Part 2 (1/2)

One of these I indicated at the close of our opening chapter; and this at the cost of what in logic is a mere digression, it will be desirable, for practical purposes, to state it with greater fulness.

Admissions and a.s.sertions, such as those which I have just now quoted, do, no doubt, represent a definite intellectual advance which has taken place in the theory of socialism, among those who are its most thoughtful exponents, and in a certain sense its leaders. They represent what these leaders think and say among themselves, and what they put forward when disputing with opponents who are competent to criticise them. But what they do not represent is socialism as still preached to the populace, or the doctrine which is still vital for socialists as a popular party. This is still, just as it was originally, the socialism of Marx in an absolutely unamended form. It is the doctrine that the manual efforts of the vast mult.i.tude of labourers, directed only by the minds of the individual labourers themselves, produce all the wealth of the world; that the holding of any of this wealth by any other cla.s.s whatever stands for nothing but a system of legalised plunder; and that the labourers need only inaugurate a legislation of a new kind in order to secure and enjoy what always was by rights their own. Let me ill.u.s.trate this a.s.sertion by two examples, one supplied to us by England, the other by America.

In England the body which calls itself the Social Democratic Federation, and represents at this moment socialism of the more popular kind, began its campaign with a manifesto which was headed with the familiar words, ”All wealth is due to labour; therefore to the labourer all wealth is due.” This text or motto was followed by certain figures, with regard to the total income of Great Britain, and the manner in which it is at present distributed. Labour was represented as getting less than one-fourth of the whole, and the labourers were informed that if they would but ”educate themselves, agitate, and organise,” the remaining three-fourths would automatically pa.s.s into their possession. This doc.u.ment, it is true, was issued some twenty years ago;[4] but that the form which socialism takes, when addressed to the ma.s.ses of the population, has not appreciably altered from that day to this, will be made sufficiently clear by the following pertinent fact. Shortly after my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and republished, and claiming renewed attention. The first of these--and it was signalised by an accompanying advertis.e.m.e.nt as fundamental--bore the impressive t.i.tle of, ”Why the Working Man should be a Socialist,” and the answer to this question is given in the writer's opening words. ”You know,” he says, addressing any labourer and the street-worker, ”or you ought to know, that you alone produce all the good things of life; and you know, or you ought to know, that by so simple a process as that of casting your ballot intelligently you will be able”--to do what? The writer explains himself in language which, except for a difference in his statistics, is almost a verbal repet.i.tion of that of his English predecessors. He specifies two sums, one representing the income which each working-man in America would receive were the entire wealth of the country divided equally among the manual labourers; the other representing the income which, on an average, he actually receives as wages; and the writer tells every working man that, by ”merely casting his ballot intelligently,” he can secure for himself the whole difference between the larger sum and the less.[5]

But the fact that the Marxian doctrine of the all-productivity of labour, and the consequent economic nullity of all other forms of effort, still supplies the main ideas by which popular socialism is vitalised, is shown perhaps even more distinctly by the popular hopes and demands which result from this doctrine indirectly than it is by the direct rea.s.sertion of the formal doctrine itself. One of the members of the Parliamentary Labour party in England celebrated his success at the polls by a letter to the _Times_, proclaiming that socialism was a moral quite as much as an economic movement, and that an object which to socialists was dearer even than the seizure of the riches of the rich, was the achievement of ”economic freedom,” or, in other words, the ”emanc.i.p.ation of labour,” or, in other words again, the abolition of the system which he described as ”wagedom.” I merely mention the particular letter in question in order to remind the reader of these familiar phrases, which are current in every country where the theory of socialism has spread itself.

Now, what does all this talk about the emanc.i.p.ation of labour mean? It can only mean one or other of two things: either that the economic prosperity of every nation in the future will depend on the emanc.i.p.ation of every average mind from the guidance of any minds that are in any way superior to itself, or are able to enhance the productivity of an average pair of hands--a proposition so ludicrous that n.o.body would consciously a.s.sent to it; or else it means a continued a.s.sent to the theory which fails to correlate labour with directive ability at all, and so never raises the question of whether the latter is necessary or no.

What, then, becomes of that chorus of vehement protestations, with which my critics in America were all so eager to overwhelm me, to the effect that socialists to-day recognise as clearly as I do that ”common manual labour,” as Mr. Hillquit puts it, ”is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations,” apart from the ”organisation and control” of the minds most competent to direct it? That the more intellectual socialists of to-day do recognise this fact--some with greater and some with less distinctness--is the very point on which I am anxious to insist. We shall have abundant opportunities for considering it later on. For the moment, however, I pause to ask them the following question.

