The last thing men contrive to discern in every question is the familiar obvious, and it came as a great and shattering discovery to the economic and sociological thought of the latter half of the nineteenth century that there was going on not simply a production but an immense concentration of wealth, a differentiation of a special wealthy cla.s.s of landholder and capitalist, a diminution of small property owners and the development of a great and growing cla.s.s of landless, nearly propertyless men, the _proletariat_. Marx showed--he showed so clearly that to-day it is recognized by every intelligent man--that _given a continuance of our industrial and commercial system_, of uncontrolled gain seeking, that is, given a continuance of our present spirit and ideas of property, there must necessarily come a time when the owner and the proletarian will stand face to face, with nothing--if we except a middle cla.s.s of educated professionals dependent on the wealthy, who are after all no more than the upper stratum of the proletariat--to mask or mitigate their opposition. We shall have two cla.s.ses, the cla.s.s-conscious worker and the cla.s.s-conscious owner, and they will be at war. And with a broad intellectual sweep he flung the light of this conception upon the whole contemporary history of mankind. _Das Kapital_ was no sketch of Utopias, had no limitation to the conditions or possibilities of this country or that. "Here," he says, in the widest way, "is what is going on all over the world. So long as practically untrammelled private property, such as you conceive it to-day, endures, this must go on.
The worker gravitates steadily everywhere to a bare subsistence, the rest of the proceeds of his labour swell the power of the owners. So it will go on while gain and getting are the rule of your system, until acc.u.mulated tensions between cla.s.s and cla.s.s smash this present social organization and inaugurate a new age."
In considering the thought and work of Karl Marx, the reader must bear in mind the epoch in which that work commenced. The intellectual world was then under the sway of an organized ma.s.s of ideas known as the Science of Political Economy, a ma.s.s of ideas that has now not so much been examined and refuted as slipped away imperceptibly from its hold upon the minds of men. In the beginning, in the hands of Adam Smith--whose richly suggestive book is now all too little read--political economy was a broad-minded and sane inquiry into the statecraft of trade based upon current a.s.sumptions of private ownership and personal motives, but from him it pa.s.sed to men of perhaps, in some cases, quite equal intellectual energy but inferior vision and range. The history of Political Economy is indeed one of the most striking instances of the mischief wrought by intellectual minds devoid of vision, in the entire history of human thought.
Special definition, technicality, are the stigmata of second-rate intellectual men; they cannot work with the universal tool, they cannot appeal to the general mind. They must abstract and separate. On such men fell the giant"s robe of Adam Smith, and they wore it after their manner. Their arid atmospheres are intolerant of clouds, an outline that is not harsh is abominable to them. They criticized their master"s vagueness and must needs mend it. They sought to give political economy a precision and conviction such a subject will not stand. They took such words as "_value_," an incurably and necessarily vague word, "_rent_," the name of the specific relation of landlord and tenant, and "_capital_," and sought to define them with relentless exactness and use them with inevitable effect. So doing they departed more and more from reality. They developed a literature more abundant, more difficult and less real than all the exercises of the schoolmen put together. To use common words in uncommon meanings is to sow a jungle of misunderstanding. It was only to be expected that the bulk of this economic literature resolves upon a.n.a.lysis into a ponderous, intricate, often astonishingly able and foolish wrangling about terminology.
Now in the early Victorian period in which Marx planned his theorizing, political economy ruled the educated world. Ruskin had still to attack the primary a.s.sumptions of that tyrannous and dogmatic edifice. The duller sort of educated people talked of the "immutable laws of political economy" in the blankest ignorance that the basis of everything in this so-called science was a plastic human convention.
Humane impulses were checked, creative effort tried and condemned by these mystical formulae. Political economy traded on the splendid achievements of physics and chemistry and pretended to an inexorable authority. Only a man of supreme intelligence and power, a man resolved to give his lifetime to the task, could afford in those days to combat the pretensions of the political economist; to deny that his categories presented scientific truth, and to cast that jargon aside.
