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_ PART I-HISTORICAL. CHAPTER I - MARX AND SOCIALIST DOCTRINE
SOCIALISM, like everything else that is vital, is
rather a tendency than a strictly definable body of
doctrine. A definition of Socialism is sure either to
include some views which many would regard as not
Socialistic, or to exclude others which claim to be
included. But I think we shall come nearest to the
essence of Socialism by defining it as the advocacy
of communal ownership of land and capital. Communal
ownership may mean ownership by a democratic
State, but cannot be held to include ownership
by any State which is not democratic. Communal
ownership may also be understood, as Anarchist
Communism understands it, in the sense of
ownership by the free association of the men and
women in a community without those compulsory
powers which are necessary to constitute a State.
Some Socialists expect communal ownership to arrive
suddenly and completely by a catastrophic revolution,
while others expect it to come gradually, first
in one industry, then in another. Some insist upon
the necessity of completeness in the acquisition of
land and capital by the public, while others would
be content to see lingering islands of private ownership,
provided they were not too extensive or powerful.
What all forms have in common is democracy
and the abolition, virtual or complete, of the present
capitalistic system. The distinction between Socialists,
Anarchists and Syndicalists turns largely upon
the kind of democracy which they desire. Orthodox
Socialists are content with parliamentary democracy
in the sphere of government, holding that the evils
apparent in this form of constitution at present
would disappear with the disappearance of capitalism.
Anarchists and Syndicalists, on the other
hand, object to the whole parliamentary machinery,
and aim at a different method of regulating the political
affairs of the community. But all alike are
democratic in the sense that they aim at abolishing
every kind of privilege and every kind of artificial
inequality: all alike are champions of the wage-
earner in existing society. All three also have much
in common in their economic doctrine. All three
regard capital and the wages system as a means of
exploiting the laborer in the interests of the possessing
classes, and hold that communal ownership, in one
form or another, is the only means of bringing freedom
to the producers. But within the framework
of this common doctrine there are many divergences,
and even among those who are strictly to be called
Socialists, there is a very considerable diversity of
schools.
Socialism as a power in Europe may be said
to begin with Marx. It is true that before his time
there were Socialist theories, both in England and in
France. It is also true that in France, during the
revolution of 1848, Socialism for a brief period
acquired considerable influence in the State. But
the Socialists who preceded Marx tended to indulge
in Utopian dreams and failed to found any strong or
stable political party. To Marx, in collaboration
with Engels, are due both the formulation of a coherent
body of Socialist doctrine, sufficiently true or
plausible to dominate the minds of vast numbers of
men, and the formation of the International Socialist
movement, which has continued to grow in all
European countries throughout the last fifty years.
In order to understand Marx's doctrine, it is
necessary to know something of the influences which
formed his outlook. He was born in 1818 at Treves
in the Rhine Provinces, his father being a legal
official, a Jew who had nominally accepted
Christianity. Marx studied jurisprudence, philosophy,
political economy and history at various German
universities. In philosophy he imbibed the doctrines
of Hegel, who was then at the height of his fame,
and something of these doctrines dominated his
thought throughout his life. Like Hegel, he saw in
history the development of an Idea. He conceived
the changes in the world as forming a logical development,
in which one phase passes by revolution into
another, which is its antithesis--a conception which
gave to his views a certain hard abstractness, and a
belief in revolution rather than evolution. But of
Hegel's more definite doctrines Marx retained nothing
after his youth. He was recognized as a brilliant
student, and might have had a prosperous career as
a professor or an official, but his interest in politics
and his Radical views led him into more arduous
paths. Already in 1842 he became editor of a newspaper,
which was suppressed by the Prussian Government
early in the following year on account of
its advanced opinions. This led Marx to go to Paris,
where he became known as a Socialist and acquired
a knowledge of his French predecessors.[1] Here in the
year 1844 began his lifelong friendship with Engels,
who had been hitherto in business in Manchester,
where he had become acquainted with English Socialism
and had in the main adopted its doctrines.[2] In
1845 Marx was expelled from Paris and went with
Engels to live in Brussels. There he formed a German
Working Men's Association and edited a paper
which was their organ. Through his activities in
Brussels he became known to the German Communist
League in Paris, who, at the end of 1847, invited him
and Engels to draw up for them a manifesto, which
appeared in January, 1848. This is the famous
"Communist Manifesto," in which for the first time
Marx's system is set forth. It appeared at a fortunate
moment. In the following month, February,
the revolution broke out in Paris, and in March it
spread to Germany. Fear of the revolution led the
Brussels Government to expel Marx from Belgium,
but the German revolution made it possible for him
to return to his own country. In Germany he again
edited a paper, which again led him into a conflict
with the authorities, increasing in severity as the
reaction gathered force. In June, 1849, his paper
was suppressed, and he was expelled from Prussia.
