THE TRUE SHAPE OF THE SOCIAL QUESTION,
AS SHEWN IN THE LIFE OF MODERN MAN
Does not the modern social movement stand revealed by the great
catastrophe of the war, demonstrating in actual facts how inadequate
the thoughts were, which for years have been supposed sufficient to
an understanding of the working-class movement and its purport?
It is a question forced upon us by the demands of the workers and all
that these involve,--demands which formerly were kept in suppression,
but which at the present time are forcing their way to the surface of
life. The powers that were instrumental in suppression are partially
destroyed; and the position they took up towards the forces of social
growth in a large part of mankind is one that nobody can wish to
maintain, who does not totally fail to recognise how indestructible
such impulses of human nature are.
The greatest illusions in respect to these social forces have been
harboured by persons, whose situation in life gave them the power,
by word and voice, either to assist or to check those influences in
European life, which, in 1914, were rushing us into the catastrophe
of war. These persons actually believed, that a military victory for
their country would hush the mutterings of the social storm. They
have since been obliged to recognise, that it was the consequences of
their own attitude that first brought these social tendencies fully
to light. Indeed, the present catastrophe,--which is the catastrophe
of mankind,--has shewn itself to be the very event, through which,
historically, these tendencies gained the opportunity to make
themselves felt in their full force. During these last fateful years,
both the leading persons and the leading classes have been constantly
obliged to tune their own behaviour to the note sounded in socialist
circles. Could they have disregarded the tone of these circles, they
would often gladly have acted differently. And the effects of this
live on in the form which events are taking to-day.
And now the thing, which for years past has been drawing on in
mankind's life-evolution, preparing its way before it, has arrived
at a decisive stage,--and now comes the tragedy: The facts are with
us in all their ripeness, but the thoughts that came up with the
growth of the facts are no match for them. There are many persons who
trained their thoughts on the lines of the growing process, hoping
thereby to serve the social ideal which they recognised in it; and
these persons find themselves to-day practically powerless before
the problems which the accomplished facts present, and on which the
destinies of mankind hang. A good many of these persons, it is true,
still believe that the things they have so long thought necessary
to the remodelling of human life will now be realised, and will
then prove powerful enough to give these facts a possible turn and
meet their requirements. One may dismiss the opinion of those, who,
even now, are still under the delusion, that it must be possible to
maintain the old scheme of things against the new demands that are
being urged by a large part of mankind. We may confine ourselves
to examining what is going on in the wills of those people who are
convinced that a remodelling of social life is necessary. Even so,
we shall be forced to own to ourselves, that party shibboleths go
wandering up and down amongst us like the dessicated corpses of once
animate creeds,--everywhere flouted and set at naught by the evolution
of facts. The facts call for decisions, for which the creeds of the
old parties are all unprepared. These parties certainly evolved along
with the facts,--but they, and their habits of thought, have not kept
pace with the facts. One may perhaps venture without presumption
to hold,--in the face of still common opinion,--that the course of
events throughout the world at the present time bears out what has
just been said. One may draw the conclusion, that this is just the
favorable moment to attempt to point out something, which, in its
true character, is foreign even to those who are expert thinkers
among the parties and persons belonging to the various schools of
social thought. For it may well be, that the tragedy that reveals
itself in all these attempts to solve the social question, arises
precisely from the real purport of the working-class struggle having
been misunderstood,--misunderstood even by those who, themselves with
all their opinions, are the outcome of this struggle. For men by no
means always read their own purposes aright.
There may therefore seem some justification for putting these
questions: What is, in reality, the purport of the modern working-class
movement? What is its will? Does this, its will and purport, correspond
to what is usually thought about it, either by the workers themselves,
or by the non-workers? Does what is commonly thought about the "social
problem" reveal that question in its true form? Or is an altogether
different line of thought needed? This is a question which one cannot
approach impartially unless, through personal destiny, one has in
a position oneself to enter into the life of the modern worker's
soul,--especially amongst that section of the workers who have most
to do with the form the social movement is taking in the present day.
