Part 18 (1/2)
”Is there,” Mr. Morley had asked, ”any approach to such a body of systematic political thought in our own day?” Mr. Webb announced that the Fabians proposed to fill in this void. It was primarily system and order rather than any particular principle at which he aimed. The keynote of his system was to be opposition to the individualistic _theory_ of the philosophic Liberals whom the Fabians hoped to succeed rather than opposition to the _principles_ of capitalism, which lend themselves equally well either to an individualistic or to a collectivistic application.
Just as Mr. Webb is the leading publicist, so Mr. Bernard Shaw is the leading writer, among the exponents of Fabian Socialism. It is now more than twenty years since he also began idealizing the State, and he is doing the same thing to-day. ”Who is the people? What is the people?” he asked in the Fabian Essays in 1889. ”Tom we know, and d.i.c.k; also Harry; but solely and separately as individuals: as a trinity they have no existence. Who is their trustee, their guardian, their man of business, their manager, their secretary, even their stockholder? The Socialist is stopped dead at the threshold of practical action by this difficulty, until he bethinks himself of the State as the representative and trustee of the people.”[128] It will be noticed that Mr. Shaw does not say the State may become the representative and trustee of the people, but that it _is_ their representative. ”Hegel,” he continues, ”expressly taught the conception of the perfect State, and his disciples saw that nothing in the nature of things made it possible or even difficult to make the existing State if not absolutely perfect, at least trustworthy;” and then, after alluding with the greatest brevity to the anti-democratic elements of the British government, Mr. Shaw proceeds to develop at great length the wonderful possibilities of the existing State as the practically trustworthy trustee, guardian, man of business, manager, secretary, and stockholder _of the people_.[129]
Yet Mr. Shaw says that a Social-Democrat is one ”who _desires_ through democracy _to_ gather the whole people into the State, so that the State may be trusted with the rent of the country, and finally with the land and capital and the organization of national industry.” He reasons that the transition to Socialism through gradual extensions of democracy and State action had seriously begun forty-five years before the writing of the Essays, that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century (when scarcely one sixth of the adult male population of Great Britain had a vote, and when, through the unequal election districts, the country squires practically controlled the situation--W. E. W.). In Mr. Shaw's reasoning, as in that of many other British Socialists, a very little democracy goes a long way.[130]
Later Mr. Shaw repudiated democracy altogether, saying that despotism fails only for want of a capable benevolent despot, and that what we want nowadays is not a new or modern form of democracy, but only capable benevolent representatives. He shelved his hopes for the old ideal, government _by_ the people, by opposing to it a new ideal of a very active and beneficent government _for_ the people. In ”Fabianism and the Empire” Shaw and his collaborators say frankly: ”The nation makes no serious attempt to democratize its government, because its ma.s.ses are still in so deplorable a condition that democracy, in the popular sense of government by the ma.s.ses, is clearly contrary to common sense.”[131]
Mr. H. G. Wells, long a member of the Fabian Society, has well summed up the character of what he calls this ”opportunist Socialist group” which has done so much to shape the so-called British Socialism. He says that Mr. Sidney Webb was, during the first twenty years of his career ”the prevailing Fabian.”
”His insistence upon continuity pervaded the Society, was re-echoed and intensified by others, and developed into something like a mania for achieving Socialism _without the overt change of any existing ruling body_. His impetus carried this reaction against the crude democratic idea to its extremest opposite. Then arose Webbites to caricature Webb. From saying that the unorganized people cannot achieve Socialism, they pa.s.sed to the implication that organization alone, without popular support, might achieve Socialism. Socialism was to arrive as it were _insidiously_.
”To some minds this new proposal had the charm of a schoolboy's first dark lantern. Socialism ceased to be an open revolution, and become a plot. Functions were to be s.h.i.+fted, quietly, unostentatiously, from the representative to the official he appointed; a bureaucracy was to slip into power through the mechanical difficulties of an administration by debating representatives; and since these officials would, by the nature of their positions, const.i.tute a scientific government as distinguished from haphazard government, they would necessarily run the country on the lines of a _pretty distinctly undemocratic Socialism_.
