CHAPTER VIII
THE IMMEDIATE DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM
1. Democracy.
Bearing in mind that the watchword of Socialism is Evolution, not Revolution, and that its battlefield is Parliament, its immediate programme becomes of the utmost importance. In this programme, as in the Socialist theory itself, there are to be found some interesting survivals of a historic past. The revolutionary republicanism of 1848 can be traced both in proposals to abolish the monarchy and to repudiate the National Debt which one meets with in some programmes which seem to have been kept as sacred from the touch of change as some rooms in ancient places where the Merry Monarch slept or the Young Pretender hastily laid his head. In democratically governed countries where Socialism has had to take its place in the political conflict of actualities not only have these antiquities been left behind amongst the discarded baggage, but they hardly influence Socialist thought. The virtues of republicanism and the conveniences of a monarchy are subjects of abstract interest which may ruffle for an hour the surface of debating societies, but in this country and under present circumstances, they do not cause a ripple in Parliamentary controversy or take up a line in Parliamentary programmes. One can conceive of a time when a foolish monarch and foolish court advisers might make the question a practical one by interfering in polities as the House of Lords recently did when it rejected a Budget. In such a case, the Socialist movement would be bound to stand for democratic control, and it would strive for root and branch changes. But from the purely practical point of view, Socialism, as is shown by the writings of many of its most distinguished exponents, of whom I may mention Lassalle, does not consider republicanism of essential importance. Theoretically it would say that a republic is a more intellectually defensible system of government than any other, and there it would leave the matter for the folly of other people to make it of practical moment.
Socialism declares for the sovereignty being in the hands of the people; it is opposed to property being the qualification for voting; it rejects all fancy franchises and all fancy checks, not one of which, according to the experience of the world, has ever worked; it bases the right to vote on the experience that men have had living under the state which they control; it therefore stands for the widest possible suffrage. Nor does it consider that men alone should vote. So soon as the state begins to act closely with the individual and to concern itself with wages, labour conditions, public morals, children, the experience of women must guide it as much as the experience of men. A masculine state can never fulfil the functions of a Socialist state.
At a time when the common people as electors were suspected and, if tolerated, certainly not welcomed, caution spun out fine theories about checks and counter-balances. There was to be some authority in the constitution, wise and impartial, conservative but not opposed to change, a break but not a spoke in the wheel, and it was to protect the nation from revolution and spoliation, from demagogues and scratch majorities. This authority was to consist of representatives of a section of the community and was either to be recruited by birth, or by people chosen from property voters, or from large constituencies which could be fought only by those possessed of much means. Later on, this theory was supplemented by another. The lower house was not always truly representative. It was elected on complicated issues, its constituencies were of unequal sizes, by the efflux of time it drifted away from its mandates. Some authority had to be created which would judge when the democratic house was acting as a representative, and when as an autocratic, body.
The politics of Socialism have been constructed on a different plan. They offer no abject allegiance to representative government though they assume that in every state of considerable area and population the representative must be the legislator. The representative, however, needs to be checked, but the Socialist proposes to do that by the people themselves and not by a particular section of the people. Hence, the referendum and proportional representation present themselves to the Socialist in alluring garments, and undoubtedly in countries suffering from corrupt legislators and from gross injustice from an inequality of constituencies, these proposals may be entitled to the term "reforms." In our country, however, that name cannot be given to them. The former is but a clumsy and ineffective weapon which the reaction can always use more effectively than the democracy, because it, being only the power to say "No," is far more useful to the few than to the many, and that will be more and more the case as the many become enlightened. The other adds greatly to the expense of elections, offers increased opportunities for the manipulating caucus managers, makes majorities and governments more dependent upon stray odd men in the legislature, and returns to Parliament a greater number of men than are there now whose votes represent no opinion and carry out no mandate, because so many will be returned on single issues—e. g. Temperance—but will have to vote on every question that comes before Parliament. The Socialist knows that democracy in government can be secured only by an efficiently working machine and not by an elaborate set of paper perfections of beautiful but intangible delicacy.
Shorter parliaments, payment of members, adult suffrage, is the Socialist machinery of democracy, whilst for further checks and safeguards resource can be had to one thing and one thing only, a higher political intelligence on the part of the majority of the electors.