He returned to Paris, but was expelled from there
also. This led him to settle in England--at that
time an asylum for friends of freedom--and in England,
with only brief intervals for purposes of agitation,
he continued to live until his death in 1883.
[1] Chief among these were Fourier and Saint-Simon, who
constructed somewhat fantastic Socialistic ideal commonwealths.
Proudhon, with whom Marx had some not wholly friendly relations,
is to be regarded as a forerunner of the Anarchists rather
than of orthodox Socialism.
[2] Marx mentions the English Socialists with praise in "The
Poverty of Philosophy" (1847). They, like him, tend to base
their arguments upon a Ricardian theory of value, but they
have not his scope or erudition or scientific breadth. Among
them may be mentioned Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), originally
an officer in the Navy, but dismissed for a pamphlet critical
of the methods of naval discipline, author of "Labour Defended
Against the Claims of Capital" (1825) and other works;
William Thompson (1785-1833), author of "Inquiry into the
Principles of Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human
Happiness" (1824), and "Labour Rewarded" (1825); and
Piercy Ravenstone, from whom Hodgskin's ideas are largely
derived. Perhaps more important than any of these was Robert
Owen.
The bulk of his time was occupied in the composition
of his great book, "Capital."[3] His other
important work during his later years was the formation
and spread of the International Working Men's
Association. From 1849 onward the greater part
of his time was spent in the British Museum, accumulating,
with German patience, the materials for his
terrific indictment of capitalist society, but he
retained his hold on the International Socialist movement.
In several countries he had sons-in-law as
lieutenants, like Napoleon's brothers, and in the
various internal contests that arose his will generally
prevailed.
[3] The first and most important volume appeared in 1867;
the other two volumes were published posthumously (1885 and
1894).
The most essential of Marx's doctrines may be
reduced to three: first, what is called the material-
istic interpretation of history; second, the law of the
concentration of capital; and, third, the class-war.
1. The Materialistic Interpretation of History.--
Marx holds that in the main all the phenomena of
human society have their origin in material conditions,
and these he takes to be embodied in economic
systems. Political constitutions, laws, religions,
philosophies--all these he regards as, in their broad
outlines, expressions of the economic regime in the
society that gives rise to them. It would be unfair
to represent him as maintaining that the conscious
economic motive is the only one of importance; it
is rather that economics molds character and opinion,
and is thus the prime source of much that appears
in consciousness to have no connection with them.
He applies his doctrine in particular to two revolutions,
one in the past, the other in the future. The
revolution in the past is that of the bourgeoisie
against feudalism, which finds its expression, according
to him, particularly in the French Revolution.
The one in the future is the revolution of the wage-
earners, or proletariat, against the bourgeoisie,
which is to establish the Socialist Commonwealth.
The whole movement of history is viewed by him as
necessary, as the effect of material causes operating
upon human beings. He does not so much advocate
the Socialist revolution as predict it. He holds, it
is true, that it will be beneficent, but he is much more
concerned to prove that it must inevitably come.
