Socialism As It Is Part 27

In Germany especially, Marx's co-workers and successors developed marked hostility to "State Socialism" from the moment when it was taken up by Bismarck nearly a generation ago (1883). August Bebel's hostility to the existing State goes so far that he predicts that it will expire "with the expiration of the ruling cla.s.s,"[180] while Engels contended that the very phrase "the Socialist State" was valueless as a slogan in the present propaganda of Socialism, and scientifically ineffective.[181]

Engels had even predicted, as long ago as 1880, that the coming of monopolies would bring it about that the State, being "the official representative of capitalistic society," would ultimately have to undertake "the protection of production," and that this necessity would first be felt in the case of the railways and the telegraphs. Later events have shown that his prediction was so correct that even America and England are approaching the nationalization of their railways, while the proposal to nationalize monopolies is rapidly growing in popularity in every country in the world, and among nearly all social cla.s.ses.

Engels did not consider that such developments were necessarily in the direction of Socialism any more than the nationalization of the railways by the Czar or the Prussian government. On the contrary, he suggested that it meant the strengthening of the capitalism.

"The modern State," he wrote in 1880, "no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalistic machine, the State of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more it actually becomes the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wageworkers--proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head."[182] Engels did not think that State ownership necessarily meant Socialism; but he thought that it might be utilized for the purposes of Socialism if the working cla.s.s was sufficiently numerous, organized, and educated to take charge of the situation. "State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that give the elements of the solution."

As early as 1892 Karl Kautsky, at the present moment perhaps the greatest living Socialist editor and economist, wrote that the system of laissez-faire, for which "State Socialism" offers itself as a remedy, had long ago lost whatever influence it once had on the capitalist cla.s.s--which was never very great. If, then, the theory that "that government is best which governs least" had been abandoned by the capitalists themselves, there was no ground why Socialists should devote their time to the advocacy of a view ("State Socialism") that was merely a reaction against an outworn standpoint. The theory of collectivism, that the functions of the State ought to be widely extended, had long been popular among the capitalists themselves.

"It has already been seen," wrote Kautsky, "that economic and political development has made necessary and inevitable the taking over of certain economic functions by the State.... It can by no means be said that every nationalization of an economic function or of an economic enterprise is a step towards Socialistic cooperation and that the latter would grow out of the general nationalization of all economic enterprises without making a fundamental change in the nature of the State."[183] In other words, Kautsky denies that partial nationalization or collectivism is necessarily even a step towards Socialism, and a.s.serts that it may be a step in the other direction. The German Socialists acted on this principle when they opposed the nationalization of the Reichsbank, and it has often guided other Socialist parties.

Kautsky feels that it is often a mistake to transfer the power over industry, _e.g._ the ownership of the land, into the hands of the State as now const.i.tuted, since this puts a tremendous part of the national wealth at the disposal of capitalist governments, one of whose prime functions is to prevent the increase of the political and economic power of the working people. And, although the State employees would probably receive a somewhat better treatment than they had while the industry was privately owned, they would simply form a sort of aristocracy of labor opposed in general to the interests of the working people.

"Like every State," says Kautsky, "the modern State is in the first place a tool for the protection of the general interests of the ruling cla.s.ses. It changes its nature in no way if it takes over functions of general utility which aim at advancing the interests not only of the ruling cla.s.ses, but also of those of society as a whole _and_ of the ruling cla.s.ses, and on no condition does it take care of these functions in a way which might threaten the general interests of the ruling cla.s.ses or their domination.... If the present-day State nationalizes certain industries and functions, it does this, not to put limitations on capitalistic exploitation, but to protect and to strengthen the capitalistic mode of production, or in order itself to take a share in this exploitation, to increase its income in this way, and to lessen the payments that the capitalist cla.s.s must obtain for its own support in the way of taxes. And as an exploiter, the State has this advantage over private capitalists: that it has at its disposal to be used against the exploited not only the economic powers of the capitalists, but the political force of the State." (My italics.)