As for Marx, he saw fit to accept the verbal instruments of his time (albeit he bent them not a little in use), to accommodate himself to their spirit and to split and re-cla.s.sify and re-define them at his need. So that he has become already difficult to follow, and his more specialized exponents among Socialists use terms that arouse no echoes in the contemporary mind. The days when Socialism need present its theories in terms of a science whose fundamental propositions it repudiates, are at an end. One hears less and less of "surplus value"
now, as one hears less and less of McCulloch"s Law of Wages. It may crop up in the inquiries of some intelligent mechanic seeking knowledge among the obsolescent acc.u.mulations of a public library, or it may for a moment be touched upon by some veteran teacher. But the time when social and economic science had to choose between debatable and inexpressive technicalities on the one hand or the stigma of empiricism on the other, is altogether past.
The language a man uses, however, is of far less importance than the thing he has to say, and it detracts little from the cardinal importance of Marx that his books will presently demand restatement in contemporary phraseology, and revision in the light of contemporary facts. He opened out Socialism. It is easy to quibble about Marx, and say he didn"t see this or that, to produce this eddy in a backwater or that as a triumphant refutation of his general theory. One may quibble about the greatness of Marx as one may quibble about the greatness of Darwin; he remains great and cardinal. He first saw and enabled the world to see capitalistic production as a world process, pa.s.sing by necessity through certain stages of social development, and unless some change of law and spirit came to modify it, moving towards an inevitable destiny. His followers are too apt to regard that as an absolutely inevitable destiny, but the fault lies not at his door. He saw it as Socialism. It did not appear to him as it does to many that there is a possible alternative to Socialism, that the process may give us, not a triumph for the revolting proletariat, but their defeat, and the establishment of a plutocratic aristocracy culminating in imperialism and ending in social disintegration. From his study, from the studious rotunda of the British Museum Reading-room he made his prophecy of the growing cla.s.s consciousness of the workers, of the inevitable cla.s.s war, of the revolution and the millennium that was to follow it. He gathered his facts, elaborated his deductions and waited for the dawn.
So far as his broad generalization of economic development goes, events have wonderfully confirmed Marx. The development of Trusts, the concentration of property that America in particular displays, he foretold. Given that men keep to the unmodified ideas of private property and individualism, and it seems absolutely true that so the world must go. And in the American _Appeal to Reason_, for example, which goes out weekly from Kansas to a quarter of a million of subscribers, one may, if one chooses, see the developing cla.s.s consciousness of the workers, and the promise--and when strikers take to rifles and explosives as they do in Pennsylvania and Colorado, something more than the promise--of the cla.s.s war....
But the modern Socialist considers that this generalization is a little too confident and comprehensive; he perceives that a change in custom, law or public opinion may delay, arrest or invert the economic process, and that Socialism may arrive after all not by a social convulsion, but by the gradual and detailed concession of its propositions. The Marxist presents dramatically what after all may come methodically and unromantically, a revolution as orderly and quiet as the precession of the equinoxes. There may be a concentration of capital and a relative impoverishment of the general working ma.s.s of people, for example, and yet a general advance in the world"s prosperity and a growing sense of social duty in the owners of capital and land may do much to mask this antagonism of cla.s.s interests and ameliorate its miseries. Moreover, this antagonism itself may in the end find adequate expression through temperate discussion, and the cla.s.s war come disguised beyond recognition, with hates mitigated by charity and swords beaten into pens, a mere constructive conference between two cla.s.ses of fairly well-intentioned albeit perhaps still bia.s.sed men and women.
-- 2.
The circle of ideas in which Marx moved was that of a student deeply tinged with the idealism of the renascent French Revolution. His life was the life of a recluse from affairs--an invalid"s life; a large part of it was spent round and about the British Museum Reading-room, and his conceptions of Socialism and the social process have at once the s.p.a.cious vistas given by the historical habit and the abstract quality that comes with a divorce from practical experience of human government. Only in England and in the eighties did the expanding propositions of Socialism come under the influence of men essentially administrative. As a consequence Marx, and still more the early Marxists, were and are negligent of the necessities of government and crude in their notions of cla.s.s action. He saw the economic process with a perfect lucidity, practically he foretold the consolidation of the Trusts, and his statement of the necessary development of an entirely propertyless working-cla.s.s with an intensifying cla.s.s consciousness is a magnificent generalization. He saw clearly up to that opposition of the many and the few, and then his vision failed because his experience and interests failed. There was to be a cla.s.s war, and numbers schooled to discipline by industrial organization were to win.