The same sense of necessity is visible in his exposition
of the evils of the capitalist system. He does
not blame capitalists for the cruelties of which he
shows them to have been guilty; he merely points out
that they are under an inherent necessity to behave
cruelly so long as private ownership of land and
capital continues. But their tyranny will not last
forever, for it generates the forces that must in the
end overthrow it.
2. The Law of the Concentration of Capital.--
Marx pointed out that capitalist undertakings tend
to grow larger and larger. He foresaw the substitution
of trusts for free competition, and predicted
that the number of capitalist enterprises must diminish
as the magnitude of single enterprises increased.
He supposed that this process must involve a diminution,
not only in the number of businesses, but also
in the number of capitalists. Indeed, he usually
spoke as though each business were owned by a single
man. Accordingly, he expected that men would be
continually driven from the ranks of the capitalists
into those of the proletariat, and that the capitalists,
in the course of time, would grow numerically weaker
and weaker. He applied this principle not only to
industry but also to agriculture. He expected to
find the landowners growing fewer and fewer while
their estates grew larger and larger. This process
was to make more and more glaring the evils and
injustices of the capitalist system, and to stimulate
more and more the forces of opposition.
3. The Class War.--Marx conceives the wage-
earner and the capitalist in a sharp antithesis. He
imagines that every man is, or must soon become,
wholly the one or wholly the other. The wage-
earner, who possesses nothing, is exploited by the
capitalists, who possess everything. As the capitalist
system works itself out and its nature becomes more
clear, the opposition of bourgeoisie and proletariat
becomes more and more marked. The two classes,
since they have antagonistic interests, are forced
into a class war which generates within the capitalist
regime internal forces of disruption. The working
men learn gradually to combine against their
exploiters, first locally, then nationally, and at last
internationally. When they have learned to combine
internationally they must be victorious. They
will then decree that all land and capital shall be
owned in common; exploitation will cease; the tyranny
of the owners of wealth will no longer be
possible; there will no longer be any division of
society into classes, and all men will be free.
All these ideas are already contained in the
"Communist Manifesto," a work of the most amazing
vigor and force, setting forth with terse compression
the titanic forces of the world, their epic battle, and
the inevitable consummation. This work is of such
importance in the development of Socialism and
gives such an admirable statement of the doctrines
set forth at greater length and with more pedantry
in "Capital," that its salient passages must be
known by anyone who wishes to understand the hold
which Marxian Socialism has acquired over the intellect
and imagination of a large proportion of working-class
leaders.
"A spectre is haunting Europe," it begins, "the
spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old
Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise
this spectre--Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies. Where
is the party in opposition that has not been decried
as communistic by its opponents in power? Where
the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding
reproach of Communism against the more
advanced opposition parties, as well as against its
re-actionary adversaries?"
The existence of a class war is nothing new:
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles." In these struggles the
fight "each time ended, either in a revolutionary
re-constitution of society at large, or in the common
ruin of the contending classes."
"Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie . . .
has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a
whole is more and more splitting up into two great
hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing
each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." Then follows
a history of the fall of feudalism, leading to a
description of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary
force. "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a
most revolutionary part." "For exploitation, veiled
by religious and political illusions, it has substituted
naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." "The
need of a constantly expanding market for its products
chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface
of the globe." "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of
scarce one hundred years, has created more massive
and more colossal productive forces than have all
preceding generations together." Feudal relations
became fetters: "They had to be burst asunder;
they were burst asunder. . . . A similar movement
is going on before our own eyes." "The weapons
with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the
ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgoisie forged the weapons
that bring death to itself; it has also called into
existence the men who are to wield those weapons--
the modern working class--the proletarians."
The cause of the destitution of the proletariat
are then set forth. "The cost of production of a
workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means
of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance
and for the propagation of his race. But the price
of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal
to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore,
as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage
decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of
machinery and diversion of labor increases, in the
same proportion the burden of toil also increases."
"Modern industry has converted the little workshop
of the patriarchal master into the great factory
of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers,
crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers.
