Socialism: Positive and Negative Part 3

"In the days of the years we dwell in, that wear our lives away."

My statement that the Revolutionary worker abstains from crimes against property from expediency rather than from principle must not be construed into an allegation that fear of personal punishment is the only ground for abstaining from such crimes. If it were not for the stupidity and malice of our opponents I would feel that I was insulting my readers by making this explanation; but for their benefit be it said that in a society based economically upon the inst.i.tution of private property social life is impossible without respect (respect here refers to acts, not to mental att.i.tude) for private property. Crimes against property are distinctly unsocial. But respect for the rights of property is rapidly disintegrating both among trust magnates and proletarians.

The Natural Rights Philosophy[6] still has much vitality in the middle cla.s.ses, but as a broad statement it will hold good that the millionaire or the proletarian who shows respect for private property (the private property of others, be it understood) does so chiefly on grounds of expediency.

The socialist materialist is well content to leave this whole question of ethics to adjust itself, since he knows that equality of condition, the economic basis of Socialism, will necessarily evolve a mode of living, and standards of conduct in perfect harmony with their economic environment.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] It may be as well to state that this was written before the writer had read Karl Kautsky's illuminating work, "Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History."

[6] For a fuller discussion of the relation of current conceptions of property-rights to the Natural Rights Philosophy see Veblen's "The Theory of Business Enterprise," Chapters II and VIII, and La Monte's paper "Veblen, The Revolutionist," International Socialist Review, Vol.

V. pp. 726-739.

THE NIHILISM OF SOCIALISM.

"In their negative proposals the socialists and anarchists are fairly agreed. It is in the metaphysical postulates of their protest and in their constructive aims that they part company. Of the two, the socialists are more widely out of touch with the established order. They are also more hopelessly negative and destructive in their ideals, as seen from the standpoint of the established order." THORSTEIN VEBLEN in "The Theory of Business Enterprise." Page 338.

To label a truth a truism is too often regarded as equivalent to placing it in the category of the negligible. It is precisely the salient obviousness, which makes a truth a truism, that places it in the direst peril of oblivion in the stress of modern life. Such a truth was well stated by Enrico Ferri, the Italian criminologist, in a recent lecture before the students of the University of Naples:

"Without an ideal, neither an individual nor a collectivity can live, without it humanity is dead or dying. For it is the fire of an ideal which renders the life of each one of us possible, useful and fertile.

And only by its help can each one of us, in the longer or shorter course of his or her existence, leave behind traces for the benefit of fellow-beings."

Plat.i.tude though this may be, our greatest poets have not hesitated to use their highest powers to impress it upon us. Robert Browning put this truth into the mouth of Andrea del Sarto in one of the strongest lines in all English verse,

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp."

Mr. George S. Street, in a very interesting paper in Putnam's Monthly for November (1906), points out that the most significant contrast between our time and Early Victorian days is a decrease in idealism.

"The most characteristic note," he tells us, "in the mental att.i.tude of the forties and fifties in England, and that in which they contrast most sharply with our own times, was confidence.... In party politics this confidence was almost without limit. There was a section of Conservatism which really believed in things as they were, and thought it undesirable to attempt any change for the better.... It was simply--I speak of a section, not the party as a whole--the articulate emotion of privileged and contented people and their parasites, and its denomination as 'stupid' was an accurate description, though hardly the brilliant epigram for which, in our poverty of political wit, it has been taken.

On the other hand, there was a confident Liberalism which inspired a whole party. Some wished to go faster, some slower, but all believed sincerely in a broad scheme of domestic policy. They were to reform this and that at home; they were to a.s.sist, or at least applaud, the reforming of this and that abroad. So believing and intending, they naturally conceived themselves made very little indeed lower than the angels.