People have talked a great deal about the evolution of modern
technical science and modern capitalism. They have studied the rise
of the present working-class in the process of this evolution, and
how the developments of economic life in recent times have led on to
the workers' present demands. There is much that is to the point in
what has been said about all this. But there is one critical feature
which is never touched on, as one cannot help seeing, if one refuses
to be hypnotised by the theory that it is external conditions that
give the stamp to a man's life. It is a feature obvious to anyone
who keeps an unclouded insight for impulses of the soul that work
from within outwards, out of hidden depths. It is quite true, that
the worker's demands have been evolved during the growth of modern
technical science and modern capitalism; but a recognition of this fact
affords no further clue whatever to the impulses that are actuating
these demands, and which are in fact purely human in character. Nor,
till one penetrates to the heart of these impulses, will one get to
the true form of the social question.
There is a word in frequent use among the workers, which is of striking
significance for anyone able to penetrate to the deeper-seated forces
active in the human will. It is this: the modern worker has become
"class-conscious." He no longer follows, more or less instinctively
and unconsciously, the swing of the classes outside his own. He knows
himself one of a class apart, and is determined, that the relation,
which public life establishes between his class and the other classes,
shall be turned to good account for his own interests. And anyone,
who has comprehension for the undercurrents of men's souls, finds in
the word "class-conscious," as used by the modern worker, a clue to
very important facts in the worker's view of life,--in particular
amongst those classes of workers, whose life is cast amidst modern
technical industry and modern capitalism. What will above all arrest
his attention is, how strongly the worker's soul has been impressed and
fired by scientific teachings about economic life and its bearing on
human destinies. Here one touches on a circumstance about which many
people, who only think about the workers, not with them, have very
hazy notions,--notions indeed, which are downright mischievous, in
view of the serious events taking place at the present day. The view,
that the "uneducated" working man has had his head turned by Marxism,
and by later labour writers of the Marxist school, and other things one
hears of the same sort, will not conduce towards that understanding
of the subject and its connection with the whole historic situation
of the world, which is so peculiarly necessary at the present day. In
expressing such a view, one only shews that one lacks the will to
examine an essential feature of the present social movement. For
it is an essential feature, that the working-class consciousness
has thus become filled with concepts that take their stamp from
the scientific evolution of recent times. This class-consciousness
continues to be dominated by the note struck in Lassalle's speech on
"Science and the Workers." Such things may appear unessential to
many a man who reckons himself a "practical person"; but anyone,
who means to arrive at a really fruitful insight into the modern
labour movement, is bound to turn his attention to these things. In
the demands put forward by the workers to-day, be they moderates
or radicals, we have the expression, not, as many people imagine,
of economic life that has--somehow--become metamorphosed into human
impulse, we have the expression of economic science, by which the
working-class consciousness is possessed. This stands out clearly in
the literature of the labour movement, with its scientific flavour and
popular journalistic renderings. To deny this, is to shut one's eyes to
actual facts. And it is a fundamental fact, and one which determines
the whole social situation at the present day, that everything which
forms the subject of the worker's "class-consciousness" is couched
for him in concepts of a scientific kind. The individual working at
his machine may be no matter how completely a stranger to science;
yet those, who enlighten him as to his own position and to whom he
listens, borrow their method of enlightenment from this same science.
All the disquisitions about modern economic life, about the machine
age and capitalism, may throw ever so instructive a light on the
facts underlying the modern working-class movement; but the decisive
light on the present social situation does not proceed directly from
the fact, that the worker has been placed at the machine, that he
has been harnessed to the capitalist scheme of things. It proceeds
from the other, different, fact, that his class-consciousness has been
filled with a quite definite kind of thought, shaped at the machine and
under the influence of the capitalist order of economy. Possibly the
habits of thought peculiar to the present day may prevent many people
from realising the full bearing of this circumstance, and may cause
them to regard the stress laid upon it as a mere dialectic play upon
terms. One can only say in reply: So much the worse for any prospect
of a successful intervention in social life to-day by people who are
unable to distinguish essentials. Anyone, who wants to understand the
working-class movement, must first and foremost know, how the worker
thinks. For the working-class movement, from its moderate efforts
at reform to its most sweeping extravagances, is not created by
"forces outside man," by "economic impulses," but by human-beings,
by their mental conceptions and by the impulses of their will.
