Contemporary Socialism

by John Rae

Both parties direct their chief attention to the peasantry, especially where any germ of an agrarian movement happens already to prevail. The Galician agitation against great landlords in 1886 was fomented by anarchist emissaries, and we occasionally hear of anarchist operations among the people of Northern Bohemia or Styria as well as in Upper Austria, where rural discontent has long been more or less acute. Austria is mainly an agricultural country; but greater part of the land is held in very large estates by the clergy and nobility, and the evils of the old feudal régime are only now being gradually removed. There are, it is true, as many as 1,700,000 peasant proprietors in the Cisleithanian half of the Empire alone; but then their properties are seriously encumbered by the debt of their redemption from feudal servitudes and by the severity of the public taxation. The land tax amounts to 26 per cent. of the proprietor's income, and the indirect taxes on articles of consumption are numerous and burdensome. But three-fourths of the rural population are merely farm servants or day labourers, and are worse off even than the same class elsewhere. The social question in Austria is largely agrarian, but the spontaneous movements of the Austrian peasantry seem rather unlikely to run in harness with social democracy. Unions of free peasants for example have sprung up of recent years in various provinces. Their great aim is to procure a reduction in the taxes paid by the peasantry; but then they add to their programme the principle of State-help to labour, the abolition of all feudal privileges and all rights of birth, gratuitous education, and cessation of the policy of contracting national debt, and they speak vaguely about instituting a peasant State, and requiring every minister and responsible official to serve an apprenticeship to peasant labour as a qualification for office, in order that he may understand the necessities and capacities of the peasantry. This idea of the peasant State is analogous to the idea of the labour State of the Social Democrats; but of course this is agreement which is really conflict. It is like the harmony between Sforza and Charles VIII.: "I and my cousin Charles are wonderfully at one; we both seek the same thing—Milan." The class interest of the landed peasant is contrary to the class interest of the working man, and would be invaded by social democracy. The peasantry are simply fighting for their own land, and as their votes are courted by both political parties they will probably be able to secure some mitigation of their grievances. Distress is certainly serious among them when, as happened a few years ago, in a parish of 135 houses as many as 35 executions were made in one day for failure to pay taxes, and in another of 250 houses as many as 72; but on the whole there seems to be little of that hopeless indigence which appears among the peasant proprietary in countries where the practice of unrestricted or compulsory subdivision of holdings exists, or has recently existed, to any considerable extent.

There is an influential Catholic Socialist movement in Austria, led by the clergy and nobility, and dealing in an earnest spirit with the social question as it appears in that country.

Socialism was introduced into Italy in 1868 by Bakunin, who, in spite of the opposition of Mazzini, gained wide acceptance for his ideas wherever he went, and founded many branches of the International in the country, which survived the extinction of the parent society, and continued to bear its name. They were, like Bakunin himself, anarchist in their social and political views, and were marked by an especial violence in their attacks on Church and State and family. They published a great number of journals of various sorts, and kept up an incessant and very successful propaganda; but no heed was paid them by the authorities till 1878, when an attempt on the life of the king led to a thorough examination being instituted into the whole agitation. The dimensions and ramifications of the movement were found to be so much more extensive than any one in power had anticipated, that it was determined to set a close watch thereafter on all its operations, and its meetings and congresses were then from time to time proclaimed. But after the passing of the Franchise Act of 1882, a new socialist movement came into being which looked to constitutional methods alone. The franchise was not reduced very low: it only gave a vote to one person in every fourteen, while in England one in six has a vote; but the reduction was accompanied with scrutin de liste and the ballot, and it was felt that something could now be done. Accordingly a new Socialist Labour Party was formed on the usual Marxist lines, under the leadership of a very capable man, an orator and a good organizer, Andrea Costa, who was formerly an anarchist. This party obtained 50,000 votes at the first subsequent election, and returned two candidates to the Legislature, one of them being Costa. In 1883 it formed a working alliance with the Italian Democratic Society—an active working-class body of which Costa was a leading member; and in 1884 it entered into an incorporating union with another working-class body, the Lombardy Labour Federation, which had a large number of local branches. With their help it had become, in 1886, an organization of 133 branches, and Government resolved to suppress it. Most of the branches in the north of Italy were dissolved, and their funds, flags, and libraries confiscated. But the party is still active over the country. They returned three members at the late election in November, 1890. The growth of this party was even more displeasing to the anarchists than to the Government, and in 1882 they called back Maletesta, one of their old leaders, from abroad, to conduct a regular campaign over the whole kingdom against Costa, and to denounce every man for a traitor to the socialist cause who should take any manner of part in parliamentary elections, or show the smallest sign of reconciliation to the existing order of things. His campaign ended in his arrest in May, 1883, and the condemnation of himself and 53 comrades to several years' imprisonment for inciting to disturbance of the public peace. Besides their contentions with the Socialist Labour Party, the Italian anarchists are much given to contending among themselves, and split up, even beyond other parties of the kind, upon trifles of doctrine or procedure. But however divided they may be, socialists and anarchists in Italy are all united in opposing the new social legislation of the Government. When the Employers' Liability Bill was introduced, Costa declared that legislation of that kind was utterly useless so long as the people were denied electoral rights, because till the franchise was reduced far enough to give the people a real voice in public affairs, there could be no security for the loyal and faithful execution of the provisions of such an act.

