Labour policy—false and true

by Lynden Livingston Macassey

The Common Characteristics of all Socialistic Creeds—State Socialism—Syndicalism—National Guildism—Nationalization and Democratic Control.

Socialism is too amorphous to admit of any workable definition. Each age exhibits schools of thought, industrial and philosophic, which define Socialism in different ways according to contemporary political circumstances, economic conditions and industrial tendencies or their interpretation of them. There is no more interesting study than to trace out the variant meanings of “Socialist” from its first appearance in the Co-operative Magazine of November 1827 up to the present time, and to note its successive contractions and extensions in political, ethical, economic and social implications as decade succeeded to decade.

The Common Characteristics of all Socialistic Creeds

But certain brands of Socialism can be described if not defined. The one common characteristic is abolition of the “capitalistic organization” of industry. If we call this A, then we can say that all schemes of Socialism can be reduced to the general formula A + x, where x is a symbol standing for a very large number of variables which comprise the methods by which the capitalist is to be extinguished; the terms on which the present capitalists will be compensated or otherwise expropriated; the persons or authority in whom the means of production—and probably there should be added distribution and exchange—will be vested; the persons or body to be responsible for the organization of industry and for its control; the means by which capital will be found and prices regulated; the relation in which the new industrial system will stand to the community, and the various socialized industries to one another. These are the practical points to which attention should be directed rather than academic definitions.

Of the term “capitalism” and what is implied by it all kinds of definitions are current. Socialists of different schools have their own definitions embellished with epithets which vary in virulence according to their particular trend of thought. Employers too have their definitions, but it will be sufficient for our purposes if we take capitalism to mean the existing scheme of industrial organization. The basic vices of capitalism, according to all Socialists, are that it is a system under which the owner of the capital employed in industry possesses and controls the whole business of production and sale of the output, buying, just as he buys raw materials for his business, the labour power of the workman, paying him as little for it as possible, and that in the form of a wage merely in respect of the time he is at work; a system under which the employer maintains a reserve of unemployed labour in order to provide for the variations in trade, while recognizing no responsibility in respect of the workman at times when the employer cannot or is not prepared to provide him with work. Under such conditions the workman is said to occupy a quasi-servile status, to be a wage-slave and entitled to no voice at all in the control of the industry. That, without the usual garnish of abuse, is probably a fair description of the present organization of industry as it is envisaged by the Socialist. The two great incidents of capitalism which the Socialist therefore seeks to eradicate are: the private ownership of land and capital; and the employment on a wage-basis of hired labour. If only capitalism could be abolished the workman would no longer see his employer and other capitalists appropriating, in the shape of rent and interest and profits, all the value of the product which the labourer is said to create over and above the amount of his wages.

To capitalism, it is customary, and, indeed, necessary for his argument, for the Socialist to attribute all the ills from which industry suffers and most evils to which the community is heir. With the exit of capitalism the Socialist says that unemployment would disappear and adequate maintenance be secured for sickness, old age and other incapacity, equality of opportunity afforded to all, full scope provided for individual expression and development, and a universal millennium inaugurated. In the minds of some Socialists there seems no limit whatsoever to the mephitic influence of capitalism. Dr. Shadwell, in his discerning articles in The Times[2] on “The Revolutionary Movement in Great Britain,” mentions that the Daily Herald of February 2, 1921, found the cause of influenza in capitalism, and argued that unless the latter is destroyed it will destroy mankind; conversely Dr. Shadwell logically suggested we may assume that if capitalism is abolished influenza will disappear!

We are now in a position to distinguish the principal schools of Socialism that exist to-day. One will not find them formulating their principles as crisply as I set them out. My object is merely to indicate the main outlines.

State Socialism

First we have the State Socialist who advocates that the State should acquire, as he generally says, the means of production, distribution and exchange, or, to reduce it to practical terms, land and the national industries. Taking, for example, a concrete case—the railway industry—the State would take over all the railway undertakings in the country from the various companies of shareholders who now own them and, under most schemes of State Socialism, would compensate the shareholders by paying them, in State securities, something approaching the capital value of the net maintainable revenue of the undertakings. Under this system the State steps into the shoes of the original owners of the railways and acts as the employer controlling the industry and employing the workmen just as the private owners previously did. The industry would be run by a Government Department in Whitehall and, the State Socialist says, will be run in the interests of the community and not for private profit, inasmuch as the Government Department is, through its ministerial head, responsible to Parliament, which represents the community.