§ 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 spacious 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 class 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-class with an intensifying class 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 class 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 class war; then classes 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 class 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 “classic Socialism,” to which no man may add one jot or one tittle, 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 analogous 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 class 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.