Recognising, as they do, and eagerly proclaiming as they do, whenever they address themselves to those who are capable of serious dispute with them, that the original theory of socialism, which was the creed of such bodies as the International, is absolutely false in itself, and in many of the expectations which it stimulates, why do not they set themselves, whenever they address the mult.i.tude, to expose and repudiate a fallacy in which they no longer believe? Do they do this? Do they make an attempt to do this? On the contrary, as a rule, though there are doubtless many honourable exceptions, they endeavour to hide from the mult.i.tude their intellectual change of front altogether; and, instead of insisting that the undirected labour of the many is, in the modern world, impotent to produce anything, they continue to speak of it as though it produced everything, and as though no cla.s.s other than the labouring fulfilled any economic function or had any right to exist.[6]

Let me give the reader an example, which is curiously apt here. It is taken from Mr. Hillquit's own attack on myself, which filled the front sheet of a newspaper, and was distributed to the public at the door of one of the buildings in which I spoke. Of the short pa.s.sages, amounting to some twenty lines out of six hundred, in which alone he condescended to detailed argument, the first is that in which, as we have already seen, he declares that all socialists know, without any instruction on my part, that common manual labour, unless it is directed by ability, is ”impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations.” But having made this admission with much blowing of trumpets, he immediately drops it, and instead of developing its consequences, he diverts the attention of his readers from it by a long series of irrelevancies; nor does he return to the question of directive ability at all till he is nearing the end of his discourse, when he suddenly takes it up again, declaring that he will meet and refute me on ground which I myself have chosen, and show that wealth--at all events in the commercial sense--is still produced by manual labour alone. He refers to my selection of the case of a printed book, as ill.u.s.trating, in the manner explained in an earlier chapter, the part which directive ability plays in modern production. The economic value of an edition of a printed book, I said, as the reader will remember, depends in the most obvious way, not on the labour of compositors, but on the quality of the directions which the author imposes on this labour through his ma.n.u.script--the author's mind being typical of directive ability generally. And what has Mr. Hillquit--the intellectual Ajax of the socialists--got to say about this? ”Whether a book,” he says, ”is a work of genius or mere rubbish will largely affect its literary or artistic value; but it will have very little bearing on its economic or commercial value.” This, he goes on to argue, will, despite all my objections, be found to depend on ordinary manual labour, of which the labour of the hands of the compositors is that which concerns us most. Nothing, according to him, can be more evident than this. ”For the market price,” he says, ”of a wretched detective story, of the same length as Hamlet, and printed in the same way, will be exactly the same as that of a copy of Hamlet itself.”

Now, if we consider Mr. Hillquit as a purely literary critic, we can but admire his subtlety in discovering that the literary value of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish; but when he descends from pure criticism to economics, it is difficult, unless we suppose him to have taken leave of his senses, to imagine that he can himself believe in the medley of nonsense propounded by him. For what he is here doing--or more probably pretending to do--is to confuse the cost of producing an edition of a book with the commercial value of that edition when produced. The labour in question no doubt determines the price at which the printed paper can be sold at a profit, or without loss; but the number of copies which the public will be willing to buy, or, in other words, the value of the edition commercially, depends on qualities resident in the mind of the author, which render the book attractive to but few readers, or to many. Whether these qualities amount to genius in the higher sense of the word, or to nothing more than a knack of t.i.tillating the curiosity of the vulgar, does not affect the question. In either case--and this is the sole important fact--they are qualities of the author's mind, and of the author's mind alone; and the labour of the compositors conduces to the production of a pile of volumes which is of large, of little, or of no value commercially, not according to the dexterity with which this labour is performed, but according to the manner in which the author's mind directs it.

Than any human being who is capable of perceiving that the literary quality of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish, should seriously suppose that the saleable value of editions--whether they are editions of a popular novel, or of a treatise on the conchology of Kamchatka, is proportionate to the number of letters in them arranged in parallel lines--for Mr. Hillquit's argument means neither more nor less than this--is, let me repeat, incredible.

What, then, is the explanation of his indulging in a performance of this degrading kind? The explanation is that he, like so many of his colleagues, though recognising personally that labour among ”modern nations” depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the ma.s.ses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers; and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he actually manages to wind up with a repet.i.tion of the old Marxian moral that the profits of ability mean nothing but labour which has not been paid for.[7]

One of my reasons, then, for beginning the present examination of socialism with exposing the fallacy of principles which the intellectual socialists of to-day are so eager to proclaim that they have long since abandoned, is the fact that these principles are still the principles of the mult.i.tude; that for practical purposes they are those which most urgently require refutation; and that the intellectual socialists who have doubtless repudiated them personally, not only do not attempt to discredit them in the eyes of the ignorant, but themselves continue to appeal to them as instruments of popular agitation.