"The contrast with our own day hardly needs pointing. You might now search long and in vain for a Conservative in public life who would not admit that reforms are desirable or even urgent, though few might be prepared with precise statements about particulars.... But their (the Liberals') confidence in reform, in their ability to improve the body politic by certain definite measures, is gone. The old Liberal spirit animating a whole party is dead. It may seem an odd remark to make just after the late election, but the evidence is abundant, and the explanation simple. Domestic reform on a large scale and on individualist lines has reached its limit; but to many Liberals, to many eminent and authoritative Liberals, reform on socialist lines is abhorrent.... Consequently there is a large party called Liberal, which, through the faults of its opponents and the accidents of time, is successful and has the high spirits of success, but is no more now than it has been for twenty years a party of h.o.m.ogeneous confidence in domestic reform, while on the world outside the British islands it looks with pa.s.sivity, perhaps timidity, certainly with no intention of a.s.sisting oppressed peoples."

"Theoretical Socialism of a logical and thoughtful kind, not entangled with Radicalism, has made much progress of late years, more especially, so far as my own experience goes, in the educated and professional cla.s.ses; but in practice it bides its time, with confidence perhaps, but with a consciousness that the time will be long coming. That is a different spirit from the buoyant expectancy of the old Liberalism."

Granted the necessity of idealism to individual and social health, Mr.

Street's views do not conduce to optimism. Here we have a competent observer telling us that the only note of idealism he finds in contemporary intellectual life is a growing, but half-hearted, belief in Socialism, which is more noticeable "in the educated and professional cla.s.ses."

There is another note of idealism in the life of to-day which Mr. Street ignores. This is the tendency toward the apotheosis of the individual in ant.i.thesis to society. This is a sign of health, in so far as it is a revolt against the stifling pressure of outworn conventionality, and it has found worthy expression in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the poetry of Browning and Walt Whitman.

But this form of idealism cannot be said to differentiate our time from the Early Victorian era, for it found its cla.s.sic expression back in the middle of the last century in Max Stirner's _Der Einzige und sein Eigentum_, a book which has been forgotten amid the growing consciousness of the organic solidarity of society. But Mr. Street is possibly justified in ignoring this tendency, for as a school of thought it has committed suicide in the person of Nietzsche's Overman attempting to construct out of materials drawn from his inner consciousness a pair of stilts on which to tower above "the herd."

What is the lure of Socialism that is appealing, according to Mr.

Street, to more and more of our "educated and professional" people? For, in spite of what Professor Veblen truly says of the "negative and destructive" (in the quotation at the head of this paper) character of socialist ideals, Socialism must hold up some positive ideals to attract such growing numbers of the educated cla.s.ses. To convince oneself of the actuality of this appeal it is only necessary to run over the writers'

names in the tables of contents in our popular magazines. The proportion of socialists is surprisingly large and is constantly growing. There can be no doubt that the percentage of Socialists among writers of distinction is larger than the percentage of socialists in the population at large.

Socialism does present certain very definite positive ideals. The first of these is "Comfort for All" (to use a chapter-heading from Prince Kropotkin's too little known book, "_La Conquete du Pain_"). The second is Leisure for All, or, in Paul Lafargue's witty phrase, "The Right to be Lazy." The third is the fullest possible physical and intellectual development of every individual, considered not as an isolated, self-centred ent.i.ty, but as a member of an interdependent society; or, in the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto, the socialist ideal is "an a.s.sociation in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

It may be noted that all that is vivifying in the ideal of individualism is included in this third positive ideal of Socialism, so that, it is now seen, Mr. Street was fully justified in making no separate mention of the ideal of individualism. There can be no doubt that it is the immensely richer literary and artistic life promised by this third ideal of Socialism that accounts for the phenomenon noted by Mr. Street.