2. Palliatives.
From the Socialist standpoint, Democracy is both an end in itself and a means to other ends, for, whilst the Socialist regards the Democratic state as the proof and pledge of completed citizenship, he regards political power as the means of social reconstruction and betterment. He therefore supplements his political programme by a social one, and this consists of two main sections. He proposes a series of measures to mitigate present conditions, and another series as the first gatherings in of ripened Socialist opinion.
In the first section are proposals dealing with factory and mine regulation and inspection, the feeding of school children, old age pensions. Some of these he defends on principle, and they will be carried on into then Socialist state. Factories will be inspected to reduce accident risks under Socialism just as under commercialism, under Socialism injured workmen will be compensated, and workmen temporarily displaced or idle from no fault of their own will be insured against loss when Socialism has come in its fulness. The casualties and other accidents which beset the path of the workman are a fair charge upon industry. They are as much legitimate costs upon production as are the mending and renewal of machinery. Any other view is unthinkable to the Socialist. Industry must be carried on and its breakdowns must be provided for, and surely there is no more pressing—though to-day no more neglected—responsibility lying at its door than the proper care of the men and women who are the victims of its uncertainties and its dangers. The whole of this part of the Socialist programme, therefore, is aimed at securing that the human factors in industry are as carefully tended, and as jealously kept from deteriorating as machines and factory walls are now. When the community owns the machines it will not regard them as of greater value than the people who work them, for it will be as interested in human efficiency as capitalists are now interested in mechanical efficiency.
A part of this programme, however, will be dropped when Socialism is attained. It is purely protective against conditions which the Socialist is determined to remove. The feeding of needy children is a case in point. Under Socialism, family income will be equal to family requirements. It is far short of that to-day, and therefore if children are to be nourished, if they are to be kept out of the gutter, if they are to have the moral as well as the physical pleasure of a good meal served under proper conditions, the state must step in and do what the parents cannot now do. There is the gravest risk attending this kind of legislation, and only the most dire necessity can justify it. But when one sees the prodigal waste of child life, the reckless lowering of mental standards and physical fitness, the criminal destruction of good taste and manners which shadow our present failure to keep the family intact, one has to recognise that steps must be taken immediately to stop this deterioration whilst its cause is being dealt with by action which takes longer to complete and which produces results in a provokingly slow way.
Some of the critics of Socialism seem to assume that Socialists alone commit themselves to this kind of action. But that is not so. All other parties do the same kind of thing. The Socialist, however, never loses sight of the completed work and its results. For instance, some people tell us that we must have religious education taught with the multiplication table and Latin in our schools, as if such education could be of the least value to any one. Their excuse is that if it is not taught there it will be taught nowhere else. The Socialist knows, however, that it cannot be taught there at all, and that the attempt to substitute the schoolmaster for the mother, and the school desk for the fireside, is fatal to both religion and the child. So with divorce. As I am writing this book, a committee of worthy persons is sitting considering with the help of a great variety of witnesses whether the curse of unhappy wedded life can be mitigated by the other curse of easy divorce. The Socialist is like a man in a tangled wood, having to turn now to the right, now to the left, and even occasionally to turn back upon his steps, but guided all the time by a compass and a general map of the country he is traversing. The others are like the same man similarly beset, but without compass or map.
3. Constructive Legislation.
Finally, there is the constructive section of the programme—the section which lays the rounds of well-trimmed and prepared stones on the permanent Socialist fabric. Municipalisation and nationalisation in every shape and form, from milk supplies to telephones, are included in this section. But even here, the reader must be warned, the full intention of Socialism cannot yet be carried out. State capitalism is no more Socialism than is peasant proprietorship secured by public credit land nationalisation. The state can be as bad an employer as any joint stock company. It can exploit one class of users and consumers to benefit the class of tax and rate payers, just as effectively and objectionably as a limited liability company can exploit consumers to put profits in the pockets of its shareholders. The Socialist therefore constantly strives to make the state a model employer, to get it to work co-operatively with its employees, and associate the latter with its management; and as a corollary to this he tries to make the state as a customer of the private employer patronise only those firms which, as far as is possible to-day, do their duty fairly by their workpeople. That is why municipally and nationally Socialism has been as closely associated with the demands for the insertion in public contracts of clauses providing for fair wages and conditions of labour as with demands for public ownership. Whoever desires to understand the purport of Socialism must not dissociate these two forms of Socialist activity.