Not in what capitalism and the machine have implanted in the worker's
consciousness, not here lie the ideas and will-forces, that give
its character to the present social movement. This movement turned
in the direction of modern science to find its fount of thought,
because capitalism and the machine could give the worker no substance
with which to content his soul as a human being. Such substance and
content was afforded to the medieval craftsman by his craft. In the
kind of connection which the medieval handworker felt between himself,
as a human being, and his craft, there was something that shewed life
within the whole human confraternity in a light which made it seem, for
his individual consciousness, worth living. Whatever he might be doing,
he was able to regard it in such a way, that he seemed through it to be
realising what he desired, as a "man," to be. Tending a machine under
the capitalist scheme of things the man was thrown back upon himself,
upon his own inner life, whenever he tried to find some principle
on which to base a general outlook on Man and one's consciousness
of what as a "man" one is. Technical industry, capitalism,--these
could contribute nothing towards such an outlook. And so it came to
pass, that the working-class consciousness took the bent towards the
scientific type of thought. The direct human link with actual life
was lost.
Now this occurred just at a time, when the leading classes of mankind
were working towards a scientific mode of thought, which in itself no
longer possessed the spiritual energy to content man's consciousness
in every aspect and guide it along all the directions of its wants. The
old views of the universe gave man his place as a soul in the spiritual
complex of existence. Modern science views him as a natural object
amidst a purely natural order of things. This science is not felt
as a stream flowing from a spiritual world into the soul of man,
and on which man as a soul is buoyed and upborne. Whatever one's
opinion may be as to the relation of the religious impulses, and
kindred things, to the scientific mode of thought of recent times,
yet one must admit, if one considers historic evolution impartially,
that the scientific conception has developed out of the religious
one. But the old conceptions of the universe, that rested deep down
on religious foundations, lacked power to impart their soul-bearing
force to the newer form of scientific conception. They withdrew beyond
its range, and lived on, contenting their consciousness with things in
which the souls of the workers could find no resource. For the leading
classes, this inner world of consciousness might still have a certain
value. In some form or other it was bound up with their own position
in life. They sought for no new substance for their consciousness,
because they were able to keep a hold on the old one, that had been
handed down to them through actual life. But the modern worker was
torn out of all his old setting in life. He was the man whose life had
been put on a totally new basis. For him, when the old bases of life
were withdrawn, there disappeared at the same time all possibility of
drawing from the old spiritual springs. These lay far off in regions
to which he was now become a stranger. Contemporaneous with modern
technical science and modern capitalism,--in such a sense as one can
speak of great worldstreams of history as contemporaneous,--there grew
up the modern scientific conception of the world. To this the trust,
the faith, of the modern worker turned. It was here he sought the
new substance that he needed to content his inner consciousness. But
the working-class and the leading classes were differently situated
with regard to their scientific outlook. The leading classes felt no
necessity for making the scientific mode of conception into a gospel
of life, for the support of their souls. No matter how thoroughly they
might have permeated themselves with the scientific conception of a
natural order of things, in which a direct chain of causality leads
up from the lowest animals to man, this mode of conception remained
nevertheless a merely theoretic persuasion. It never stirred their
feelings, and impelled them to take life through and through in a
way befitting such a persuasion. Take naturalists such as Vogt and
the popular writer, Buechner; they were unquestionably permeated
with the scientific mode of conception; but, alongside this, there
was something else at work in their souls which kept their lives
interwoven with a whole complex of circumstances, such as can those
whose only intelligible justification can be the belief in a spiritual
order of the world. Putting aside all prejudice, let us just imagine,
how differently the scientific outlook affects a man whose personal
existence is anchored in such a complex, from the modern artisan, who,
in the few evening hours that he has free from work, hears the labour
leader get up and address him in this fashion: "Science in our time
has cured men of believing that they have their origin in a spiritual
world. They have learnt better, and know now, that in the far ages,
long ago, they climbed about on trees like any vulgar monkey. Science
has taught them too, that they were all alike in their origin, and
that it was a purely natural one." It was a science that turned on
such thoughts as these, which met the worker when he was looking for