The Italian socialists and anarchists have always had a lively brood of journals, which, however, are generally shorter lived than even socialist organs elsewhere; but when one dies for want of funds to-day, another comes out in its place to-morrow. This remarkable fertility in journals seems to be due to the large literary proletariat that exists in Italy—the unemployed educated class who could live by their pen if they only had a paper to use it in. Through their presence among the socialists new journals are pushed forward without sufficient funds to carry them on, and as the people are too poor to subscribe to them, and the party too poor to subsidize them, they soon come to a natural termination.

The development of socialism in Italy is no matter of surprise. Though there is no great industry in the country, the whole population seems a proletariat. There is a distressed nobility, a distressed peasantry, a distressed working class, a distressed body of university men. Mr. Gallenga says that for six months of the year Italy is a national workshop; everybody is out of employment, and has to get work from the State; and he states as the reason for this, that the employing class wants enterprise and ability, and are apt to look to the Government for any profitable undertakings. The Government, however, are no better financiers than the rest, and the state of the public finances is one of the chief evils of the country. Taxation is very heavy, and yet property and life are not secure. "The peasants," says M. de Laveleye, "are reduced to extreme misery by rent and taxation, both alike excessive. Wages are completely inadequate. Agricultural labourers live huddled in bourgades, and obtain only intermittent employment. There is thus a rural proletariat more wretched than the industrial. Excluded from property by latifundia, it becomes the enemy of a social order that crushes it." The situation is scarcely better in parts of the country which are free from latifundia. In Sicily most of the agricultural population live on farms owned by themselves; but then these farms are too small to support them adequately, and their occupiers scorn the idea of working for hire. There are as many nobles in Sicily as in England, and Mr. Dawes (from whose report on Sicily to the Foreign Office in 1872 I draw these particulars states) that 25 per cent. of the lower orders are what he terms drones—idlers who are maintained by their wives and children. In Italy there is little working-class opinion distinct from the agricultural. There are few factories, and the artisans who work in towns have the habit of living in their native villages near by, and going and coming every day to their work. Two-thirds of the persons engaged in manufactures do so, or at least go to their rural homes from Saturday till Monday. Their habits and ways of thinking are those of agriculturists, and the social question of Italy is substantially the agricultural labourers' question. The students at the universities, too, are everywhere leavened with socialism. The advanced men among them seem to have ceased to cry for a republic, and to place their hope now in socialism. They have no desire to overturn a king who is as patriotic as the best president, and they count the form of government of minor importance as compared with the reconstitution of property. Bakunin thought Italy the most revolutionary country of Europe except Spain, because of its exceptionally numerous body of enthusiastic young men without career or prospects; and certainly revolutionary elements abound in the peninsula, but, as M. de Laveleye shrewdly remarks, a revolution is perhaps next to impossible for want of a revolutionary metropolis. "The malaria," he says, "which makes Rome uninhabitable for part of the year will long preserve her from the danger of becoming the seat of a new commune."