The beauties of the positive ideals of the socialist Utopias have been sufficiently lauded by scores of writers from Sir Thomas More to Bellamy and Mr. H. G. Wells. What it is desired to emphasize here is the "negative and destructive" (from the standpoint of the established order) aspects of socialist ideals; for it is the Nihilism of Socialism that explains why Mr. Street's "educated and professional" socialists have more patience than confidence in awaiting the realization of their ideal. The Nihilism of Socialism turns aside many, who have felt the lure of the socialist ideal, into what Professor Veblen calls, "some excursion into pragmatic romance,"[7] such as Social Settlements, Prohibition, Clean Politics, Single Tax, Arts and Crafts, Neighborhood Guilds, Inst.i.tutional Church, Christian Science, New Thought, Hearstism, or "some such cultural thimble-rig." Yet more, there are many of the "educated and professional cla.s.ses" who call themselves socialists, because they cherish the charming delusion that it is possible to separate the positive from the negative ideals of Socialism, and to work (in a dilettante fashion) for the former while blithely anathematizing the latter.

It is the purpose of this paper to show that Socialism is not a scheme for the betterment of humanity to be accomplished by a sufficiently zealous and intelligent propaganda, but that it is, on the contrary, a consistent, (though to many repellent) monistic philosophy of the cosmos; that it is from its Alpha to its Omega so closely and inextricably interlocked that its component parts cannot be disa.s.sociated, save by an act of intellectual suicide; that, in a word, the Nihilism[8] of Socialism is of the very essence of Socialism.

But, here, a most important distinction should be noted. Socialism, viewed as a political propaganda, is purely positive in its demands. In fact, all its demands may be reduced to two--Collectivism and Democracy.

That the people shall own the means of production, and the producers shall control their products--that is the sum and substance of all Socialist platforms. Socialist parties do not attack Religion, the Family, or the State. But socialist philosophy proves conclusively that the realization of the positive political and economic ideals of Socialism involves the atrophy of Religion, the metamorphosis of the Family, and the suicide of the State.

The Nihilism of Socialism springs from the Materialist Conception of History, and this is precisely the portion of the socialist doctrine that is usually ignored or half-understood by the enthusiastic young intellectuals who are in growing numbers joining the Socialist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. While the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847, is throughout founded on this conception, the first clearly formulated statement of the conception itself is to be found in the Preface to the "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," published by Karl Marx in 1859, the same year in which Darwin and Wallace made public their independent and almost simultaneous discoveries of the theory of Natural Selection. This first statement runs thus:

"In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production const.i.tutes the economic structure of society--the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or--what is but a legal expression for the same thing--with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."[9]

This statement contains a whole Revolution in embryo. Viewed from the standpoint of the established order, it is the very Quintessence of Nihilism. In a word, it teaches the material origin of Ideas. In the last a.n.a.lysis, every idea can be traced back to the economic and telluric environments. In the words of Joseph Dietzgen, "philosophy revealed to them (Marx and Engels) the basic principle that, in the last resort, the world is not governed by Ideas, but, on the contrary, the Ideas by the material world." This doctrine involves a new epistemology, the distinguishing mark of which is its denial of the immaculate conception of thought. The human mind, according to Marx and Dietzgen, can only bring forth thought after it has been impregnated by the objects of sense perception.[10]

Here we have a thorough-going system of materialist monism. "Ours is the organic conception of history," says Labriola. "The totality of the unity of social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is economics itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to reappear in as many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else, to form an historic conception of economics, and to explain the other changes by means of its changes."[11]

In another place he says: "Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream.... The change in ideas, even to the creation of new methods of conception, has reflected little by little the experience of a new life. This, in the revolutions of the last two centuries, was little by little despoiled of the mythical, religious and mystical envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical and precise consciousness of its immediate and direct conditions. Human thought, also, which sums up this life and theorizes upon it, has little by little been plundered of its theological and metaphysical hypotheses to take refuge finally in this prosaic a.s.sertion: in the interpretation of history we must limit ourselves to the objective co-ordination of the determining conditions and of the determined effects." He reiterates: "Ideas do not fall from heaven; and, what is more, like the other products of human activity, they are formed in given circ.u.mstances, in the precise fulness of time, through the action of definite needs, thanks to the repeated attempts at their satisfaction, and by the discovery of such and such other means of proof which are, as it were, the instruments of their production and their elaboration. Even ideas involve a basis of social conditions; they have their technique; thought also is a form of work. To rob the one and the other, ideas and thought, of the conditions and environment of their birth and their development, is to disfigure their nature and their meaning."[12]

This socialist materialism does not refuse the inspiration of ideals.

