Socialism As It Is

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Why is the sinister role of the upper classes not universally grasped?
Because the ideas and teachings of former generations still survive,
however much contradicted by present developments. At the time of the
American and French Revolutions and for nearly a century afterwards,
when political democracy was first securing a world-wide acceptance _as
an ideal_, it was looked upon as a creed which had only to be mentally
accepted in order to be forthwith applied to life. The only forces of
resistance were thought to be due to the ignorance or possibly to the
unregenerate moral character of the unconverted. The democratic faith
was accepted and propagated by the French and others almost exactly as
religion had been. As late as the middle of the last century this
conception of democracy, due to the wide diffusion of small and in many
localities approximately equal farms and small businesses, continued to
prevail.

About the middle of the nineteenth century the first advance was made.
It became recognized with the coming of railroads and steamships that
society could never become fixed as a Utopia or in any other form, but
must always be subject to change,--and the ideal of social evolution
gained a considerable acceptance even before the evolution theory had
been generally applied to biology. It was seen that if the ideal of
democracy was to become a reality, a certain degree of intellectual and
material development was required,--but it was thought that this
development was at hand. It was a period when wealth was rapidly
becoming more equally distributed, when plenty of free land remained,
and when it was commonly supposed that universal free trade and
universal peace were about to dawn upon the nations, and equal
opportunity, if not yet achieved, was not far away. The obstacles in the
way of progress were not the resistance of privileged classes, but the
time and labor required for mankind to conquer the world and nature.
With the establishment of so-called democratic and constitutional
republics in the place of monarchies and landlord aristocracies, and the
abolition of slavery in the United States, all systematic opposition to
social progress, except in the minds of a few perverted or criminal
individuals, was supposed to be at an end.

A generation or two ago, then, though it was now recognized that the
golden age could not be attained immediately by merely converting the
majority to a wise and beneficent social system (as had been proposed in
the first half of the century), yet it was thought that, with the
advance of science and the conquest of nature, and without any serious
civil strife, "equality of opportunity" was being gradually and rapidly
brought to all mankind. This state of mind has survived and is still
that of the majority to-day, when the conditions that have given rise to
it have disappeared.

Not all previous history has a greater economic change to show than the
latter half of the nineteenth century, which converted all the leading
countries from nations of small capitalists into nations of hired
employees. Even such a far-sighted and broad-minded statesman as
Lincoln, for example, had no idea of the future of his country, and
regarded the slaveowners and their supporters as the only classes that
dreamed that we could ever become a nation of "hired laborers" (the
capitalism of to-day), any more than we could remain in part a nation of
"bought laborers." Lincoln puts a society based on hired labor in the
same class with a society based on owned labor, on the ground that both
lead to an effort "to place capital on an equal footing, if not above
labor in the structure of the government." This effort, marked by the
proposal of "the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the
denial to the people of the right to participate in the selection of
public officers except the legislative" (so similar to tendencies
prevailing to-day), he calls "returning despotism." And so inevitable
did it seem to Lincoln that a nation based on hired labor would evolve a
despotic government, that he fell back on the fact that the population
was composed chiefly not of laborers, but of small capitalists, and
would probably remain so constituted, as the only convincing ground that
our political democracy would last. In a word, our greatest statesman
recognized that our political democracy and liberty were based on the
wide distribution of the land and other forms of capital. (See Lincoln's
Message of December 3, 1861.) If Lincoln foresaw no class struggle
between "hired labor" and the "returning despotism," this was only
because he mistakenly expected that the nation would continue to consist
chiefly of small capitalists. Yet his conclusions and those of his
contemporaries, so clearly limited to conditions that have passed away,
are taught like a gospel to the children in our public schools to-day.

The present generation, however, is slowly realizing, through the
development of organized capitalism in industry and government, and the
increase of hired laborers, that it is not nature alone that
civilization must contend against, not merely ignorance or poverty or
the backwardness of material development, but, more important than all
these, the systematic opposition of the employing and governing classes
to every program of improvement, except that which promises still
further to increase their own wealth and power.

The Socialist view of the evolution of society is that the central fact
of history is this struggle of classes for political and economic power.
The governing class of any society or period, Marx taught, consists of
the economic exploiters, the governed class of the economically
exploited. The governing class becomes more and more firmly established
in power, until it begins to stagnate, but the machinery of production
continues to evolve, and falls gradually into the hands of some
exploited element which is able to use this economic advantage as a
means for overthrowing its rulers. Marx felt that with the vast
revolution in society marked by modern science and modern machinery, the
time is fast approaching when the exploited classes of to-day will be
able to overthrow the present ruling class, the capitalists, and at the
same time establish an industrial democracy, where all class oppression
will be brought to an end.