”The process went even farther than secretiveness in its reaction from the _large rhetorical forms of revolutionary Socialism_. There arose even a _repudiation of 'principles' of action_, and a type of worker which proclaimed itself 'Opportunist-Socialist.' This conception of indifference to the forms of government, of accepting whatever governing bodies existed and using them to create officials and '_get something done_,' was at once immediately fruitful in many directions, and presently productive of many very grave difficulties in the path of advancing Socialism.” (Italics mine.)[132]
Besides the obvious absurdities of such tactics, Mr. Wells points out that they ignored entirely that reconstruction of legislative and local government machinery which is very often an indispensable preliminary to Socialization. He is speaking of such Socialism when he says:--
”Socialism has concerned itself only with the material reorganization of Society and its social consequences, with economic changes and the reaction of these changes on administrative work; it has either accepted existing intellectual conditions and political inst.i.tutions as beyond its control or a.s.sumed that they will obediently modify as economic and administrative necessity dictates.... Achieve your expropriation, said the early Fabians, get your network of skilled experts over the country, and your political forms, your public opinion, your collective soul will not trouble you.”[133]
Here Mr. Wells shows that, while the practical difficulties of making collectivism serve all the people were ignored on the one hand, the first need of the people, political education, was neglected on the other. It is true that during the first few years of its existence the Fabian Society made a great and successful effort to educate public opinion in a Socialist direction, but soon its leading members deserted all such larger work, to support various administrative ”experiments.”
Mr. Wells referred to this same type of Socialism in his ”Misery of Boots”:--
”Let us be clear about one thing: that Socialism means revolution, and that it means a change in the everyday texture of life. It _may_ be a very gradual change, but it will be a very complete one.
You cannot change the world, and at the same time not change the world. You will find Socialists about, or at any rate men calling themselves Socialists, who will pretend that this is not so, who will a.s.sure you that some odd little jobbing about munic.i.p.al gas and water is Socialism, and backstairs intervention between Conservative and Liberal the way to the millennium.... Socialism aims to change, not only the boots on people's feet, but the clothes they wear, the houses they inhabit, the work they do, the education they get, their places, their honors, and all their possessions. Socialism aims to make a new world out of the old. It can only be attained by the intelligent, outspoken, courageous resolve of a great mult.i.tude of men and women. You must get absolutely clear in your mind that Socialism means a _complete change, a break with history_, with much that is picturesque; _whole cla.s.ses will vanish_. The world will be vastly different, with different sorts of houses, different sorts of people. All the different trades and industries will be changed, the medical profession will be carried on under different conditions, engineering, science, the theatrical trade, the clerical trade, schools, hotels, almost every trade, will have to undergo as complete an internal change as a caterpillar does when it becomes a moth ... a change as profound as the abolition of private property in slaves would have been in ancient Rome or Athens.” (The italics are mine.)
Here is the exact opposite view to that which has been taught for many years by the Fabian Society to no small audience of educated Englishmen (and Americans). For there are comparatively few who have neither read any of the Fabian pamphlets nor seen or read any of Bernard Shaw's plays in which the same standpoint is represented.
Mr. John A. Hobson cla.s.ses the Socialist and non-Socialist reformers of Great Britain together as regards their opportunism. Though a Liberal himself, he objects that some Socialists are not radical enough, and that ”the milder and more opportunist brand suffer from excessive vagueness.” Of the prevailing tendency towards opportunism, Mr. Hobson writes:--
”This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the manipulation of wirepullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by sophistical motions or other clever trickery. Great national issues really turn, according to this judgment, upon the arts of political management, the play of the adroit tactician and the complete canva.s.ser. This is the 'work' that tells; elections, the sane expression of the national will, are won by these and by no other means.