As privates of the industrial army they are placed
under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers
and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois
class, and of the bourgeois State, they are
daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the
over-looker, and, above all, by the individual
bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this
despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the
more petty, the more hateful, and the more embittering
it is."
The Manifesto tells next the manner of growth
of the class struggle. "The proletariat goes
through various stages of development. With its
birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At
first the contest is carried on by individual laborers,
then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the
operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the
individual bourgeois who directly exploits them.
They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois
conditions of production, but against the instruments
of production themselves."
"At this stage the laborers still form an incoherent
mass scattered over the whole country, and broken
up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they
unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet
the consequence of their own active union, but of
the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to
attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the
whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for
a time, able to do so."
"The collisions between individual workmen and
individual bourgeois take more and more the character
of collisions between two classes. Thereupon
the workers begin to form combinations (Trades
Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together
in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found
permanent associations in order to make provision
beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and
there the contest breaks out into riots. Now and
then the workers are victorious, but only for a time.
The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate
result, but in the ever-expanding union of
the workers. This union is helped on by the im-
proved means of communication that are created
by modern industry, and that place the workers
of different localities in contact with one another.
It was just this contact that was needed to centralize
the numerous local struggles, all of the same character,
into one national struggle between classes.
But every class struggle is a political struggle. And
that union, to attain which the burghers of the
Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required
centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways,
achieve in a few years. This organization of
the proletarians into a class, and consequently into
a political party, is continually being upset again by
the competition between the workers themselves. But
it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It
compels legislative recognition of particular interests
of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions
among the bourgeoisie itself."
"In the conditions of the proletariat, those of
old society at large are already virtually swamped.
The proletarian is without property; his relation
to his wife and children has no longer anything in
common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern
industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the
same in England as in France, in America as in
Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national
character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so
many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in
ambush just as many bourgeois interests. All the
preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought
to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting
society at large to their conditions of appropriation.
The proletarians cannot become masters
of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing
their own previous mode of appropriation, and
thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.
They have nothing of their own to secure and to
fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous
securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements
of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The
proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent
movement of the immense majority, in the
interest of the immense majority. The proletariat,
the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot
stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super-
incumbent strata of official society being sprung
into the air."
The Communists, says Marx, stand for the proletariat
as a whole. They are international. "The
Communists are further reproached with desiring
to abolish countries and nationality. The working
men have no country. We cannot take from them
what they have not got."
The immediate aim of the Communists is the conquests
of political power by the proletariat. "The
theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
single sentence: Abolition of private property."
The materialistic interpretation of history is
used to answer such charges as that Communism is
anti-Christian. "The charges against Communism
made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally,
from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving
of serious examination. Does it require deep
intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and
conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness,
changes with every change in the conditions of his
material existence, in his social relations, and in his
social life?"
The attitude of the Manifesto to the State is not
altogether easy to grasp. "The executive of the
modern State," we are told, "is but a Committee for
managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."
Nevertheless, the first step for the proletariat
must be to acquire control of the State. "We have
seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the
working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position
of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to
wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie,
to centralize all instruments of production in the
hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized
as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive
forces as rapidly as possible."
The Manifesto passes on to an immediate program
of reforms, which would in the first instance
much increase the power of the existing State, but
it is contended that when the Socialist revolution is
accomplished, the State, as we know it, will have
ceased to exist. As Engels says elsewhere, when the
proletariat seizes the power of the State "it puts an
end to all differences of class and antagonisms of
class, and consequently also puts an end to the State
as a State." Thus, although State Socialism might,
in fact, be the outcome of the proposals of Marx and
Engels, they cannot themselves be accused of any
glorification of the State.
The Manifesto ends with an appeal to the wage-
earners of the world to rise on behalf of Communism.
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and
aims. They openly declare that their ends can be
attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing
social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble
at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have
nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world
to win. Working men of all countries, unite!"