However his predictions may turn out in the future, Marx's view of the
past is rapidly gaining ground and is possibly accepted by the majority
of those most competent to speak on these questions to-day, including
many leading economists and sociologists and prominent figures in
practical political life. Winston Churchill, for example, says that "the
differences between class and class have been even aggravated in the
passage of years," that while "the richer classes [are] ever growing in
wealth and in numbers, and ever declining in responsibility, the very
poor remain plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless
misery." This being the case, he predicts "a savage strife between class
and class," unless the most radical measures are taken to check the
tendency. Nor are his statements mere rhetoric, for he shows
statistically "that the increase of income assessable to income tax is
at the very least more than ten times greater than the increase which
has taken place in the same period in the wages of those trades which
come within the Board of Trade returns."[208] In other words, the income
of the well-to-do classes (which increased nearly half a billion pounds,
that is, almost doubled, in ten years) is growing ten times more rapidly
than that even of the organized and better paid workmen, who alone are
considered in the Board of Trade returns.

Here is a situation which is world-wide. The position of the working
class, or certain parts of it, may be improving; the income of the
employing and capitalist class is certainly increasing _many fold_ more
rapidly. Here is the financial expression of the growing _divergence_ of
classes which Marx had in mind, a divergence that we have no reason
whatever for supposing will be checked, as Mr. Churchill suggests, even
by his most "Socialistic" reforms, short of surrendering the political
and economic power to those who suffer from this condition.

At the German Socialist Congress at Hanover in 1899, Bebel said that
even if the income of the working class was increasing, or even if the
purchasing power of total wages was becoming greater, the income of the
nation as a whole was increasing much more rapidly and that of the
capitalist class at a still more rapid rate. The great Socialist
statesman laid emphasis on the essential point that capitalists are
absorbing continually a greater and a greater proportion of the national
income.

The class struggle, says Kautsky, rests not upon the fact that the
misery of the proletariat is growing greater, but on _its need to
annihilate a pressure that it feels more and more keenly_.

"The class struggle," he writes, "becomes more bitter the longer it
lasts. The more capable of struggle the opponents become in and through
the struggle itself, _the more important become the differences in their
conditions of life, the more the capitalists raise themselves above the
proletariat by the ever growing exploitation_."[209]

This feature of present-day (capitalistic) progress, Socialists view as
the very essence of social injustice, no matter whether there is a
slight and continuous or even a considerable progress of the working
class. The question for them is not whether from time to time something
more falls to the workingman, but what proportion he gets of the total
product. It would never occur to any one to try to tell a business man
that he ought not to sell any more goods because his profits were
already increasing "fast enough." It is as absurd to tell the workingman
that the moderate advance he is making either through slight
improvements as to wages and hours, or through political and social
reforms, ought to blind him to all the possibilities of modern
civilization from which he is still shut off, and which will remain out
of his reach for generations, unless his share in the income of society
is rapidly increased to the point that he (and other non-capitalist
producers) receive the total product.

The conflict of class interests is not a mere theory, but a widely
recognized reality, and the worst accusation that can be made against
Socialists is not that they are trying to create a war of classes where
none exists, but that some of them at times interpret the conflict in a
narrow or violent sense (I shall discuss the truth or untruth of this
criticism in later chapters). Yet Mr. Roosevelt voices the opinion of
many when he calls the view that the maximum of progress is to be
secured only after a struggle between the classes, the "most mischievous
of Socialist theses," says that an appeal to class interest is not
"legitimate," and that the Socialists hope "in one shape or another to
profit at the expense of the other citizens of the Republic."[210]

"There is no greater need to-day," said Mr. Roosevelt in his Sorbonne
lecture, "than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage
between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship,
runs at right angles to, not parallel to, the lines of cleavage between
class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the
face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his
conduct in that position."

This is as much as to say that there are only individuals, but no class,
which it is better to have outside than inside of a progressive
majority. The Socialist view is the exact opposite. It holds that _the
very foundation of Socialism as a method_ (which is its only aspect of
practical importance) is that the Socialist movement assumes a position
so militant and radical that every privileged class will voluntarily
remain on the outside; and events are showing the wisdom and even the
necessity of these tactics. Socialists would say, "Ruin looks us in the
face if, in politics, we judge the men who occupy a certain position
(the members of a certain class) by their conduct as individuals,
instead of judging them by the fact that they occupy a certain position
and are members of a certain class."

Again, to the Chamber of Commerce at New Haven, Mr. Roosevelt expressed
a view which, to judge by their actions, is that of all non-Socialist
reformers: "I am a radical," he said, "who most earnestly desires to see
a radical platform carried out by conservatives. I wish to see great
industrial reforms carried out, not by the men who will profit by them,
but by the men who will lose by them; by such men as you are around me."