”_Nowhere has this mechanical conception of progress worked more disastrously than in the movement towards Collectivism._ Suppose that the mechanism of reform were perfected, that each little clique of specialists and wirepullers were placed at its proper point in the machinery of public life, will this machinery grind out progress? Every student of industrial history knows that the application of a powerful 'motor' is of vastly greater importance than the invention of a special machine. Now, what provision is made for generating the motor power of progress in Collectivism?
Will it come of its own accord? Our mechanical reformer apparently thinks it will. The attraction of some present obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of monopolist power by a private company, some needed enlargement of existing Munic.i.p.al or State enterprise by lateral expansion--such are the sole springs of action. In this way the Munic.i.p.alization of public services, increased a.s.sertion of State control over mines, railways, and factories, the a.s.sumption under State control of large departments of transport trade, proceed without any recognition of the guidance of general principles. Everywhere the pressure of special concrete interests, nowhere the conscious play of organized human intelligence!...
”My object here is to justify the practical utility of 'theory' and 'principle' in the movement of Collectivism by showing that reformers who distrust the guidance of Utopia, or even the application of economic first principles, are not thrown back entirely upon that crude empiricism which insists that each case is to be judged separately and exclusively on its own individual merits.”
Mr. Hobson then proposes his collectivist program, which he rightly considers to be not Socialist but Liberal merely--and we find it more collectivistic, radical, and democratic than that of many so-called Socialists. Moreover it expresses the views of a large and growing proportion of the present Liberal Party. Then he concludes as follows:--
”If practical workers for social and industrial reforms continue to ignore principles, the inevitable logic of events will nevertheless drive them along the path of Collectivism here indicated. But they will have to pay the price which shortsighted empiricism always pays; with slow, hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable false starts and backslidings, they will move in the dark along an unseen track towards an unseen goal. Social development may be conscious or unconscious. It has been mostly unconscious in the past, and therefore slow, wasteful, and dangerous. If we desire it to be swifter, safer, and more effective in the future, it must become the conscious expression of the trained and organized will of a people not despising theory as unpractical, but using it to furnish economy in action.”[134]
Practically all ”State Socialists” hold a similar view to that of Shaw and Webb. Mr. Wells even, in his ”First and Last Things,” has a lengthy attack on what he calls democracy, when he tells us that its true name is ”insubordination,” and that it is base because ”it dreams that its leaders are its delegates.” His view of democracy is strictly consistent with his att.i.tude toward the common man, whom he regards as ”a gregarious animal, collectively rather like a sheep, emotional, hasty, and shallow.”[135] Democracy can only mean, Mr. Wells concludes, that power will be put into the hands of ”rich newspaper proprietors, advertising producers, and the energetic wealthy generally, as the source flooding the collective mind freely with the suggestions on which it acts.”
The _New Age_, representing the younger Fabians, also despairs of democracy and advocates compromise, because ”the democratic party have failed so far to be indorsed and inforced by popular consent.” It acknowledges that the power of the Crown is ”great and even temporarily overwhelming,” but discourages opposition to monarchy for the reason that monarchy rests on the ignorance and weakness of the people and not on sheer physical coercion.[136] The _New Age_ opposes those democratic proposals, the referendum and proportional representation, considers that the representative may so thoroughly embody the ideals and interests of the community as to become ”a spiritual sum of them all,”
and admits that this ideal of a ”really representative body of men”
might be brought about under an extremely undemocratic franchise.[137]
”Outside of a parish or hamlet the Referendum,” it says, ”is impossible.
To an Empire it is fatal.”[138] And finally, this Socialist organ is perfectly ready to grant another fifty million pounds for the navy, provided the money is drawn from the rich, as it finds that ”a good, thumping provision for an increased navy would do a great deal to sweeten a drastic budget for the rich, as well as strengthen the appeal of the party which professes to be advancing the cause of the poor.”