Contemporary Socialism

by John Rae

The Socialists of the Chair and the Christian Socialists of Germany contemplate nothing beyond correctives and palliatives of existing evils; but then they ask the State to administer them. They ask the State to inspect factories, or to legalize trades unions, or to organize working-class insurance, or to fix fair wages. Their requests may be wise or foolish, but none of them, nor all of them together, would either subvert or transform the existing industrial system; and those who propound them are called socialists merely because they make it part of the State's business to deal with social questions, or perhaps more particularly because they make it the State's business to deal with social questions in the interest of the working class. This idea of socialism seems largely to govern the current employment of the term. We often hear any fresh extension of the functions of the State condemned as socialistic even when the extension is not supposed to be made in the interests of the working class, or to be conducive to them. The purchase of the telegraphs was socialistic; the proposal to purchase the railways is socialistic; a national system of education is socialistic; and an ecclesiastical establishment, if it were now brought forward as a new suggestion, would be pronounced socialistic too. Since, in a socialistic community, all power is assigned to the State, any measure which now increases the power of the State gets easily represented as an approach to socialism, especially in the want—and it is one of our chief wants at present—of a rational and discriminating theory of the proper limits and sphere of public authority.

But in the prevailing use of the word, there is generally the idea that the intervention of authority to which it is applied is undertaken to promote the well-being of the less fortunate classes of society. Since socialism seeks to construct what may be called a working class State, where the material welfare of each shall be the great object of the organization of all, it is common to represent as socialistic any proposal that asks the State to do something for the material well-being of the working class, and to describe any group of such proposals, or any theory that favours them, by the name of socialism. The so-called State-socialism of Prince Bismarck, for example, is only, as he has himself declared, a following-out of the traditions of the House of Hohenzollern, the princes of that dynasty having always counted it one of their first duties as rulers to exercise a special protection and solicitude over the poorer classes of their subjects. The old ideas of feudal protection and paternal government have charms for many minds that deplore the democratic spirit of modern society. In Germany they have been maintained by the feudal classes, the court, and the clergy; their presence in the general intellectual atmosphere there has probably facilitated the diffusion of socialistic views; and they have certainly led to the curious phenomenon of a Conservative socialism, in which the most obstinately Conservative interests in the country go to meet the Social Democrats half way, and promise to do everything to get them better wages if they will but come to church again and pray for the Kaiser. The days of feudal protection and paternal government are gone; as idealized by Carlyle, they perhaps never existed; at any rate, in an age of equality they are no longer possible, but their modern counterparts are precisely the ideas of social protection and fraternal government which find their home among socialists. On the strength of this analogy, Prince Bismarck and the German Emperor are sometimes spoken of as socialists, because they believe, like the latter, that the State should exercise a general or even a particular providence over the industrial classes. But socialism is more than such a belief. It is not only a theory of the State's action, but a theory of the State's action founded on a theory of the labourer's right. It is at bottom, as I have said, a mistaken demand for social justice. It tells us that an enlargement of social justice was made when it was declared that every man shall be free—or, in other words, that every man shall possess completely his own powers of labour; and it claims that a new enlargement of social justice shall be made now, to declare that every man shall possess the whole produce of his labour. Now those who are known as Conservative Socialists, in patronizing the working people, do not dream of countenancing any such claim, or even of admitting in the least that there is anything positively unjust in the present industrial system. None of them would go further than to say that the economic position of the labourer is insufficient to satisfy his legitimate aspirations in a civilized community; few of them would go so far. It is therefore highly confusing to class them among socialists.

M. Limousin, again, speaks of a "minimum of socialism." He would call no man a socialist who does not hold this minimum, and he would call every man a socialist who does hold it. And the minimum of socialism, in his opinion, is this, that the State owes a special duty of protection to labourers because they are poor, and that this duty consists in securing to them a more equitable part in the product of general labour. The latter clause might have been better expressed in less general terms, but that may pass. The definition recognises at any rate that the paternal or the fraternal theory of government does not of itself constitute socialism, and that this must be combined with the demand for a new distribution of wealth, on supposed grounds of justice or equity, before we have even the minimum of socialism. But it would have been more correct if it had recognised that the demand for a better distribution must be made not merely on supposed, but on erroneous grounds of justice or equity. If the proposed distribution is really just and equitable, nothing can surely be more proper than to ask the State to do its best to realize it and any practicable intervention for that purpose is only a matter of the ordinary expansion of the law. What is law, what is right, but a protection of the weak? and all legal reform is a transition from a less equitable to a more equitable system of arrangements. The equitable requirements of the poor are the natural concern of the State on the narrowest theory of its functions, and M. Limousin's definition would really include all rational social reformers under the name of socialist.

If we are in this way to stretch the word socialism first to the one side, till it takes in J. S. Mill and Maurice and the co-operators, who repudiate authority and State help, and then on the other side, till it takes in Prince Bismarck, and our own aristocratic Conservative Young England Party, and all social reformers who want the State to do its ordinary duty of supplying the working classes with better securities for the essentials of all humane living, how can there be any rational and intelligible use of the word at all? Mill holds a more or less socialistic idea of what a just society would be; Bismarck holds a more or less socialistic view of the functions of the State; but neither of these ideas separately make up the minimum of socialism; and it would therefore be misleading to call either of them by that name, while to call both by it would be hopeless confusion, since the one politician holds exactly what the other rejects, and no more. But, after all, it is of less importance to define socialism in the abstract than to describe the actual concrete socialism that has organization and life, especially as the name is only transferred in common speech to all these varying shades of opinion, because they are thought to resemble that concrete socialism in one feature or another.