As an ill.u.s.tration of Kautsky's reference to the lessening of taxes through the profits of government ownership, it may be pointed out that the German Socialists fear the further nationalization of industries in Germany on account of the danger that with this increased income the State would no longer depend on the annual grants of the Reichstag and would then be in a position to govern without that body. The king of Prussia and the Emperor of Germany could in that event rule the country much as the present Czar rules Russia.

As a rule, outside of Great Britain, the advocates of the collectivist program are also aware that their "Socialism" is not that of the Socialist movement. In an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Mr. John Martin, for example, indicates the "State Socialist" tendency of present-day reform measures in America, and at the same time shows that they are removed as far as possible from that anti-capitalist trend which is held by most Socialist Party leaders to be the essence of their movement. Mr. Martin points to the irrigation projects, the conservation of national resources, the railway policy of the national administration, the expansion of the Federal government, and the tendency towards compulsory arbitration since the interference of President Roosevelt in the coal strike of 1902, as being "Socialistic"

and yet in no sense cla.s.s movements. They tend towards social reconstruction and to greater social organization and order; and there are no "logical halting places," says Mr. Martin, "on the road to Collectivism." But so far is this movement from a cla.s.s movement in Mr.

Martin's opinion that its advance guard consists in part of millionaires like Mr. Carnegie and Mrs. Sage, "who aim at a social betterment of both getting and spending of fortunes," while "behind them, uncommitted to any far-reaching theory, but patriotic and zealous for an improved society, there are marching philanthropists, doctors, lawyers, business men, and legislators, people of distinction." And finally the army is completed by millions of common privates "_for_ whose children the better order will be the greatest boon." (The italicizing is mine.) The privates apparently figure rather as mere recipients of public and private benefactions than as active citizens.[184]

Some of the reformers openly advise joining the Socialist movement with the hope of using it for the purpose of reform and without aiding it in any way to reach a goal of its own. Professor John Bates Clark, one of America's most prominent economists, says of the Socialist Party that it is legitimate because "it represents the aspirations of a large number of workingmen" and because "its immediate purposes are good."

"It has changed the uncompromising policy of opposing all halfway measures," continues Professor Clark. "It welcomes reforms and tries to enroll in its membership as many as possible of the reformers.... In short, the Socialist and the reformer may walk side by side for a considerable distance without troubling themselves about the unlike goals which they hope in the end to reach.... What the reformers will have to do is to take the Socialistic name, walk behind a somewhat red banner, and be ready to break ranks and leave the army when it reaches the dividing of the ways."[185]

Professor Clark, it will be seen, has no difficulty in suggesting a "logical halting place on the road to collectivism"; namely, when the Socialists turn from collectivist reforms and start out towards Socialism.

Anti-Socialists may share the Socialist _ideal_ and even favor all the reforms that the capitalists can permit to be put into practice without resigning their power and allowing the overthrow of capitalism. But Socialists have long since seen a way to mark off all such idealists and reformers--by presenting Socialism for what it really is, not as an ideal, nor a program of reform under capitalist direction, but as a method, and the only practical method, of ending capitalist rule in industry and government.

When Liebknecht insists on "the extreme importance of tactics and the necessity of maintaining the party's cla.s.s struggle character," he makes "tactics," or the practical methods of the movement, _identical_ with its basic principle, "the cla.s.s struggle." Kautsky does the same thing when he says that Socialism is, _both in theory and practice_, a revolution against capitalism.

"Those who repudiate political revolution as the princ.i.p.al means of social transformation, or wish to confine the latter to such measures as have been granted by the ruling cla.s.s," says Kautsky, "are social reformers, no matter how much their social ideas may antagonize existing forms of society."