In all the great countries of the Continent,
except Russia, a revolution followed quickly on the
publication of the Communist Manifesto, but the
revolution was not economic or international, except
at first in France. Everywhere else it was inspired
by the ideas of nationalism. Accordingly, the rulers
of the world, momentarily terrified, were able to
recover power by fomenting the enmities inherent
in the nationalist idea, and everywhere, after a very
brief triumph, the revolution ended in war and
reaction. The ideas of the Communist Manifesto
appeared before the world was ready for them, but
its authors lived to see the beginnings of the growth
of that Socialist movement in every country, which
has pressed on with increasing force, influencing
Governments more and more, dominating the Russian
Revolution, and perhaps capable of achieving
at no very distant date that international triumph to
which the last sentences of the Manifesto summon
the wage-earners of the world.
Marx's magnum opus, "Capital," added bulk
and substance to the theses of the Communist Manifesto.
It contributed the theory of surplus value,
which professed to explain the actual mechanism
of capitalist exploitation. This doctrine is very
complicated and is scarcely tenable as a contribution
to pure theory. It is rather to be viewed as a translation
into abstract terms of the hatred with which
Marx regarded the system that coins wealth out of
human lives, and it is in this spirit, rather than in
that of disinterested analysis, that it has been read
by its admirers. A critical examination of the theory
of surplus value would require much difficult and
abstract discussion of pure economic theory without
having much bearing upon the practical truth or
falsehood of Socialism; it has therefore seemed impossible
within the limits of the present volume. To
my mind the best parts of the book are those which
deal with economic facts, of which Marx's knowledge
was encyclopaedic. It was by these facts that
he hoped to instil into his disciples that firm and
undying hatred that should make them soldiers to
the death in the class war. The facts which he
accumulates are such as are practically unknown to
the vast majority of those who live comfortable lives.
They are very terrible facts, and the economic system
which generates them must be acknowledged to be
a very terrible system. A few examples of his choice
of facts will serve to explain the bitterness of many
Socialists:--
Mr. Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared,
as chairman of a meeting held at the Assembly Rooms,
Nottingham, on the 14th January, 1860, "that there was
an amount of privation and suffering among that portion
of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown
in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilized
world. . . . Children of nine or ten years are dragged
from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o clock in
the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence
until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing
away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening,
and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like
torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate."[4]
[4] Vol. i, p. 227.
Three railway men are standing before a London coroner's
jury--a guard, an engine-driver, a signalman.
A tremendous railway accident has hurried hundreds of
passengers into another world. The negligence of the
employes is the cause of the misfortune. They declare
with one voice before the jury that ten or twelve years
before, their labor only lasted eight hours a day. During
the last five or six years it had been screwed up to
14, 18, and 20 hours, and under a specially severe pressure
of holiday-makers, at times of excursion trains, it
often lasted 40 or 50 hours without a break. They
were ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a certain point their
labor-power failed. Torpor seized them. Their brain
ceased to think, their eyes to see. The thoroughly
"respectable" British jurymen answered by a verdict that
sent them to the next assizes on a charge of manslaughter,
and, in a gentle "rider" to their verdict, expressed the
pious hope that the capitalistic magnates of the railways
would, in future, be more extravagant in the purchase of
a sufficient quantity of labor-power, and more "abstemious,"
more "self-denying," more "thrifty," in the
draining of paid labor-power.[5]
[5] Vol. i, pp. 237, 238.
In the last week of June, 1863, all the London daily
papers published a paragraph with the "sensational"
heading, "Death from simple over-work." It dealt with
the death of the milliner, Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years
of age, employed in a highly respectable dressmaking
establishment, exploited by a lady with the pleasant name
of Elise. The old, often-told story was once more recounted.
