Twentieth Century Socialism: What It Is Not; What It Is: How It May Come

by Edmond Kelly

What under these circumstances would be the special functions of Congress? Congress would continue to exercise the powers it now exercises as regards collecting taxes, establishing rules of naturalization, providing for the punishment of counterfeiting, establishing postoffices and postroads, organizing federal courts, punishing piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offences against the law of nations, declaring war, and providing for and maintaining the army, navy, and militia.

The States would enjoy all the rights they now enjoy as regards the federal government; but the cities would enjoy much larger powers of government than they now do. There seems to be no reason why the question whether the city of New York should own its own subway should be referred to farmers sitting in Albany, who have no interest and little, if any, knowledge of the needs and resources of the city of New York. It is probable, therefore, that on the whole the effect of Socialism would be to decentralize rather than to centralize.

The parties in a coöperative commonwealth would probably be determined by the main issue between coöperation and competition, and we find here a reason for leaving to Congress the last word as regards the decisions of the industrial parliament. For the latter would be a parliament of coöperative industries and disposed, in protecting these industries, to perpetually invade the territory of competition. So long as humanity needs the stimulus of competition, it is essential that this element be fairly represented in the political organization of the state. All measures tending to restrain competition ought therefore to be subject to the approval of the whole nation represented in Congress.

One principal bourgeois objection to Socialism is that, under competitive conditions the men best fitted to run an enterprise are those to whom business enterprises are to-day confided upon the principle of the survival of the fittest; whereas under a coöperative commonwealth, the selection of those who are to manage industries must be left to the doubtful intrigues of politics. This objection cannot be seriously taken into consideration. There is probably nothing more difficult for the bourgeois to understand than the difference that would exist between the politics of a coöperative and those of a competitive commonwealth. In the latter, the field of politics is inevitably a cesspool of corruption, because every business man has something to lose or gain through politics. The tariff law just enacted presents one of the most recent illustrations of this. Not only so, but the men appointed to office and elected to Congress in our competitive commonwealth are selected by business interests, and not appointed because of special fitness for the task.

In a coöperative commonwealth this situation would be reversed. When all our comforts in life and the necessaries of existence are furnished by our municipalities and our guilds, the management of these municipalities and guilds will be of the utmost importance to every one of us. Our citizens, instead of being interested in bad government, will become interested in good government, in good management and in good administration. Here the public will benefit by the power of recall which, though it may work very imperfectly under competitive, ought to work well under coöperative conditions. For every man is interested in his municipal bakery furnishing good bread, his municipal gas plant furnishing good gas; and citizens will be so deeply interested in matters that touch them as nearly as this that they will not be influenced by political cabals to put in a bad man as superintendent of the municipal bakery, or to replace a good one by a bad one for purely political reasons.

One reason why our politics are bad to-day is that hardly any of us have time to give to making them good even if we wanted them good. The workingman who works ten or more hours in the factory and travels two or more hours to reach his work in the morning and return home when his work is done, can hardly have much vitality left to attend to politics. Indeed, the complaint of the trade unions is that he has not vitality enough left to attend to matters so important to him as those of his own trade union. But when the workingman in the first place is thoroughly trained by an education that will last not less than eighteen years—when he is not called upon to work more than four or five hours a day, he will have the knowledge necessary to understand his political needs, and the leisure to organize political movements when necessary to remove a bad administrator and put a good administrator in his place.

Indeed, popular government is impossible under capitalism for the reasons just stated; those of us who want good government have not the time to secure it. Popular government is only possible when the people are sufficiently educated to understand their rights and have leisure enough to organize with a view to enforcing them.

In the foregoing two chapters entitled, respectively, The Economic Construction of the Coöperative Commonwealth, and The Political Aspect of Socialism, I have endeavored to draw a picture of a coöperative commonwealth in which capitalism is eliminated from the production and distribution of all the necessaries and many of the comforts of life; leaving, however, full play to the existing competitive system as regards the luxuries, some of its comforts, and even as regards necessaries wherever the coöperative commonwealth fails to do its work up to the standard of taste of the community.

This picture has been drawn not because it is possible at this time to forecast exactly what this economic and political construction will be, but because many persons find it impossible to form to themselves any idea how things can be produced and distributed without the help of capitalism. No more is claimed for these chapters than that they do present a scheme by means of which necessaries and many comforts can be produced and distributed without the evils of capitalism, of unemployment, of pauperism, of prostitution, and of economic crime.

Obviously, the two foregoing chapters suggest a thousand questions to an inquiring mind, but I hope that the missing details cannot be classed amongst those details which Gladstone characterized as organic. In other words, I hope that they present a picture giving sufficient details to make it clear that Socialism, as regards the production and distribution of the necessaries and most of the comforts of life, is not only beneficial, but practical and economical; that, in a word, it puts an end to the waste and the anarchy which jointly characterize the capitalistic system of to-day.