But there is another highway to Socialism along which we are treading. The facilities which the present system of property owning give to certain individuals to exploit the public must be the subject of legislation. The need for an ever-increasing public income makes this a pressing question for all parties, and the Socialist's system of economic justice and efficiency make it a peculiarly important one for him. No section of the Socialist programme will repay careful study so much as that which deals with finance. By opponents it is described as confiscation, by himself it is regarded as the means of stopping confiscation; they regard it as a method of impoverishment, he as a means of enrichment; they think of it as raids upon private property, he defends it as a way to secure private property. The difference dividing the two lies in the fact that they assume that whatever is held, is justly held; he contends that there ought to be some title in moral right to all property. Arising out of this challenge to produce a good title, the Socialist classifies incomes into earned and unearned. The division is rough, but no rougher than the division of life into animal and vegetable, and it is sufficiently accurate to bear practical application. With that idea in mind, the Socialist starts upon his financial programme-making.
The type of unearned income is rent.[1] The Socialist therefore proposes to tax it, and when he is told that by doing so he is differentiating one kind of property from another, he replies that it is so, the reason being that land is differentiated from every other kind of property by its own nature. The aim of this tax is to secure the economic rent for the state, because it is the state that creates the value which economic rent represents. When the tax upon economic rent becomes substantial, the monopoly character of land will be destroyed, and it will be free for more general use than at present. Large estates will be broken up and more people will live upon the soil.
Two problems will face the state in the transition stage. It must remember that economic rent has become private property with the state's consent, and it therefore must agree that it has obligations to the owners. It must also guard against the multiplication of owners, because the creation of small holdings from big estates will increase economic rent, and will therefore increase the difficulties of the state in securing that rent if the class interested in exploitation by rent becomes larger.
But there are unearned incomes drawn from other sources than from rents. In time these sources may be classified and scales of taxation arranged to suit them. But for the time being that is unnecessary because, roughly, we can take it for granted that large incomes are less and less earned in their final increments, so that a scheme of graduated income-tax may be assumed to trap those portions of national income which illegitimately find their way into private pockets.
The effect of this system of finance is three-fold. It will tap sources of national income which will yield ever-swelling volumes of supply; it will destroy the value of monopolies to individual owners and thus stop existing opportunities of exploitation; it will lighten the burdens borne by industrial capital and thus enable trade to expand and prices to fall. The cost of government will be borne mainly by public income and not by taxes paid from private income, so that industry will not feel it, and proceeding along with this will be a steady extension of municipalisation and nationalisation made practical by the destruction of monopoly and by the expansiveness of national financial resources.
Only one incident in this transition need be discussed specially. The Socialist denies that he proposes a policy of confiscation. Is he not, however, to confiscate as a matter of fact? The state did not confiscate when the telegraphs were nationalised, nor does it propose to confiscate the telephone service in a few months from now. Switzerland did not confiscate the railways when it nationalised them. Neither Glasgow nor London confiscated their trams when they municipalised them. If there has been a shadow of confiscation in any of these transfers the taxpayers and ratepayers were the victims, not the shareholders.
I shall show presently that Socialism cannot come by confiscation, but before doing so I desire to point out that, if it could, the economic history of the past would be very awkward for those who might complain. The expropriation of the monasteries upon which were founded the fortunes of some of our most respectable families, the wholesale enclosure of commons and public lands, the brutal competition, which was really not competition at all but industrial murder, by which the fortunes of some of our trust magnates have been secured, form an awkward record for the classes moralising about expropriation. And if it be argued, as it generally is, that these things were done only that lands might be used for the national good and that economic resources might not go to waste, the Socialist's answer is both swift and decisive. That is just his aim and his justification. What is done in the green tree can surely be done in the dry. But history, though an awkward record of predatory acts for some classes, is a bad precedent in this respect for Socialists.
The interests of classes are so mixed up, the generous sentiments of the masses are so strong, the sanction which the community has given to its own exploitation has been so definite, that it would not be politic, and it certainly would not be just, to pursue any policy of confiscation. Socialists have not proposed to do so. "We do not consider," wrote Engels in 1894,[2] "the indemnification of the owners as an impossibility, whatever be the circumstances. How many times has not Karl Marx expressed to me the opinion that if we could buy up the whole gang, it would even be the means of getting rid of them most cheaply."