Having now ascertained the general nature of the contemporary socialistic movement, we shall be in a better position to judge of its bearings and importance. We have seen that the only form of socialism which has come to life again since 1848 is the political and revolutionary phase of Social Democracy. Now, this was also the original form in which socialism first appeared in modern Europe at the time of the earlier Revolution of 1789. The tradition it represents is consequently one of apparently vigorous vitality. It has kept its place in European opinion for a hundred years, it seems to have grown with the growth of the democratic spirit, and it has in our own day broken out simultaneously in most of the countries of the Continent, and in some of them with remarkable energy. A movement like this, which seems to have taken a continuous and extensive hold of the popular mind, and which moreover has a consciousness of right, a passion for social justice, however mistaken, at the heart of it, cannot be treated lightly as a political force; but at the same time its consequence is apt to be greatly overrated both by the hopes of sanguine adherents and by the apprehensions of opponents. Socialists are incessantly telling us that their system is the last word of the Revolution, that the current which broke loose over Europe in 1789 is setting, as it could not help setting, in their direction, and that it can only find its final level of repose in a democratic communism. Conservative Cassandras tell us the same thing, for the Extreme Right takes the same view as the Extreme Left does of the logical tendency of measures. They feel things about them moving everywhere towards equality, they feel themselves helpless to resist the movement, and they are sure they shall waken one morning in a social revolution. Stahl, for example, thought democracy necessarily conducted to socialism, and that wherever democracy entered, socialism was already at the door. A few words will therefore be still necessary towards explaining, first, the historical origin of modern socialism; second, the relations of socialism to democracy, and, finally, the extent and character of the spread of the present movement.

Respecting the first of these three points, modern socialism was generated out of the notions about property and the State which appeared towards the close of last century in the course of the speculations then in vogue on the origin and objects of civil society, and which were proclaimed about the same time by many different writers—by Brissot, by Mably, by Morelly, and above all by Rousseau. Their great idea was to restore what they called the state of nature, when primitive equality still reigned, and the earth belonged to none, and the fruits to all. They taught that there was no foundation for property but need. He who needed a thing had a right to it, and he who had more than he needed was a thief. Rousseau said every man had naturally a right to whatever he needed; and Brissot, anticipating the famous words of Proudhon, declared that in a state of nature "exclusive property was theft." It was so in a state of nature, but it was so also in a state of society, for society was built on a social contract, "the clauses of which reduce themselves to one, viz., the total transfer of each associate, with all his rights, to the community." The individual is thus nothing; the State is all in all. Property is only so much of the national estate conditionally conceded to the individual. He has the right to use it, because the State permits him, while the State permits him, and how the State permits him. So with every other right; he is to think, speak, train his children, or even beget them, as the State directs and allows, in the interest of the common good.

These ideas circulated in a diffuse state till 1793. They formed as yet neither system nor party. But when Joseph Baboeuf, discarding his Christian name of Joseph (because, as he said, he had no wish for Joseph's virtues, and so saw no good in having him for his patron saint), and taking instead the ominous name of Caius Gracchus, organized the conspiracy of the Egaux in that year, then modern socialism began, and it began in the form in which it still survives. Baboeuf's ambition was to found what he called a true democratic republic, and by a true democratic republic he meant one in which all inequalities, whether of right or of fact, should be abolished, and every citizen should have enough and none too much. It was vain, he held, to dream of making an end of privilege or oppression until all property came into the hands of the Government, and was statedly distributed by the Government to the citizens on a principle of scrupulous equality. Misled by the name Caius Gracchus, people thought he wanted an agrarian law and equal division. But he told them an agrarian law was folly, and equal division would not last a twelvemonth, if the participants got the property to themselves. What he wanted, he said, was something much more sublime—it was community of goods. Equality could only be made enduring through the abolition of private property. The State must be sole proprietor and sole employer, and dispense to every man his work according to his particular skill, and his subsistence in honourable sufficiency according to his wants. An individual who monopolized anything over and above such a sufficiency committed a social theft. Appropriation was to be strictly limited to and by personal need.

Baboeuf saw no difficulty in working the scheme; was it not practised every day in the army, with 1,200,000 men? If it were said, the soil of France is too small to sustain its population in the standard of sufficiency contemplated, then so much the worse for the superfluous population; let the greater landlords first, and then as many sansculottes as were redundant, be put out of the way for their country's good. He actually ascribed this intention to Robespierre, and spoke of the Terror as if it were an excellent anticipation of Malthusianism. Did any one say that, without inequalities, progress would cease and arts and civilization decay, Baboeuf was equally prepared to take the consequences. "Perish the arts," said a manifesto discovered with him at his apprehension, "but let us have real equality." "All evils," he said in his newspaper, "are on their trial. Let them all be confounded. Let everything return to chaos, and from chaos let there rise a new and regenerated world."

We have here just the revolutionary socialist democracy that is still rampant over Europe. Socialists now, indeed, generally make light of the difficulty of over-population which Baboeuf solved so glibly with the guillotine, and they contend that their system would humanize civilization instead of destroying it. They follow, too, a different tradition from Baboeuf regarding the right of property. While he built that right on need, they build it on labour. He said the man who has more than he needs is a thief; they say the man who has more than he wrought for is a thief. He would have the State to give every man an honourable sufficiency right off, according to his need; they ask the State to give every man according to his work, or, if unfit for work, according to his need, and they hold that this rule would afford every one an honourable sufficiency. But these differences are only refinements on Baboeuf's plan, and its main features remain—equality of conditions, nationalization of property, democratic tyranny, a uniform medium fatal to progress, an omnipresent mandarin control crushing out of the people that energy of character which W. von Humboldt said was the first and only virtue of man, because it was the root of all other excellence and advancement. In short, socialists now seek, like Baboeuf, to establish a democratic republic—a society built on the equal manhood of every citizen—and, like Baboeuf, they think a true democratic republic is necessarily a socialistic one.