a substance to fill his soul and give him a sense of his own place
as man in the life of the universe. He took the scientific outlook
on the world in thorough earnest, and drew from it his own practical
conclusions for life. The technical, capitalistic age laid hold of
him differently from a member of the leading classes. The latter had
his place in an order of life, which still bore the shape once given
it by soul-sustaining forces; it was all to his interest to fit the
acquisitions of the new age into this setting. But the worker, in his
soul, was torn loose from this order of life. It was not capable of
giving him one emotion that could illumine and fill his own life with
anything of human worth. There was one thing only, which could give the
worker any sense of what a "man" is, one thing only that seemed to have
emerged from the old order of life endowed with the power that awakens
faith, and that was--scientific thought. It may arouse a smile in some
of those who read this, to be told of the "scientific" character of
the worker's conceptions. Let them smile, who can only think of the
scientific habit of mind as something that is acquired by many years
of application on the benches of "educational institutes," and then
contrast this sort of "science" with what fills the mind of the worker
who has "never learnt anything." What is for him a smiling matter,
are facts of modern life on which the fate of the future turns. And
these facts shew, that many a very learned man lives unscientifically,
whereas the unlearned worker brings his whole view of life into line
with that scientific learning, of which very likely nothing has fallen
to his share. The educated man has made a place for science,--it has
a pigeon-hole of its own in the recesses of his soul. But he himself
has his place in a network of circumstances in actual life, and it is
these which give the direction to his feelings. His feeling is not
directed by his science. The worker, through the very conditions of
his life, is led to bring his conception of existence into unison
with the general tone of this science. He may be very far from
what the other classes call "scientific," yet his life's course is
charted by the scientific lines of conception. For the other classes,
some religious or aesthetic, some general spiritual principle is
the determining basis;--for him, Science is turned into the creed
of life,--even though often it may be science filtered away to its
last little shallows and driblets of thought. Many a member of the
"foremost" classes feels himself to be "enlightened" in religion,
a "free-thinker." No doubt his scientific convictions influence his
conceptions; but in his feelings still throb the forgotten remnants
of a traditional creed of life. What the scientific type of thought
has not brought down from the old order, is the consciousness of
being, as a spiritual type, rooted in a spiritual world. This was
a peculiarity of the modern scientific outlook, which presented
no difficulty to a member of the leading classes. Life to him was
filled by old traditions. For the worker it was otherwise; his new
situation in life drove the old traditions from his soul. He took over
from the ruling classes as heritage the scientific mode of thought,
and made this the basis of his consciousness of the life and being of
man. But this "spiritual possession," with which he filled his soul,
knew nothing of its derivation from an actual life of the spirit. The
only spiritual life, that the workers could take over from the ruling
classes, was of a sort that denied its spiritual origin.
I well know, how these thoughts will affect people outside as well as
inside the working-class, who, believing themselves to have a thorough
practical acquaintance with life, regard the view here expressed as
quite remote from realities. The language of actual facts, as spoken
by the whole state of the world to-day, will more and more prove
this belief of theirs to be a delusion. For anyone able to look at
these facts without prejudice, it will be plain, that a view of life,
which never gets beyond their external aspect, becomes ultimately
inaccessible to any conceptions save such as have lost all touch
with facts. Ruling thought has clung on so long in this "practical"
way to facts,--that the thoughts themselves have ended by bearing
no resemblance whatever to the facts. The present world-catastrophe
might have taught many people a lesson in this respect. What did they
think it possible might happen? And what really did happen? Is it to
be the same with their thoughts about social problems?
I know too, how someone who professes working-class views will feel
about what has been said, and can hear him saying: "Just like the rest
of them! trying to shunt the real gist of the social question off on
to lines that promise to be smooth for the bourgeois sort." With his
creed, he does not see how fate has brought him into this working-class
life, and how he is trying to find his way in it with a type of thought
inherited from the ruling-classes. He lives as a working-man but he
thinks as a bourgeois. The new age is making it necessary to learn not
only a new way of life, but a new way of thought also. The scientific
mode of conception can only become substantial and life-supporting,
when it evolves, in its own fashion, a power to content the whole of
human life in all its aspects, such as the old conceptions of life
once evolved in their way.