The substitution of public for private ownership will not come in a day, nor will it affect everything at once. That is tantamount to saying that it will come in different ways. Railways have been purchased, rival milk supplies have been provided as new businesses, proposals have been made to take land for use and regard the landowners as dowagers.[3] Thus, we have already experienced purchase, competition, expropriation with guarantee of income (and if we add the case of the Suez Canal, the acquiring of national interests in undertakings) as steps to public ownership, and as time goes on other methods appropriate to circumstances will be adopted. When the state is in a better position than it is now to absorb industry, it will extend the principle of the Development Commission and the Congested Districts Boards of Ireland and Scotland, and these Boards will then act for the development of state enterprise, and not merely to spur on, to enlighten and to guide private enterprise. In fact, upon this, which may be granted to be the most difficult part of the Socialist evolution to forecast with any certainty, numerous public activities are beginning to throw a light. What is quite certain is that the state will adopt different methods of acquiring control of industrial capital, but that none of them—unless a catastrophe were to be precipitated by the reaction—can be called confiscation with any justice.
4. Right to Work.
The political demands of Socialism cannot be understood better than by a study of the "Right to Work." The demand has a long and a rich history in the course of which political theory, Socialist points of view, and historical events would have to be reviewed. Had Anton Menger lived, he might have written that history. In a short section of a book like this, I can hardly do justice even to a summary of it. Curiously enough, in the first instance, the doctrine was a philosophic tenet of the eighteenth-century individualists—though the phrase itself appears to have been used first of all by Fourier, when he was discussing other rights than the political ones which were proclaimed during the Revolution. It was held to be inseparable from individuality. If a man had a right to life, the individualist argument ran, the state had to see that he had physical sustenance. If he could not work some poor law organisation had to take him in hand; if he could work but had no opportunity given him to work, under any state which was not communist that right of his took the form of a claim upon the state to find something for him to do by which to earn an income. In one form or another that received the support of Locke, of Montesquieu, of Rousseau and the whole of their school.
But the baffling entanglements in which commercialism enveloped the right, led to the individualists dropping it. It became a mere dream to them, and the fact that the Socialists stuck to it is only one of many proofs which show that, so far from being an anti-individualist philosophy, Socialism contains all the essentials of real individualism. It exercised considerable influence upon Socialist thought in the 'forties, and, as every one knows, the Revolution of 1848 led to the founding of the National Workshops of Paris. I am not to expose the already oft-exposed error of attributing the failure of these workshops to Louis Blane and his Socialist friends. It is true that the Socialists made the opening of the workshops imperative, but the Minister responsible for them deliberately designed their collapse because he was a bitter opponent of Louis Blane. Mr. Kirkup, one of the most impartial and painstaking of inquirers, wrote: "It is perfectly clear that the national workshops were simply a travesty of the proposals of Louis Blane, established expressly to discredit them";[4] and it was regarding the tales spread about them that Lassalle exclaimed: "Lying is a European power." Louis Blane repudiated them. There are some events in history about which popular opinion comes to a conclusion, wrong as wrong can be, but the opinion is circulated, is reiterated, is persisted in until it becomes an unquestioned assumption, and it can be removed after that only by the most patient and laborious campaign of—telling the truth. Such an event is the failure of the National Workshops of Paris. The French Socialist movement had to bow to the opposition of popular ignorance and become silent on the Right to Work for a long time.
A similar untoward fate befell it in Germany. The Liberal individualists there adopted it as a cardinal article of their faith. In the Prussian Civil Code of the 5th of February, 1794, it was embodied, but in administration it proved to be but a constitutional provision for poor law relief. The English workhouse and stoneyard were what the Prussian Liberals meant when they recognised the Right to Work. Further, when Bismarck was piloting his anti-Socialist legislation through the Reichstag in 1884, he declared that a recognition of the Right to Work was necessary as a part of the programme by which he was to kill the menace of Socialism by kindness. The Liberals had then abandoned the principles of individualism and were standing by those of wage slavery, and attacked Bismarck for his declaration. In reply to their leader, Richter, he said categorically: "I recognise unconditionally a right to labour." Hence, used as it has been in Germany, as a mere poor law claim, it has not only disappeared from the demands of the German Social Democrats, but has been opposed by them at International Congresses.