My other reason for following the course in question is that the theory of socialism in its higher and more recent forms, which recognises directive intellect in addition to manual effort as one of the forces essential to the production of modern wealth, cannot be understood and estimated in any profitable way, without a previous examination of those earlier doctrines and ideas, some of which it still retains, while it modifies and rejects others.

And now let us take up again the thread of our main argument. We laid this down early in the present chapter, having emphasised the fact that, the intellectual socialists of to-day agree, on their own admission, with one proposition at all events which has been elucidated in this volume--namely, that labour alone, as one of their spokesmen puts it, ”is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations,” the faculties and the functions of the minority by whom labour is directed and organised being no less essential to the result than the labour of the majority itself. In the following chapter we shall see that this agreement extends yet further.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Mr. Hillquit--a lawyer, who has adopted the business of propagating socialism in America--is unknown in England; but his name, not long ago, was to be found in the English papers, as that of one of the representatives sent from America to a recent Socialistic Congress in Europe. Amongst the socialists of the United States he holds a position a.n.a.logous to that enjoyed by Mr. Shaw, Mr. Webb, and Mr. Ramsey Macdonald in England.

[4] Whilst this work was in the press a ”Catechism,” lately published in England, for use of children, was sent me. It was proposed to use this Catechism on Sundays in the London County Council Schools. The first economic ”lesson” in it begins thus: ”Who creates all wealth? The working-cla.s.s. Who are the workers? Men who work for wages.” All who are not wage-workers are declared in this catechism to be absolutely idle and not productive.

[5] The writer of this leaflet, Mr. Wils.h.i.+re, has subsequently declared in his published criticisms of myself, that I impute to socialists what no socialists really say, and contends that, when he thus speaks of ”working-men” and ”labourers,” he includes all men who contribute anything to the productive forces of a country--inventors like Mr.

Edison, and millionaire captains of industry, in so far as they are active agents, and not mere recipients of interest. But that such is not the meaning which he conveys, or desires to convey, to those to whom his leaflet addresses itself, is plainly shown by his statistics, if by nothing else; for the share of the national income, which goes, as he a.s.serts, to ”labour,” is avowedly the amount which, according to his estimate, is paid to-day in America, as weekly wages to the ma.s.s of manual labourers. To say that labour _in its more extended sense_ is the producer of all wealth, is a mere meaningless plat.i.tude. It is to say that there would be no wealth without effort of some kind. Does Mr.

Wils.h.i.+re seriously wish us to believe that he is telling Mr. Edison that ”if he will only cast his ballot intelligently” he will be able to treble his income at the expense of richer men?

[6] This applies to England no less than to America. Whenever any one of the more educated amongst the socialistic agitators is taxed with maintaining the popular doctrines of socialism with regard to labour, he at once repudiates them, and accuses his opponents of imputing to him and his fellows childish fallacies which no one in his senses would maintain; but the propagation of these fallacies amongst the more ignorant sections of the population continues just the same.

[7] According to Mr. Hillquit, d.i.c.kens, for example, made his whole fortune by robbing his compositors.

CHAPTER VI

REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS, CONTINUED.

THEIR RECOGNITION OF CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY.

THEIR NEW POSITION, AND THEIR NEW THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES

The reader will remember how, having first elucidated the part which exceptional mental faculties, concentrated on the direction of labour, and here called ability, play in modern production, I proceeded to the question of the means by which this direction is accomplished, and showed that these were supplied by the possession of wage-capital--capitalism thus representing no mere pa.s.sive monopoly, but a system of reins which are attached to innumerable horses, and are useless except as vehicles of the skill with which the coachmen handle them. We shall find that by implication, if not always by direct admission, the intellectual socialists of to-day are in virtual but unacknowledged agreement with this further portion of the present argument also.

In order to demonstrate that such is the case, let me briefly call attention to a point on which we shall have to dwell at much greater length presently--namely, that these socialists, though they reject the theory of production on which morally and intellectually the earlier socialism based itself, persist in making promises to the labourers precisely of the same kind as those with which the earlier socialism first whetted their appet.i.tes. In especial besides promising them indefinitely augmented wealth, they continue to promise them also some sort of _economic emanc.i.p.ation_; and many of these socialists, in explicit accord with their predecessors, declare that what they mean by emanc.i.p.ation is the entire abolition of the wage-system.