This points the path for the discovery in its true form of one factor
in the modern labour movement. And having travelled it to the end,
the worker's soul utters this cry of conviction: "I am striving after
spiritual life. Yet this spiritual life is ideology, is merely man's
own reflection of what is going on in the world outside, it does not
come to us from a spiritual world of its own." In the transition to
the new age, the old spiritual life had turned to something which,
for the working-class sense of life, is ideology. If one wants
to understand the mood of soul amongst the workers, as it finds
vent in the social demands of the present day, one must be able to
grasp the full possible effects of the theory that spiritual life
is ideology. It may be retorted: "What does the average working-man
know of any such theory? it is only a will-o'-the-wisp in the brains
of their more or less educated leaders." But anyone who says so is
talking wide of life, and his doings in actual life will be wide of
it too. He simply does not know, what has been going on in the life
of the working-class during the last half century. He does not know
the threads that are woven from the theory, that spiritual life is
ideology, to the demands and actions of the out-and-out socialist,
whom he thinks so "ignorant";--yes, and to the deeds too of those who
"hatch revolution" out of the blind promptings of the life within them.
Herein lies the tragedy overshadowing all our interpretations of the
social demands of the day, that in so many circles there is no sense
of what is forcing its way up to the surface out of the souls of the
great masses of mankind,--that people cannot turn their eyes to what
is actually taking place in men's inner life. The non-worker listens
with dismay to the worker setting forth his demands; and this is what
he hears:--"Nothing short of communalising the means of production will
make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human being." But
the non-worker is unable to form the faintest conception, of how his
own class, in the transition from the old age to the new, not only
summoned the worker to labour at means of production that were not his,
but failed even to give him anything to satisfy and sustain his soul
in his labour. People, who see and act wide of the mark in this way,
may say:--"But, after all, the working-man only wants to better his
position in life and put himself on a level with the upper classes;
where do the needs of his soul come in?" The working-man himself may
even declare:--"I am not asking the other classes for anything for
my soul; all I want, is to prevent them exploiting me any longer. I
mean to put an end to existing class distinctions." Talk of this
kind does not touch the essence of the social question. It reveals
nothing of its true form. For, had the working population inherited
from the leading classes a genuine spiritual substance, then they
would have had a different consciousness within their souls, one
which would have voiced their social demands in quite a different
fashion from the modern workers, who can see in the spiritual life,
as they have received it, merely an ideology. The workers, as a
class, are convinced of the ideologic character of spiritual life;
but the conviction renders them more and more unhappy. They are not
definitely conscious of this unhappiness in their souls, but they
suffer acutely from it, and it far outweighs, in its significance for
the social question to-day, all demands for an improvement in external
conditions,--justifiable as these demands are too in their own way.
The ruling classes do not recognise, that they are themselves the
authors of that attitude of mind, which now confronts them militant
in the labour-world. And yet, they are the authors of it, inasmuch
as, out of their own spiritual world, they failed to bequeath to the
workers anything but what must seem to the workers "ideology."
What gives to the present social movement its essential stamp, is
not the demand for a change of conditions in the life of one class
of men,--although that is the natural sign of it. Rather, it is
the manner in which this demand is translated by this class from a
thought-impulse into actual reality. Consider the facts impartially
from this point of view. One will find persons who aim at keeping
in touch with labour tendencies in thought, smile at any talk of
a spiritual movement proposing to contribute anything towards the
solution of the social question. They dismiss it with a smile, as
ideology, empty theory. From thought, from the mere life of the spirit,
there is nothing, they feel certain, to be contributed to the burning
social problems of the hour. And yet, when one looks at the matter
more closely, it is forced upon one, that the very nerve, the very
root-impulse of the modern movement,--especially as a working-class
movement,--does not lie in the things about which the modern worker
talks, but in thoughts. The modern working-class movement has sprung,
as perhaps no other similar movement in the world before it, out of
thoughts. When studied more closely, it shews this in a most marked
degree. I am not throwing this out as an aperçu, the result of long
pondering over the social movement. If I may venture to introduce a
personal remark I was for years lecturer at a working-man's institute,
giving instruction to working men in a wide variety of subjects; and
I think that it taught me what is living and stirring in the soul of
the modern proletarian worker. And from this starting point, I had
occasion to go on, and follow up the tendencies at work in the various
trades unions and different callings. I think I may say, that I am
not approaching the subject merely from theoretical considerations,
but am putting into words the results arrived at through actual
living experience.