Socialists, on the contrary, believe that industrial reforms will never
lead to equality of opportunity except when carried out wholly
independently of the conservatives who will lose by them. They believe
that such reforms as are carried out by the capitalists and their
governments, beneficent, radical, and even stupendous as they may be,
will not and cannot constitute the first or smallest step towards
industrial democracy.

Mr. Roosevelt's views are identical on this point with those of Mr.
Woodrow Wilson and other progressive leaders of the opposite party.
Mayor Gaynor of New York, for example, was quoted explaining the great
changes that took place in the fall elections of 1910 on these grounds:
"We are emerging from an evil case. The flocking of nearly all the
business men, owners of property, and even persons with $100 in the
savings bank, to one party made a division line and created a contrast
which must have led to trouble if much longer continued. The
intelligence of the country is asserting itself, and business men and
property owners will again divide themselves normally between the
parties, as formerly." Here again is the fundamental antithesis to the
Socialist view. Leaving aside for the moment the situation of persons
with $100 in the savings bank, or owners of property in general (who
might possess nothing more than a small home), Socialists are working,
with considerable success, towards the day when at least one great party
will take a position so radical that the overwhelming majority of
business men (or at least the representatives of by far the larger part
of business and capital) will be forced automatically into the opposite
organization.

Without this militant attitude Socialists believe that even the most
radical reforms, not excepting those that sincerely propose equal
opportunity or the abolition of social classes _as their ultimate aim_,
must fail to carry society forward a single step in that direction.
Take, as an example, Dr. Lyman Abbott, whose advanced views I have
already referred to (see Part I, Chap. III). Notwithstanding his
advocacy of industrial democracy, his attack on the autocracy of
capitalism and the wages system, and his insistence that the distinction
between non-possessing and possessing classes must be abolished, Dr.
Abbott opposes a class struggle. Such phrases amount to nothing from the
Socialist standpoint, if all of these objects are held up merely as an
ideal, and if nothing is said of the rate at which they ought to be
attained or the means by which the _opposition_ of privileged classes is
to be overcome. No indorsement of any so-called Socialist theory or
reform is of practical moment unless it includes that theory which has
survived out of the struggles of the movement, and has been tested by
hard experience--a theory in which ways and means are not the last but
the first consideration,--namely, the class struggle.

Mr. Roosevelt and nearly all other popular leaders of the day denounce
"special privilege." But the denouncers of special privilege, aside from
the organized Socialists, are only too glad to associate themselves with
one or another of the classes that at present possess the economic and
political power. To the Socialists the only way to fight special
privilege is _to place the control of society in the hands of a
non-privileged majority. The practical experience of the movement_ has
taught the truth of what some of its early exponents saw at the outset,
that a majority _composed even in part_ of the privileged classes could
never be trusted or expected to abolish privileges. Neither Dr. Abbott,
Mr. Roosevelt, nor other opponents of the Socialist movement, are ready
to indorse this practical working theory. For its essence being that all
those who by their economic expressions or their acts stand for anything
less than equality of opportunity should be removed from positions of
power, it is directed against every anti-Socialist. Dr. Abbott, for
example, demands only "opportunity," instead of equal opportunity, and
Mr. Roosevelt wishes merely "to start all men in the race for life on a
_reasonable_ equality." (My italics.)[211]

Let us see what Marx and his successors say in explanation of their
belief that the "class struggle" must be fought out to an end. Certainly
they do not mean that each individual capitalist is to be regarded by
his working people as their private enemy. Nor, on the other hand, can
the expression "class struggle" be interpreted, as some Socialists have
asserted, to mean that there was no flesh and blood enemy to be
attacked, but only "the capitalist system." To Marx capitalism was
embodied not merely in institutions, which embrace all classes and
individuals alike, but also in the persons of the capitalist class. And
by waging a war against that class he meant to include each and every
member of it who remained in his class, and every one of its supporters.
To Marx the enemy was no abstraction. It was, as he said, "the person,
the living individual" that had to be contended with, but only as the
embodiment of a class. "It is not sufficient," he said, "to fight the
general conditions and the higher powers. The press must make up its
mind to oppose _this_ constable, _this_ attorney, _this_
councilor."[212] These individuals, moreover, he viewed not merely as
the servants or representatives of a system, but as part and parcel of a
class.

The struggle that Marx had in mind might be called _a latent civil
war_. It was not a mere preparation for revolution, since it was as real
and serious in times of peace as in those of revolution or civil war.
But it was a civil war in everything except the actual physical
fighting, and he was always ready to proceed to actual fighting when
necessary. Throughout his life Marx was a revolutionist. And when his
successors to-day speak of "the class struggle," they mean a conflict of
that depth and intensity that it may lead to revolution.