After that the teaching weakens in conviction. The proletariat was to win in the cla.s.s war; then cla.s.ses would be abolished, property in the means of production and distribution would be abolished, all men would work reasonably--and the millennium would be with us.
The constructive part of the Marxist programme was too slight. It has no psychology. Contrasted, indeed, with the splendid destructive criticisms that preceded it, it seems indeed trivial. It diagnoses a disease admirably, and then suggests rather an incantation than a plausible remedy. And as a consequence Marxist Socialism appeals only very feebly to the man of public affairs or business or social experience. It does not attract teachers or medical men or engineers.
It arouses such men to a sense of social instability but it offers no remedy. They do not believe in the mystical wisdom of the People. They find no satisfactory promise of a millennium in anything Marx foretold.
To the labouring man, however, accustomed to take direction and government as he takes air and sky, these difficulties of the administrative and constructive mind do not occur. His imagination raises no questioning in that picture of the proletariat triumphant after a cla.s.s war and quietly coming to its own. It does not occur to him for an instant to ask "how?"
Question the common Marxist upon these difficulties and he will relapse magnificently into the doctrine of _laissez faire_. "That will be all right," he will tell you.
"How?"
"We"ll take over the Trusts and run them."...
It is part of the inconveniences attending all powerful new movements of the human mind that the disciple bolts with the teacher, overstates him, underlines him, and it is no more than a tribute to the potency of Marx that he should have paralyzed the critical faculty in a number of very able men. To them Marx is a final form of truth. They talk with bated breath of a "cla.s.sic Socialism," to which no man may add one jot or one t.i.ttle, to which they are as uncritically pledged as extreme Bible Christians are bound to the letter of the "Word."...
The peculiar evil of the Marxist teaching is this, that it carries the conception of a necessary economic development to the pitch of fatalism, it declares with all the solemnity of popular "science" that Socialism _must_ prevail. Such a fatalism is morally bad for the adherent; it releases him from the inspiring sense of uncertain victory, it leads him to believe the stars in their courses will do his job for him. The common Marxist is apt to be sterile of effort, therefore, and intolerant--preaching predestination and salvation without works.
By a circuitous route, indeed, the Marxist reaches a moral position curiously a.n.a.logous to that of the disciple of Herbert Spencer. Since all improvement will arrive by leaving things alone, the worse things get, the better; for so much the nearer one comes to the final exasperation, to the cla.s.s war and the Triumph of the Proletariat.
This certainty of victory in the nature of things makes the Marxists difficult in politics, pedantic sticklers for the letter of the teaching, obstinate opponents of what they call "Palliatives"--of any instalment system of reform. They wait until they can make the whole journey in one stride, and would, in the meanwhile, have no one set forth upon the way. In America the Marxist fatalism has found a sort of supreme simplification in the gospel of Mr. H. G. Wilshire. The Trusts, one learns, are to consolidate all the industry in the country, own all the property. Then when they own everything, the Nation will take them over. "Let the Nation own the Trusts!" The Nation in the form of a public, reading capitalistic newspapers, inured to capitalistic methods, represented and ruled by capital-controlled politicians, will suddenly take over the Trusts and begin a new system....
It would be quite charmingly easy--if it were only in the remotest degree credible.
-- 3.
The Marxist teaching tends to an unreasonable fatalism. Its conception of the world after the cla.s.s war is over is equally antagonistic to intelligent constructive effort. It faces that Future, utters the word "democracy," and veils its eyes.
The conception of democracy to which the Marxist adheres is that same mystical democracy that was evolved at the first French Revolution; it will sanction no a.n.a.lysis of the popular wisdom. It postulates a sort of spirit hidden as it were in the ma.s.ses and only revealed by a universal suffrage of all adults--or, according to some Social Democratic Federation authorities who do not believe in women, all adult males--at the ballot box. Even a large proportion of the adults will not do--it must be all. The mysterious spirit that thus peers out and vanishes again at each election is the People, not any particular person, but the quintessence, and it is supposed to be infallible; it is supposed to be not only morally but intellectually omniscient. It will not even countenance the individuality of elected persons, they are to be mere tools, _delegates_, from this diffused, intangible Oracle, the Ultimate Wisdom....