Anyone,--only, unfortunately, so few of the leading intellectuals are
in this position,--but anyone, who has learnt to know the modern labour
movement where it was carried on by the workers themselves, knows how
remarkable a feature it is in it, and how fraught with significance,
that a certain trend of thought has laid intense hold on the souls of
large numbers of men. What makes it at the present moment hard to adopt
any line as regards the social conundrums that present themselves, is
that there is so little possibility of an understanding between the
different classes. It is so hard for the middle-class to-day to put
themselves into the soul of the worker,--so hard for them to understand
how the worker's still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened to
receive a work such as that of Karl Marx,--which, in its whole mode
of conception, no matter how one regards its substance, measures the
requirements of human thought by such a lofty standard. One man may
agree with Karl Marx's intellectual system,--another may refute it;
and the arguments on either side may appear equally good. In some
points it was revised, after the death of Marx and his friend Engels,
by those who came later and saw social life under a different aspect
from these leaders. I am not proposing to discuss the substance of
the Marxian system. It is not this that seems to me the significant
thing in the modern working-class movement. The thing that to me
seems significant above all others is, that it should be a fact,
that the most powerful impulse at work in the labour world is a
thought-system. One may go so far as to put it thus:--No practical
movement, no movement that was altogether a movement of practical life,
making the most matter-of-fact demands of every-day humanity, has ever
before rested so almost entirely on a basis of thought alone, as the
present working-class movement does. Indeed it is in a way the first
movement of its kind to take up its stand entirely on a scientific
basis. One must however see this fact in its proper light. If one
considers everything that the modern worker has consciously to say
about his own views and purposes and sentiments, it does not seem to
one, from a deeper observation of life, to be by any means the thing of
main importance. What impresses itself as of real importance is, that
what in the other classes is an appendage of one single branch of the
soul's life,--the thought-basis, from which life takes its tone,--has
been made by proletarian feeling into the thing on which the whole
man turns. What has thus become an inward reality in the worker is,
however, a reality that he cannot acknowledge. He is deterred from
acknowledging it, because thought-life has been handed down to him
as ideology. He builds up his life in reality upon thoughts; yet
feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. This is a fact that one must
clearly recognise in the human evolution of recent years, together
with all that it involves,--otherwise it is impossible to understand
the worker's views of life and the way those, who hold these views,
set about realising them in practice.
From the picture drawn of the worker's spiritual life in the preceding
pages, it will be clear that the main features of this spiritual life
must occupy the first place in any description of the working-class
social movement in its true form. For it is essential to the worker's
way of feeling the causes of his unsatisfactory social condition and
endeavoring to remove them, that both the feeling and the endeavour
take the direction given them by his spiritual life. And yet, at
present, he can only reject with contempt or anger the notion, that in
the spiritual foundations of the social movement there is something
that presents a remarkable driving force. How should he recognise
in spiritual life a force able to bear him along, when he is bound
to feel it as ideology? One cannot look to a spiritual life, that
one feels as ideology, to open up the way out of a social situation,
which one has resolved to endure no longer. The scientific cast of
his thought has turned not only science, but religion, art, morality,
and right also for the modern worker into so many constituent parts
of human ideology. Behind these branches of the spiritual life he
sees nothing of the workings of an actual reality, which finds its
way into his own existence, and can contribute something to material
life. To him, these things are only the reflected shine, or mirrored
image of the material life. Whatever reflex influence they may have
on the shaping of this material life,--whether roundabout, through
the conceptions of men's brains, or through being taken up into the
impulses of the will, yet, originally, they arise out of the material
life itself as ideologic emanations from it. These of themselves can
certainly yield nothing that will conduce to the removal of social
difficulties. Only out of the sphere of material processes themselves
can anything arise that will lead to the desired end.
