Part 12 (1/2)
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 owners.h.i.+p 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 astonis.h.i.+ngly 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. Wils.h.i.+re. 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....