This girl worked, on an average, 16 1/2 hours,
during the season often 30 hours, without a break, whilst
her failing labor-power was revived by occasional supplies
of sherry, port, or coffee. It was just now the
height of the season. It was necessary to conjure up
in the twinkling of an eye the gorgeous dresses for the
noble ladies bidden to the ball in honor of the newly-
imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkley had
worked without intermission for 26 1/2 hours, with 60
other girls, 30 in one room, that only afforded 1/3 of
the cubic feet of air required for them. At night, they
slept in pairs in one of the stifling holes into which the
bedroom was divided by partitions of board. And this
was one of the best millinery establishments in London.
Mary Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday,
without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise,
having previously completed the work in hand. The doctor,
Mr. Keys, called too late to the death bed, duly bore
witness before the coroner's jury that "Mary Anne
Walkley had died from long hours of work in an over-
crowded workroom, and a too small and badly ventilated
bedroom." In order to give the doctor a lesson in good
manners, the coroner's jury thereupon brought in a verdict
that "the deceased had died of apoplexy, but there
was reason to fear that her death had been accelerated
by over-work in an over-crowded workroom, &c." "Our
white slaves," cried the "Morning Star," the organ of the
free-traders, Cobden and Bright, "our white slaves, who
are toiled into the grave, for the most part silently pine
and die."[6]
[6] Vol. i, pp. 239, 240.
Edward VI: A statue of the first year of his reign,
1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he shall be
condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced
him as an idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread
and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks
fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no
matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the
slave is absent a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for
life and is to be branded on forehead or back with the
letter S; if he runs away thrice, he is to be executed as
a felon. The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him
out on hire as a slave, just as any other personal chattel
or cattle. If the slaves attempt anything against the
masters, they are also to be executed. Justices of the
peace, on information, are to hunt the rascals down. If it
happens that a vagabond has been idling about for three
days, he is to be taken to his birthplace, branded with a
redhot iron with the letter V on the breast and be set
to work, in chains, in the streets or at some other labor.
If the vagabond gives a false birthplace, he is then to
become the slave for life of this place, of its inhabitants,
or its corporation, and to be branded with an S. All persons
have the right to take away the children of the
vagabonds and to keep them as apprentices, the young
men until the 24th year, the girls until the 20th. If
they run away, they are to become up to this age the
slaves of their masters, who can put them in irons, whip
them, &c., if they like. Every master may put an iron
ring around the neck, arms or legs of his slave, by which
to know him more easily and to be more certain of him.
The last part of this statute provides that certain poor
people may be employed by a place or by persons, who
are willing to give them food and drink and to find them
work. This kind of parish-slaves was kept up in England
until far into the 19th century under the name of
"roundsmen."[7]
[7] Vol. i, pp. 758, 759.
Page after page and chapter after chapter of
facts of this nature, each brought up to illustrate
some fatalistic theory which Marx professes to have
proved by exact reasoning, cannot but stir into fury
any passionate working-class reader, and into
unbearable shame any possessor of capital in whom
generosity and justice are not wholly extinct.
Almost at the end of the volume, in a very brief
chapter, called "Historical Tendency of Capitalist
Accumulation," Marx allows one moment's glimpse
of the hope that lies beyond the present horror:--
As soon as this process of transformation has
sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom,
as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their
means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist
mode of production stands on its own feet, then the
further socialization of labor and further transformation
of the land and other means of production into so-
cially exploited and, therefore, common means of production,
as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors,
takes a new form. That which is now to be
expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself,
but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This
expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent
laws of capitalistic production itself, by the
centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills
many, and in hand with this centralization, or this
expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on
an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the
labor-process, the conscious technical application of
science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the
transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments
of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all
means of production by their use as the means of production
of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement
of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with
this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.
Along with the constantly diminishing number of the
magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all
advantages of this process of transformation, grows the
mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation;
but with this, too, grows the revolt of the working-
class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined,
united, organized by the very mechanism of the
process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of
capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production,
which has sprung up and flourished along with, and
under it. Centralization of the means of production and
socialization of labor at last reach a point where they
become incompatible with their capitalist integument.