"By granting that society is dominated by material interests," Dietzgen explains, "we do not deny the power of the ideals of the heart, mind, science, and art. For we have no more to deal with the absolute ant.i.thesis between idealism and materialism, but with their higher synthesis which has been found in the knowledge that the ideal depends on the material, that divine justice and liberty depend on the production and distribution of earthly goods."[13]

Religions, schools of ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, art, political and juridical inst.i.tutions are all to be explained in the last a.n.a.lysis by the economic and telluric environments, present and past. This ruthless materialism crushes belief in G.o.d, in the Soul, in immortality.

It leaves no room for any shred of dualism in thought. It is true that the German Social Democracy included in the famous Erfurt Programme (adopted in 1891--the first clearly Marxian socialist platform ever promulgated) a demand for a "Declaration that religion is a private matter. Abolition of all expenditure from public funds upon ecclesiastical and religious objects. Ecclesiastical and religious bodies are to be regarded as private a.s.sociations, which order their affairs independently." It will be seen that this is nothing more than a demand that the State withdraw its sanction of religion as France has recently done in the Clemenceau law. But Ferri does nothing but draw the necessary conclusions from socialist premises when he writes: "G.o.d, as Laplace has said, is an hypothesis of which exact science has no need; he is, according to Herzen, at the most an X, which represents not the _unknowable_--as Spencer and Dubois Raymond contend--but all that which humanity does not yet know. Therefore, it is a variable X which decreases in direct ratio to the progress of the discoveries of science.

"It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio to each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same proportion that the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle against the unknown."[14]

Joseph Dietzgen has thus stated what may be called the law of the atrophy of religion: "The more the idea of G.o.d recedes into the past the more palpable it is; in olden times man knew everything about his G.o.d; the more modern the form of religion has become, the more confused and hazy are our religious ideas. The truth is that the historic development of religion tends to its gradual dissolution."[15]

The characteristic att.i.tude of the socialist materialist toward Christianity appears very clearly in the following excerpt from Professor Ferri's "Socialism and Modern Science":

"It is true that Marxian Socialism, since the Congress held at Erfurt (1891), has rightly declared that religious beliefs are private affairs[16] and that, therefore, the Socialist party combats religious intolerance under all its forms.... But this breadth of superiority of view is, at bottom, only a consequence of the confidence in final victory.

"It is because Socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs, whether one regards them, with Sergi, as pathological phenomena of human psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are destined to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary scientific culture. This is why Socialism does not feel the necessity of waging a special warfare against these religious beliefs which are destined to disappear. It has a.s.sumed this att.i.tude, although it knows that the absence or the impairment of the belief in G.o.d is one of the most powerful factors for its extension, because the priests of all religions have been, throughout all the phases of history, the most potent allies of the ruling cla.s.ses in keeping the ma.s.ses pliant and submissive under the yoke by means of the enchantment of religion, just as the tamer keeps wild beasts submissive by the terrors of the cracks of his whip"

(page 63).

It is also well to remember that a prevalent animistic habit of thought in viewing the events of life, whether it take the form of a belief in luck, as in gamblers and sporting men, or the form of a belief in supernatural interposition in mundane affairs, as in the case of the devotees of the anthropomorphic cults, or merely the tendency to give a teleological interpretation to evolution, to attribute a meliorative trend to the cosmic process, as in Tennyson's "through the ages one increasing purpose runs," tends, by r.e.t.a.r.ding the prompt perception of relations of material cause and effect, to lower the industrial efficiency of the community.[17]

The socialist materialist can look forward with unruffled serenity to the pa.s.sing of religion, since his very definition of religion as "a popular striving after the illusory happiness that corresponds with a social condition which needs such an illusion,"[18] implies that it cannot pa.s.s away till it has ceased to be needful to human happiness.