The Socialists' wholly practical grounds against "reformism" have been stated by Liebknecht, in his "No Compromise." "This political Socialism, which in fact is only philanthropic humanitarian radicalism, has r.e.t.a.r.ded the development of Socialism in France exceedingly," he wrote in 1899, before Socialist politicians and "reformists" had come into prominence in other countries than France. "It has diluted and blurred principles and weakened the Socialist Party because it brought into it troops upon which no reliance could be placed at the decisive moment." If, in other words, Socialism is a movement of non-capitalists against capitalists, nothing could be more fatal to it than a reputation due chiefly to success in bringing about reforms about which there is nothing distinctively Socialistic. For this kind of success could not fail ultimately to swamp the movement with reformers who, like Professor Clark, are not Socialists and never will be.

It must not be inferred from this that Socialists are indifferent to reform. They are necessarily far more anxious about it than its capitalist promoters. For while many "State Socialist" reforms are profitable to capitalism and even strengthen temporarily its hold on society, they are in the long run indispensable to Socialism. But this does not mean that Socialism is compelled to turn aside any of its energies from its great task of organizing and educating the workers, in order to hasten these reforms. On the contrary, the larger and the more revolutionary the Socialist army, the easier it will be for the progressive capitalists to overcome the conservatives and reactionaries.

Long before this army has become large enough or aggressive enough to menace capitalism and so to throw all capitalists together in a single organization wholly devoted to defensive measures, there will be a long period--already begun in Great Britain, France, and other countries--when the growth of Socialism will make the progressive capitalists supreme by giving them _the balance of power_. In order, then, to hasten and aid the capitalistic form of progress, Socialists need only see that their own growth is sufficiently rapid. As the Socialists are always ready to support every measure of capitalist reform, the capitalist progressives need only then secure enough strength in Parliaments so that their votes added to those of the Socialists would form a majority. As soon as progressive capitalism is at all developed, reforms are thus automatically aided by the Socialist vote, without the necessity of active Socialist partic.i.p.ation--thus leaving the Socialists free to attend to matters that depend wholly on their own efforts; namely, the organization and education of the non-capitalist ma.s.ses for aggressive measures leading towards the overthrow of capitalism.

Opposition to the policy of absorption in ordinary reform movements is general in the international movement outside of Great Britain. Eugene V. Debs, three times presidential candidate of the American Socialist Party, is as totally opposed to "reformism" as are any of the Europeans.

"_The revolutionary character of our party and of our movement_," he said in a personal letter to the present writer, which was published in the Socialist press, "_must be preserved in all its integrity at all cost, for if that be compromised we had better cease to exist_.... If the trimmers had their way we should degenerate into bourgeois reformers.... But they will not have their way." (Italics mine.)

No American Socialist has more ably summarized the dangers opportunism brings to the movement than Professor George D. Herron in his pamphlet, "From Revolution to Revolution," taken from a speech made as early as 1903. Later events, it will be noted, have strikingly verified his predictions as to the growing popularity of the word "Socialism" with nearly all political elements in this country.

"Great initiatives and revolutions," Herron says, "have always been robbed of definition and issue when adopted by the cla.s.s against which the revolt was directed....

"Let Socialists take knowledge and warning. The possessing cla.s.s is getting ready to give the people a few more crumbs of what is theirs.... If it comes to that, they are ready to give some things _in the name of Socialism_.... The old political parties will be adopting what they are pleased to call Socialistic planks in their platforms; and the churches will be coming with the insipid 'Christian Socialism,' and their hypocrisy and brotherly love. We shall soon see Mr. Hanna and Bishop Potter, Mr. Hearst and Dr.

Lyman Abbott, even Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Bryan, posing as reasonable kinds of Socialists. You will find the name of Socialism repeatedly taken in vain, and perhaps successfully. You will see the Socialist movement bridled and saddled by capitalism, in the hope of riding it to a new lease of capitalistic power....

"But Socialism, like liberty or truth, is something you cannot have a part of; you must have the whole or you will have nothing; you can only gain or lose the whole, you cannot gain or lose a part.