Well, it may seem ungracious to sneer at the grotesque formulation of an idea profoundly wise, at the hurried, wrong, arithmetical method of rendering that collective spirit a community undoubtedly can and sometimes does possess--I myself am the profoundest believer in democracy, in a democracy awake intellectually, conscious and self-disciplined--but so long as this mystic faith in the crowd, this vague, emotional, uncritical way of evading the immense difficulties of organizing just government and a collective will prevails, so long must the Socialist project remain not simply an impracticable but, in an illiterate, badly-organized community, even a dangerous suggestion.
I as a Socialist am not blind to these possibilities, and it is foolish because a man is in many ways on one"s side that one should not call attention to his careless handling of a loaded gun.
Social-Democracy may conceivably become a force that in the sheer power of untutored faith may destroy government and not replace it. I do not know how far that is not already the case in Russia. I do not know how far this may not ultimately be the case in the United States of America.
The Marxist teaching, great as was its advance on the dispersed chaotic Socialism that preceded it, was defective in other directions as well as in its innocence of any scheme of State organization. About women and children, for example, it was ill-informed; its founders do not seem to have been inspired either by educational necessities or philoprogenitive pa.s.sion. No biologist--indeed no scientific mind at all--seems to have tempered its severely "economic" tendencies. It so over-accentuates the economic side of life that at moments one might imagine it dealt solely with some world of purely "productive"
immortals, who were never born and never aged, but only warred for ever in a developing industrial process.
Now reproduction and not production is the more central fact of social life. Women and children and education are things in the background of the Marxist proposal--like a man"s dog, or his private reading, or his pet rabbits. They are in the foreground of modern Socialism. The Social Democrat"s doctrines go little further in this direction than the Liberalism that founded the United States, which ignored women, children and n.i.g.g.e.rs, and made the political unit the adult white man.
They were blind to the supreme importance of making the next generation better than the present as the aim and effort of the whole community. Herr Bebel"s book, _Woman_, is an ample statement of the evils of woman"s lot under the existing _regime_, but the few pages upon the Future of Woman with which he concludes are eloquent of the jejune insufficiency of the Marxist outlook in this direction.
Marriage, which modern Socialism tends more and more to sustain, was to vanish--at least as a law-made bond; women were to count as men so far as the State is concerned....
This disregard of the primary importance of births and upbringing in human affairs and this advocacy of mystical democracy alike contribute to blind the Marxist to the necessity of an educational process and of social discipline and to the more than personal importance of marriage in the Socialist scheme. He can say with a light and confident heart to untrained, ignorant, groping souls: "Destroy the Government; expropriate the rich, establish manhood suffrage, elect delegates strictly pledged--and you will be happy!"
A few modern Marxists stipulate in addition for a Referendum, by which the acts of the elected delegates can be further checked by referring disputed matters to a general vote of all the adults in the community....
-- 4.
My memory, as I write these things of Marxism, carries me to the dusky largeness of a great meeting in Queen"s Hall, and I see again the back of Mr. Hyndman"s head moving quickly, as he receives and answers questions. It was really one of the strangest and most interesting meetings I have ever attended. It was a great rally of the Social Democratic Federation, and the place--floor, galleries and platform--was thick but by no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest people. There was a great display of red badges and red ties, and many white faces, and I was struck by the presence of girls and women with babies. It was more like the Socialist meetings of the popular novel than any I had ever seen before. In the chair that night was Lady Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the cla.s.s conflict, a blond lady, rather expensively dressed, so far as I could judge, about whom the atmosphere of cla.s.s consciousness seemed to thicken. Her fair hair, her floriferous hat, told out against the dim mult.i.tudinous values of the gathering unquenchably; there were moments when one might have fancied it was simply a gathering of village tradespeople about the lady patroness, and at the end of the proceedings, after the red flag had been waved, after the "Red Flag" had been sung by a choir and damply echoed by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to the Countess in terms of familiar respect that completed the illusion.