Modern spiritual life has been passed on from the leading classes of
mankind to the working population in a form which prevents the latter
from being aware of the force that dwells in it. This fact above all
must be understood, when considering what are the forces that can help
towards the solution of the social question. Should it continue to
exert its present influence, then mankind's spiritual life must see
itself doomed to impotence before the social demands of our day and
the time to come. Its impotence is in fact an article of faith with
a large part of the working-class, and openly pressed in Marxism and
similar creeds. "Modern economic life"--they say--"has evolved out
of its earlier forms the present capitalistic one. This evolutionary
process has brought the workers into an unendurable situation as
regards capital. But evolution will not stop here, it will go on,
and kill capitalism through the forces at work in capitalism itself
and from the death of capitalism will spring the emancipation of
the workers." Later socialist thinkers have divested this creed of
the fatalistic character it had assumed amongst a certain school of
Marxists. But even so its essential feature remains, and shews itself
in this way:--that it would not occur to anyone, who wishes to be a
true socialist to-day, to say: "If we discover anywhere a life of the
soul, having its rise in the forces of the age, rooted in a spiritual
reality, and able to sustain the whole man,--then such a soul life as
this could radiate the power needed as a motor-force for the social
movement." The man of to-day, who is obliged to lead the life of a
worker, can cherish no such expectation from the spiritual life of the
day; and this it is which gives the key-note to his soul. He needs a
spiritual life from which power can come,--power to give his soul the
sense of his human worth. For when the capitalist economic order of
recent times caught him up into its machinery, the man himself, with
all the deepest needs of his soul, was driven for recourse to some
such spiritual life. But the kind of spiritual life which the leading
classes handed on to him as ideology left his soul void. Running
through all the demands of the modern working-class, is this longing
for some link with the spiritual life, other than the present form
of society can give; and this is what gives the directing impetus in
the social movement to-day. This fact however is one that is rightly
understood neither outside nor inside the working-class. Those outside
the working-class do not suffer from the ideologic cast of modern
spiritual life, which is of their own making. Those who are inside the
working-class do suffer; but the very ideologic character of their
inherited spiritual life has robbed them of all belief in the power
of spiritual possessions, as such, to sustain and support them. On
a right insight into this fact depends the discovery of a path out
of the maze of confusion into which social affairs have fallen. The
path has been blocked by the social system that has arisen with the
new form of industrial economy under the influence of the leading
classes. The strength to open it must be achieved.
People's thoughts in this respect will undergo a complete change, when
once they come really to feel the full weight of this fact: That, in
a human community where spiritual life plays a merely ideologic role,
common social life lacks one of the forces that can make and keep it
a living organism. What ails the body social to-day, is impotence of
the spiritual life. And the disease is aggravated by the reluctance
to acknowledge its existence. Once the fact is acknowledged, there
will then be a basis on which to develope the kind of thinking needed
for the social movement.
At present, the worker thinks that he has struck a main force in his
soul, when he talks about his "class-consciousness." But the truth is,
that ever since he was caught up into the capitalist economic machine
he has been searching for a spiritual life that could sustain his soul
and give him a "human-consciousness,"--a consciousness of his worth
as man,--which there is no possibility of developing with a spiritual
life that is felt as ideology. This "human-consciousness"--was what
he was seeking. He could not find it; and so he replaced it with
"class-consciousness" born of the economic life. His eyes are rivetted
upon the economic life alone, as though some overpowering suggestive
influence held them there. And he no longer believes that elsewhere,
in the spirit or in the soul, there can be anywhere a latent force
capable of supplying the impulse for what is needed in the social
movement. All he believes is, that the evolution of an economic life,
devoid of spirit and of soul, can bring about the particular state
of things, which he himself feels to be the one worthy of man. Thus
he is driven to seek his welfare in a transformation of economic
life alone. He has been forced to the conviction, that with the mere
transformation of economic life all those ills would disappear, that
have been brought on through private enterprise, through the egoism
of the individual employer, and through the individual employer's
powerlessness to do justice to the claims of human self-respect in
the employee. And so the modern worker was led on to believe, that
the only welfare for the body social lay in converting all private
ownership of means of production into a communal concern, or into
actual communal property. This conviction is due to people's eyes
having been removed, as it were, from everything belonging to soul
and spirit, and fixed exclusively on the purely economic process.
Hence all the paradox in the working-class movement. The modern
worker believes, that industrial economy, the economic life itself,
will of necessity evolve all that will ultimately give him his
rights as man. These rights of man in full are what he is fighting
for. And yet, in the heart of the fight something different makes
its appearance,--something which never could be an outcome of the
economic life alone. It is a significant thing, which speaks most
forcibly, that here, right at the centre of the many forms which
the social question assumes under the needs of human life to-day,
there is something that seems, in men's belief, to proceed out of
economic life, which, however, never could proceed from economic life
alone,--something, that lies rather in the direct line of evolution;
leading up through the old slave system, through the serfdom of the
feudal age, to the modern proletariat of labour. The circulation of
commodities, of money, the system of capital, property-ownership,
the land system, these may have taken no matter what form under
modern life; but at the heart of modern life something else has
taken place, never distinctly expressed, not consciously felt even
by the modern worker, but which is the fundamental force actuating
all his social purpose. It is this:--The modern capitalist system of
economy recognises, at bottom, nothing but commodities within its
own province. It understands the creation of commodity-values as a
process in the body economic. And in the capitalistic processes of
the modern age something has been turned into a commodity, which the
worker feels must not and cannot be a commodity.