In Spain, as in Italy, socialism made its first appearance in 1868 through the agency of the International, and found an immediate and warm response among the people. In 1873 the International had an extensive Spanish organization with 300,000 members and 674 branches planted over the whole length and breadth of the country, from industrial centres like Barcelona to remote rural districts like the island of Majorca. M. de Laveleye was present at several sittings of these socialist clubs when he visited Spain in 1869, and he says: "They were usually held in churches erected for worship. From the pulpit the orators attacked all that had previously been exalted there—God, religion, the priests, the rich. The speeches were white hot, but the audience remained calm. Many women were seated on the ground, working, nursing their babes, and listening attentively as to a sermon. It was the very image of '93." He adds that their journals wrote with unparalleled violence, especially against religion and the Church.

On the division of the International in 1872 the Spanish members sided with Bakunin, supporting the anarchist view of the government of the future. This was natural for Spaniards, among whom their own central government had been long thoroughly detested, and their own communal organization regarded with general satisfaction. The Spanish people, even the humblest of them, are imbued beyond others with those sentiments of personal dignity and mutual equality which are at the bottom of democratic aspirations; and in their local communes, where every inhabitant who can read and write has a voice in public council, they have for ages been accustomed to manage their own affairs with harmony and advantage. The revolutionary tradition of Spain has accordingly always favoured communal autonomy, and the Federal rather than the Central Republic. Castelar declares the Federal Republic to be the most perfect form of State, though he thinks it for the present impracticable; and the revolution of 1873, in which the International played an active part, was excited for the purpose of establishing it. The Federal Republicans are not all socialists. Many of them are for making the agricultural labourers peasant proprietors, and even for dividing the communal property among them; but in a country like Spain, where communal property exists already to a large extent, the idea of making all other property communal property lies ever at hand as a ready resource of reformers. Nor, again, are all Spanish socialists federalists. There is a Social Democratic Labour party in Spain which broke off from the anarchists in 1882, and published a programme more on Marxist lines, demanding (1) the acquisition of political power; (2) the transformation of all private and corporate into the common property of the nation; and (3) the reorganization of society on the basis of industrial associations. This body is not very numerous, but at one of its recent congresses it had delegates from 152 different branches, and it has for the last four years had a party organ, El Socialista, in Madrid.

The bulk of Spanish socialism still belongs, however, to the anarchist wing. Little has been heard of the anarchists in Spain since the revolution of 1873 and the fall of the International. They have usually been blamed for the attempts on the life of the king in 1878, but they have certainly never resorted to those promiscuous outrages which have formed so much of the recent policy of the anarchists of other countries; and except for participation in a few demonstrations of the unemployed, they have maintained a surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive existence. In 1881 they reconstituted themselves as the Spanish Federation of the International Working Men's Association, which is said by the author of "Socialismus und Anarchismus, 1883-86," apparently on their own authority, to have 70,000 members in all Spain, who are distributed in 800 branches, and hold regular district and national congresses, but always under cover of secrecy. They have two journals in Madrid, and others in the larger towns elsewhere. They are sorely divided into parties and schools on very petty points, and fierce strife rages between the tweedledums and tweedledees. One party has broken away altogether and established a society of its own, under the name of the Autonomists. The anarchists are in close alliance with an agrarian organization called the Rural Labourers' Union, which has agitated since 1879 for the abolition of latifundia in Andalusia, but they always disclaim all connection with the more notorious Andalusian society, the Black Hand, which committed so many outrages in 1881 and 1882, and is often identified with the anarchists. The Black Hand is a separate organization from the anarchists, and has, it is said, 40,000 members, mostly peasants, in Andalusia and the neighbouring provinces; but their principles are undoubtedly socialistic. Their views are confined to the subject of land; but they declare that land, like all other property, has been made by labour, that it therefore cannot in right belong to the idle and rich class who at present own it, and that any means may be legitimately employed to deprive this class of usurpers of their possessions—the sword, fire, slander, perjury.