None of the classical Socialist writers, however, has failed to grasp
the absolute necessity to a successful social movement, and especially
to a revolutionary one, of making the class struggle broad, inclusive,
and democratic. In 1851 Marx wrote to the Socialists: "The forces
opposed to you have all the advantages of organization, discipline, and
habitual authority; unless you bring _strong odds_ against them you are
defeated and ruined." (The italics are mine.)

Edward Bernstein, while representing as a rule only the ultra-moderate
element of the Party, expresses on this question the views of the
majority as well. "Social Democracy," he says, "cannot further its work
better than by taking its stand unreservedly on the theory of
democracy." And he adds that in practice it has always favored
cooeperation with all the exploited, even if "its literary advocates have
often acted otherwise, and still often do so to-day."

Not many years ago, it is true, there was still a great deal of talk in
Germany about the desirability of a "dictatorship of the proletariat,"
the term "proletariat" being used in its narrow sense. That is, as soon
as the working class (in this sense) became a political majority, it was
to make the government embody its will without reference to other
classes--it being assumed that the manual laborers will only demand
justice for all men alike, and that it was neither safe nor necessary to
consult any of the middle classes. And even to-day in France much is
said by the "syndicalists" and others as to the power of well-organized
and determined minorities in the time of revolution--it being assumed,
again, that such minorities will be successful only in so far as they
stand for a new social principle, to the ultimate interest of all (see
Chapter V). It cannot be questioned that in these schemes the majority
is not to be consulted. But they are far less widely prevalent than
they were a generation ago.

The pioneer of "reformist" Socialism in Germany (Bernstein) correctly
defines democracy, not as the rule of the majority, but as "an absence
of class government." "This negative definition has," he says, "the
advantage that it gives less room than the phrase 'government by the
people' to the idea of oppression of the individual by the majority,
which is absolutely repugnant to the modern mind. To-day we find the
oppression of the minority by the majority 'undemocratic,' although it
was originally held up to be quite consistent with government by the
people.... Democracy is in _principle_ the suppression of class
government, though it is not yet the _actual_ suppression of
classes."[213]

Democracy, as we have hitherto known it, opposes class _government_, but
countenances the existence of classes. Socialism insists that as long as
social classes exist, class government will continue. The aim of
Socialism, "the end of class struggles and class rule," is not only
democratic, but the only means of giving democracy any real meaning.

"It is only the proletariat" (wage earners), writes Kautsky, "that has
created a great social ideal, the consummation of which will leave only
one source of income, _i.e._ labor, will abolish rent and profit, will
put an end to class and other conflicts, and put in the place of the
class struggle the solidarity of man. This is the final aim and goal of
the class struggle by the Socialist Party. The political representatives
of the class interests of the proletariat thus become representative of
the highest and most general interests of humanity."[214]

It is expected that nearly all social classes, though separated into
several groups to-day, will ultimately be thrown together by economic
evolution and common interests into two large groups, the capitalists
and their allies on the one side, and the anti-capitalists on the other.
The final and complete victory of the latter, it is believed, can alone
put an end to this great conflict. But in the meanwhile, even before our
capitalist society is overthrown and class divisions ended, the very
fusing together of the several classes that compose the anti-capitalist
party is bringing about a degree of social harmony not seen before.

Already the Socialists have succeeded in this way in harmonizing a large
number of conflicting class interests. The skilled workingmen were
united for the first time with the unskilled when the latter, having
been either ignored or subordinated in the early trade unions, were
admitted on equal terms into the Socialist parties. Then the often
extremely discontented salaried and professional men of small incomes,
having been won by Socialist philosophy, laid aside their sense of
superiority to the wage earners and were absorbed in large numbers.
Later, many agricultural laborers and even agriculturists who did all
their own work, and whose small capital brought them no return, began to
conquer their suspicion of the city wage workers. And, finally, many of
those small business men and independent farmers, the _larger part_ of
whose income is to be set down as the direct result of their own labor
and not a result of their ownership of a small capital, or who feel that
they are being reduced to such a condition, are commencing in many
instances to look upon themselves as non-capitalists rather than
capitalists--and to work for equality of opportunity through the
Socialist movement.

The process of building up a truly democratic society has two parts:
first, the organization and union in a single movement of all classes
that stand for the abolition of classes, and class rule; and second, the
overthrow of those social elements that stand in the way of this natural
evolution, their destruction and dissolution _as classes_, and the
absorption of their members by the new society as individuals.

It becomes of the utmost importance in such a vast struggle, on the one
hand, that no classes that are needed in the new society shall be marked
for destruction, and on the other that the movement shall not lean too
heavily or exclusively on classes which have very little or too little
constructive or combative power. What, then, is the leading principle by
which the two groups are to be made up and distinguished? Neither the
term "capitalist classes" nor the term "working classes" is entirely
clear or entirely satisfactory.