This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist
private property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated,[8]
[8] Vol. i pp. 788, 789.
That is all. Hardly another word from beginning
to end is allowed to relieve the gloom, and in this
relentless pressure upon the mind of the reader lies
a great part of the power which this book has
acquired.
Two questions are raised by Marx's work: First,
Are his laws of historical development true? Second,
Is Socialism desirable? The second of these questions
is quite independent of the first. Marx professes
to prove that Socialism must come, but scarcely concerns
himself to argue that when it comes it will be
a good thing. It may be, however, that if it comes,
it will be a good thing, even though all Marx's arguments
to prove that it must come should be at fault.
In actual fact, time has shown many flaws in Marx's
theories. The development of the world has been
sufficiently like his prophecy to prove him a man of
very unusual penetration, but has not been sufficiently
like to make either political or economic history
exactly such as he predicted that it would be.
Nationalism, so far from diminishing, has increased,
and has failed to be conquered by the cosmopolitan
tendencies which Marx rightly discerned in finance.
Although big businesses have grown bigger and have
over a great area reached the stage of monopoly,
yet the number of shareholders in such enterprises
is so large that the actual number of individuals
interested in the capitalist system has continually
increased. Moreover, though large firms have grown
larger, there has been a simultaneous increase in
firms of medium size. Meanwhile the wage-earners,
who were, according to Marx, to have remained at
the bare level of subsistence at which they were in
the England of the first half of the nineteenth century,
have instead profited by the general increase
of wealth, though in a lesser degree than the capitalists.
The supposed iron law of wages has been
proved untrue, so far as labor in civilized countries
is concerned. If we wish now to find examples of
capitalist cruelty analogous to those with which
Marx's book is filled, we shall have to go for most
of our material to the Tropics, or at any rate to
regions where there are men of inferior races to
exploit. Again: the skilled worker of the present day
is an aristocrat in the world of labor. It is a question
with him whether he shall ally himself with the
unskilled worker against the capitalist, or with the
capitalist against the unskilled worker. Very often
he is himself a capitalist in a small way, and if he
is not so individually, his trade union or his friendly
society is pretty sure to be so. Hence the sharpness
of the class war has not been maintained. There
are gradations, intermediate ranks between rich and
poor, instead of the clear-cut logical antithesis
between the workers who have nothing and the capitalists
who have all. Even in Germany, which
became the home of orthodox Marxianism and developed
a powerful Social-Democratic party, nominally
accepting the doctrine of "Das Kapital" as all but
verbally inspired, even there the enormous increase
of wealth in all classes in the years preceding the
war led Socialists to revise their beliefs and to adopt
an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary attitude.
Bernstein, a German Socialist who lived long in
England, inaugurated the "Revisionist" movement
which at last conquered the bulk of the party. His
criticisms of Marxian orthodoxy are set forth in
his "Evolutionary Socialism."[9] Bernstein's work,
as is common in Broad Church writers, consists
largely in showing that the Founders did not hold
their doctrines so rigidly as their followers have
done. There is much in the writings of Marx and
Engels that cannot be fitted into the rigid orthodoxy
which grew up among their disciples. Bernstein's
main criticisms of these disciples, apart from such as
we have already mentioned, consist in a defense of
piecemeal action as against revolution. He protests
against the attitude of undue hostility to Liberalism
which is common among Socialists, and he blunts the
edge of the Internationalism which undoubtedly is
part of the teachings of Marx. The workers, he
says, have a Fatherland as soon as they become
citizens, and on this basis he defends that degree of
nationalism which the war has since shown to be
prevalent in the ranks of Socialists. He even goes
so far as to maintain that European nations have a
right to tropical territory owing to their higher
civilization. Such doctrines diminish revolutionary
ardor and tend to transform Socialists into a left
wing of the Liberal Party. But the increasing prosperity
of wage-earners before the war made these
developments inevitable. Whether the war will have
altered conditions in this respect, it is as yet
impossible to know. Bernstein concludes with the wise
remark that: "We have to take working men as they
are. And they are neither so universally paupers as
was set out in the Communist Manifesto, nor so free
from prejudices and weaknesses as their courtiers
wish to make us believe."