In this country, however, it has been revived in its true significance and is put forward more frequently than any single demand in the Socialist programme.
The reasons are obvious, and a narration of them will throw further light upon Socialist methods and purposes.
The Socialist revives the classical individualist claim that unless a man can find the means of life all theories about his liberty are but unreal shadows, and the duty imposed upon him to preserve his life cannot be borne by him. In society the right to work cannot be made effective except by the state. A man cannot go to any single employer and say: "I demand employment"; but he may justly go to the state and say: "I have tried everything I can think of but I can find no work. I present my claim either to be put to work or to receive subsistence." That is the foundation of the Right to Work Bill for which the British Labour Party is responsible.
The subsistence provision can be secured in one of two ways. It may be provided on the communist plan of allowing the unemployed man to share in the national wealth by giving him grants during his period of unemployment, but that is not Socialism, and the Socialist will not willingly adopt that proposal. It may also be provided by a scheme of insurance, the premiums of which are provided by the state, the trade, and the body of workmen. That is much nearer to the general principles of Socialism, and in that form this part of the Right to Work claim is now being advocated and enforced by the Socialist parties of the world.
The other part of the claim is, however, from the point of view of Socialist reconstruction more important. It assumes that it is the duty of the state to organise labour. The first step in this is the establishment of the Labour Exchange, the second the decasualisation of labour by the prohibition of the engagement of casual workers except through exchanges. The effect of this will be to increase the number of chronically unemployed men, for which the state must assume responsibility.
The state with this responsibility upon its shoulders must turn at once to an examination of its own resources to see how they can be used better than they are. For it is obvious that putting these unemployed men to work in industries already fully manned or over-manned would solve nothing and perhaps would increase misery. The problem which the Labour Party desires the state to face is therefore that of the development of its unused resources. We must be quite clear upon this point, because it is the essential part of the Labour Party's purpose. Neither relief works nor the National Workshops of 1848 (except for training, perhaps) are asked for, but a policy of national development.
So soon as this policy is considered, the question of the land will inevitably come up, and means will be taken to put it to better use than at present. The Congested Districts Boards of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, the Development Commission established in 1910, the land legislation of Australia, all point the way to the statesman who will have the foresight, the courage and the patriotism to handle this question. As part of this programme, the Socialist has long been crying for afforestation, national drainage and reclamation, labour farm colonies and rural housing with small holdings, and the pressure of social misery and depopulation has at length come to his aid. Once more he has proved himself preeminently entitled to that adjective "practical"? of which his opponents appear to be so desirous to deprive him.
He is anxious to secure one condition, however, which the shortsighted statesmen who adopt his proposals when circumstances compel them, do not see to be necessary. Every activity in this direction, the Socialist urges, should lead towards nationalisation. The public ought to retain the ownership of what it has created. The afforestation encouraged should be national and municipal afforestation, the reclaimed land should remain national property, the small holdings should not be freeholds but leaseholds with the necessary security of tenure for those who work them. This is not only required so as to fit in with the general plan of Socialist organisation, put in order to produce the practical results aimed at. I need only instance the Australian experience regarding land. Several States broke up large territorial ownerships and granted freeholds to smaller cultivators. In a very short time failure began to be written over the experiment. The small holdings were sold and the law of concentration set to work to defeat the shortsighted schemes of governments. The Governments then adopted the Socialist method and retained the freeholds in their own hands. The result came almost instantaneously. The real worker settled on the land because he was not burdened at the outset by purchase capital, the small holdings did not concentrate into large ones, the people stayed upon the soil. The policy of breaking up the large estates was justified and the support of public funds required for the purpose really resulted in an increased country population.
Thus, worked out into its consequences and translated into a social policy and programme, the Right to Work illustrates in a definite and practical form the intention and meaning of the Socialist's immediate demands.
- ↑ Some of our critics keep dinning it into our ears that rent often includes interest when landowners have spent capital in developing their lands. The Socialist, however, does not forget that at all, and when he theorises about rent, he means real rent, and not rent plus interest.
- ↑ Quoted by Vandervelde in Collectivism and Industrial Evolution, p. 186.
- ↑ Scottish Land Bill.
- ↑ History of Socialism, pp. 48, 49.