You may have munic.i.p.al ownerships, nationalized transportation, initiative and referendum, civil service reforms and many other capitalist concessions, and be all the farther away from Social Democracy.... You may have any kind and number of reforms you please, any kind and number of revolutions or revivals you please, any kind and number of new ways of doing good you please, it will not matter to capitalism, so long as it remains at the root of things, the result of all your plans and pains will be gathered into the Capitalist granary." (The italics are mine.)

Yet no Socialist dreams that the presence in the movement of semi-Socialist or non-Socialist elements, which is both the cause and the effect of reformism and compromise, is a mere accident, or that there is any device by which they may either be kept out or eliminated--until the time is ripe. The presence of opportunists and reformists in all Socialist parties is as much an inevitable result at a certain stage of social evolution as the appearance of Socialism itself.

The time will come when these "Mitlaufer," as the Germans call them, will either become wholly Socialist or will desert the movement, as has so often happened, to become a part of the rising tide of "State Socialism," but that day has not yet arrived.

The division of the organization at a certain stage into two wings is held by the able Austrian Socialist, Otto Bauer, to be a universal and necessary process in its development. The first stage is one where all party members are agreed, since it is then merely a question of the propaganda of general and revolutionary _ideas_. The second stage (the present one) arises when the party has already obtained a modest measure of power which can be either _cashed in_ and utilized for immediate and material gains or saved up and held for obtaining more power, or for both objects in degrees varying according as one or the other is considered more important. Bauer shows that these two policies of acc.u.mulating power and of spending it arise necessarily out of the social composition of the party at its present stage and the general social environment in which it finds itself.

At the third stage, he says, when the proletariat has come to form the overwhelming majority of the population, their campaign for the conquest of political power appears to the possessing cla.s.ses for the first time as a threatening danger. The capitalist parties then unite closely together against the Social Democracy; what once separated them now appears small in comparison to the danger which threatens their profits, their rents, and their monopolistic incomes. So there arises again at this higher stage of capitalist domination, as was the case at its beginning, "a Social Democracy in battle _against all the possessing cla.s.ses, against the whole power of the organized state_." (Italics mine.)[186] When the third stage arrives, these reformists who do not intend to leave the revolutionary movement, begin to get ready to follow it. Already the most prominent reformist Socialists outside of England _claim_ that their position is revolutionary. This is true of the best-known German reformist, Bernstein; it is true of Jaures; and it is also true of Berger in this country. Bernstein argues in his book, "Evolutionary Socialism," that const.i.tutional legislation is best adapted to positive social-political work, "to the creation of permanent economic arrangements." But he also says that "the revolutionary way does quicker work as far as it deals with removal of obstacles which a privileged minority places in the path of social progress." As for choosing between the revolutionary and non-revolutionary methods, he admits that revolutionary tactics can be abandoned only when the non-propertied majority of a nation has become firmly established in power; that is, when political democracy is so deeply rooted and advanced that it can be applied successfully to questions of property; "when a nation has attained a position where the rights of the propertied minority have ceased to be a serious obstacle of social progress." Certainly no nation could claim to be in such a position to-day, unless it were, possibly, Australia, though there the empire of unoccupied land gives to every citizen possibilities at least of acquiring property, and relieves the pressure of the cla.s.s struggle until the country is settled. This view of Bernstein's, let it be noted, is a far different one from that prevailing in England--as expressed, for example, in an organ of the Independent Labour Party, where it is said that "fortunately 'revolution' in this country has ceased to be anything more than an affected phrase." Certainly there are few modern countries where the "propertied minority," of which Bernstein speaks, const.i.tutes a more serious obstacle to progress than it does in England.