[9] Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben
der Sozial-Demokratie."
In March, 1914, Bernstein delivered a lecture in Budapest
in which he withdrew from several of the positions he had taken
up (vide Budapest "Volkstimme," March 19, 1914).
Berstein represents the decay of Marxian orthodoxy
from within. Syndicalism represents an attack
against it from without, from the standpoint of a
doctrine which professes to be even more radical and
more revolutionary than that of Marx and Engels.
The attitude of Syndicalists to Marx may be seen in
Sorel's little book, "La Decomposition du Marxisme,"
and in his larger work, "Reflections on
Violence," authorized translation by T. E. Hulme
(Allen & Unwin, 1915). After quoting Bernstein,
with approval in so far as he criticises Marx, Sorel
proceeds to other criticisms of a different order. He
points out (what is true) that Marx's theoretical
economics remain very near to Manchesterism: the
orthodox political economy of his youth was accepted
by him on many points on which it is now known to
be wrong. According to Sorel, the really essential
thing in Marx's teaching is the class war. Whoever
keeps this alive is keeping alive the spirit of Socialism
much more truly than those who adhere to the
letter of Social-Democratic orthodoxy. On the basis
of the class war, French Syndicalists developed a
criticism of Marx which goes much deeper than those
that we have been hitherto considering. Marx's
views on historical development may have been in a
greater or less degree mistaken in fact, and yet the
economic and political system which he sought to
create might be just as desirable as his followers
suppose. Syndicalism, however, criticises, not only
Marx's views of fact, but also the goal at which he
aims and the general nature of the means which he
recommends. Marx's ideas were formed at a time
when democracy did not yet exist. It was in the
very year in which "Das Kapital" appeared that
urban working men first got the vote in England and
universal suffrage was granted by Bismarck in
Northern Germany. It was natural that great hopes
should be entertained as to what democracy would
achieve. Marx, like the orthodox economists,
imagined that men's opinions are guided by a more
or less enlightened view of economic self-interest, or
rather of economic class interest. A long experience
of the workings of political democracy has shown
that in this respect Disraeli and Bismarck were
shrewder judges of human nature than either Liberals
or Socialists. It has become increasingly difficult
to put trust in the State as a means to liberty,
or in political parties as instruments sufficiently
powerful to force the State into the service of the
people. The modern State, says Sorel, "is a body of
intellectuals, which is invested with privileges, and
which possesses means of the kind called political for
defending itself against the attacks made on it by
other groups of intellectuals, eager to possess the
profits of public employment. Parties are constituted
in order to acquire the conquest of these
employments, and they are analogous to the State."[10]
[10] La Decomposition du Marxisme," p. 53.
Syndicalists aim at organizing men, not by party,
but by occupation. This, they say, alone represents
the true conception and method of the class war.
Accordingly they despise all POLITICAL action through
the medium of Parliament and elections: the kind of
action that they recommend is direct action by the
revolutionary syndicate or trade union. The battle-
cry of industrial versus political action has spread
far beyond the ranks of French Syndicalism. It is
to be found in the I. W. W. in America, and among
Industrial Unionists and Guild Socialists in Great
Britain. Those who advocate it, for the most part,
aim also at a different goal from that of Marx. They
believe that there can be no adequate individual
freedom where the State is all-powerful, even if the
State be a Socialist one. Some of them are out-and-
out Anarchists, who wish to see the State wholly
abolished; others only wish to curtail its authority.
Owing to this movement, opposition to Marx, which
from the Anarchist side existed from the first, has
grown very strong. It is this opposition in its older
form that will occupy us in our next chapter.
_____
Content of PART I-HISTORICAL. CHAPTER I - MARX AND SOCIALIST DOCTRINE [Bertrand Russell's book: Proposed Roads To Freedom] _
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