Mr. Hyndman"s lecture was ent.i.tled "In the Rapids of Revolution," and he had been explaining how inevitable the whole process was, how Russia drove ahead, and Germany and France and America, to the foretold crisis and the foretold millennium. But incidentally he also made a spirited exhortation for effort, for agitation, and he taunted England for lagging in the schemes of fate. Some one amidst the dim mult.i.tude discovered an inconsistency in that.
Now the questions were being handed in, written on strips of paper, and at last that listener"s difficulty cropped up.
"What"s this?" said Mr. Hyndman; unfolded the slip and read out: "Why trouble to agitate or work if the Trusts are going to do it all for us?"
The veteran leader of the Social Democratic Federation paused only for a moment.
"Well, we"ve got to get _ready_ for it, you know," he said, rustling briskly with the folds of the question to follow--and with these words, it seemed to me, that fatalistic Marxism crumbled down to dust.
We _have_ got to get ready for it. Indeed, we have to make it--by education and intention and set resolve. Socialism is to be attained not by fate, but by will.
-- 5.
And here, as a sort of Eastern European gloss upon Marxist Socialism, as an extreme and indeed ultimate statement of this marriage of mystical democracy to Socialism, we may say a word of Anarchism.
Anarchism carries the administrative _laissez faire_ of Marx to its logical extremity. "If the common, untutored man is right anyhow--why these ballot boxes; why these intermediaries in the shape of law and representative?"
That is the perfectly logical outcome of ignoring administration and reconstruction. The extreme Social-Democrat and the extreme Individualist meet in a doctrine of non-resistance to the forces of Evolution--which in this connection they deify with a capital letter.
Organization, control, design, the disciplined will, these are evil, they declare--_the_ evil of life. So you come at the end of the process, if you are active-minded, to the bomb as the instrument of man"s release to unimpeded virtue, and if you are pacific in disposition to the Tolstoyan att.i.tude of pa.s.sive resistance to all rule and property.
Anarchism, then, is as it were a final perversion of the Socialist stream, a last meandering of Socialist thought, released from vitalizing a.s.sociation with an active creative experience. Anarchism comes when the Socialist repudiation of property is dropped into the circles of thought of men habitually ruled and habitually irresponsible, men limited in action and temperamentally adverse to the toil, to the vexatious rebuffs and insufficiencies, the dusty effort, fatigue, and friction of the practical pursuit of a complex ideal. So that it most flourishes eastwardly, where men, it would seem, are least energetic and constructive, and it explodes or dies on American soil.
Anarchism, with its knife and bomb, is a miscarriage of Socialism, an acephalous birth from that fruitful mother. It is an unnatural offspring, opposed in nature to its parent, for always from the beginning the constructive spirit, the ordering and organizing spirit has been strong among Socialists. It was by a fallacy, an oversight, that _laissez faire_ in politics crept into a movement that was before all things an organized denial of _laissez faire_ in economic and social life....
I write this of the Anarchism that is opposed to contemporary Socialism, the political Anarchism. But there is also another sort of Anarchism, which the student of these schools of thought must keep clear in his mind from this, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and that other brand of William Morris, neither of which waves any flag of black, nor counsels violence; they present that conception of untrammelled and spontaneous rightness and goodness which is, indeed, I hazard, the moral ideal of all rightly-thinking men. It is worth while to define very clearly the relation of this second sort of Anarchism, the n.o.bler Anarchism, to the toiling constructive Socialism which many of us now make our practical guide in life"s activities, to say just where they touch and where they are apart.
Now the ultimate ideal of human intercourse is surely not Socialism at all, but a way of life that is not litigious and not based upon jealously-guarded rights, which is free from property, free from jealousy, and "above the law." There, there shall not be "marriage or giving in marriage." The whole ma.s.s of Christian teaching points to such an ideal; Paul and Christ turn again and again to the ideal of a world of "just men made perfect," in which right and beauty come by instinct, in which just laws and regulations are unnecessary and unjust ones impossible. "Turn your attention," says my friend, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his admirable tract on Christian Socialism--