Jaures's position is quite similar to that of Bernstein. He declared in a recent French Congress that he was both a revolutionist and a reformer. He indorses the idea of the general strike, but urges that it should not be used until the work of education and propaganda has made the time ready, "until a very large and strong organization is ready to back up the strikers," and until a large section of public opinion is prepared to recognize the legitimacy of their object. He says he expects the time to arrive when "the reforms in the interest of the whole working cla.s.s which have been promised will have been systematically refused," and then "the general strike will be the only resource left"; and finally cries, "Never in the name of the working people will we give up the right of insurrection." This position is verbally correct from the Socialist standpoint, and it shows the power of the revolutionary idea in France, when even Jaures is forced to respect it. But any capitalist politician might safely use the same expressions--so long, at least, as revolution is still far away.

So also Mr. Berger has written in the _Social Democratic Herald_ of Milwaukee that "all the ballot can do is to strengthen the power of resistance of the laboring people."

"We whom the western ultra cla.s.s-conscious proletarians ... are wont to call 'opportunists,'" writes Berger, "we know right well that the social question can no more be solved by street riots and insurrections than by bombs and dynamite.

"Yet, by the ballot _alone_, it will never be solved.

"Up to this time men have always solved great questions by _blood_ and _iron_." Berger says he is not given to reciting revolutionary phrases, but a.s.serts that the plutocrats are taking the country in the direction of "a violent and b.l.o.o.d.y revolution."

"Therefore," he says, "each of the 500,000 Socialist voters, and of the two million workingmen who instinctively incline our way, should, besides doing much reading and still more thinking, also have a good rifle and the necessary rounds of ammunition in his home and be prepared to back up his ballot with his bullets if necessary.... Now, I deny that dealing with a blind and greedy plutocratic cla.s.s as we are dealing in this country, the outcome can ever be peaceable, or that any reasonable change can ever be brought about by the ballot in the end.

"I predict that a large part of the capitalist cla.s.s will be wiped out for much smaller things ... most of the plutocratic cla.s.s, together with the politicians, will have to disappear as completely as the feudal lords and their retinue disappeared during the French revolution.

"That cannot be done by the ballot, or _only_ by the ballot.

"The ballot cannot count for much in a pinch."[187] (My italics.)

And in another number Mr. Berger writes:--

"As long as we are in the minority we, of course, have _no right to force_ our opinion _upon an unwilling majority_.... Yet we do not deny that _after we have convinced the majority of the people_, we are going to use force if the minority should hesitate."[188] (My italics.)

Few will question the revolutionary nature of this language. But such expressions have always been common at critical moments, even among non-Socialists. We have only to recall the "b.l.o.o.d.y-bridles" speech of a former populist governor of Colorado, or the advice of the _New York Evening Journal_ that every citizen ought to provide against future contingencies by keeping a rifle in his home. Revolutionary language has no necessary relation to Socialism.

Mr. Berger, moreover, has also used the threat of revolution, not as a progressive but as a reactionary force, not in the sense of Marx, who believed that a revolution, when the times were ripe and the Socialists ready, would bring incalculably more good than evil, but in the sense of the capitalists, for whom it is the most terrible of all possibilities.

It is common for conservative statesmen to use precisely the same threat to secure necessary capitalist reforms.

"Some day there will be a volcanic eruption," said Berger in his first speech in Congress; "a fearful retribution will be enacted on the capitalist cla.s.s as a cla.s.s, and the innocent will suffer with the guilty. Such a revolution would throw humanity back into semi-barbarism and cause even a temporary retrogression of civilization."

Such is the language used against revolutions by conservatives or reactionaries. Never has it been so applied by a Marx or an Engels, a Liebknecht, a Kautsky or a Bebel. Without underestimating the enormous cost of revolutions, the most eminent Socialists reckon them as nothing compared with the probable gains, or the far greater costs of continuing present conditions. The a.s.sertion of manhood that is involved in every great revolution from below in itself implies, in the Socialist view, not retrogression, but a stupendous advance; and any reversion to semi-barbarism that may take place in the course of the revolution is likely, in their opinion, to be far more than compensated in other directions, even during the revolutionary period (to say nothing of ultimate results).