If it were only recognised what a fundamental force this is in the
social movement amongst the modern workers: this loathing that the
modern worker feels at being forced to barter his labour-power to the
employer, as goods are bartered in the market,--loathing at seeing his
personal labour-power play part as a factor in the supply and demand
of the labour-market, just as the goods in the market are subject to
supply and demand. When once people become aware what this loathing
of the "labour-commodity" means for the modern social movement, when
once they straightly and honestly recognise, that the thing at work
there is not even emphatically and drastically enough expressed in
socialist doctrines,--then they will have discovered the second of the
two impulses which are making the social question to-day so urgent,
one may indeed say so burning,--the first being that spiritual life
that is felt as an ideology.
In old days there were slaves. The entire man was sold as a
commodity. Rather less of the man, but still a portion of the
human-being himself was incorporated in the economic process by
serfdom. To-day, capitalism is the power, through which still a
remnant of the human-being,--his labour-power,--is stamped with the
character of a commodity. I am not saying, that this fact has remained
unnoticed. On the contrary, it is a fact which in social life to-day
is recognised as a fundamental one, and which is felt to be something
that plays a very important part in the modern social movement. But
people in studying it keep their attention solely fixed on economic
life. They make the question of the nature of a commodity solely an
economic one. They look to economic life itself for the forces that
shall bring about conditions, under which the worker shall no longer
feel that his labour-power is playing a part unworthy of him in the
body social. They see, how the modern form of industrial economy came
about historically in the recent evolution of mankind. They see too,
how it gave the commodity character to human labour-power. What they
do not see, is, that it is a necessity inherent in economic life,
that everything incorporated in it becomes a commodity. Economic life
consists in the production and useful consumption of commodities. One
cannot divest human labour-power of its commodity character, unless
one can find a way of separating it out from the economic process. It
is of no use trying to remodel the economic process so as to give
it a shape in which human labour may come by its rights inside that
process itself. What one must endeavor, is to find a way of separating
labour-power out from the economic process, and bringing it under
social forces that will do away with its commodity character. The
worker sets his desire upon some arrangement of economic life, where
his labour-power shall find a fitting place; not seeing, that the
commodity character of his labour is inherently and essentially due
to his being bound up in the economic processes as part and parcel
of them. Being obliged to surrender his labour-power to the economic
processes, the whole man himself is caught up into them. So long
as the economic system has the regulating of labour-power, it will
go on consuming labour-power just as it consumes commodities,--in
the manner that is most useful to its purposes. It is as though the
power of economic life hypnotised people, so that they can look at
nothing except what is going on inside it. They may look for ever in
this direction without discovering how labour-power can escape being
a commodity. Some other form of industrial economy will only make
labour-power a commodity in some other manner. The labour question
cannot find place in its true shape as part of the social question,
until it is recognised that the considerations of economic life which
determine the laws governing the circulation, exchange and consumption
of commodities, are not such whose competence should be extended to
human labour-power.
New age thought has not learned to distinguish the totally different
fashions in which the two things enter into economic life: i.e.,
on the one hand, labour-power, which is intimately bound up with the
human-being himself; and, on the other hand, those things that proceed
from another source and are dissociated from the human-being, and which
circulate along those paths that all commodities must take from their
production to their consumption. Sound thinking on these lines will
shew both the true form of the labour-power question, and the place
that economic life must occupy in a healthily constituted society.
From this, it is obvious that the "social question" will divide
itself into three distinct questions. The first is the question of
a healthy form of spiritual life within the body social; the second,
the consideration of the position of labour-power, and the right way
to incorporate it in the life of the community. Thirdly, it will be
possible to deduce the proper place and function of economic life.