Socialism and Democracy in Europe

by Samuel Peter Orth

IV

It must not be inferred from this rapid survey of its warfare for political privilege that Belgian Socialism has forgotten the co-operative movement and all the various activities that were blended in the making of the Labor Party. Belgian Socialism is primarily economic. This makes it unique. It has succeeded in becoming economic, in building dairies and bake-shops, in running dry-goods stores and grocery stores and butcher shops, in the present dispensation; and it has succeeded in doing so by accommodating itself to the present conditions. It adopts the eight-hour day when it can, but it is not averse to ten hours when necessary. It pays its employees the highest wage it can, but it recognizes talent and ability like the bourgeois shopkeeper across the street. It has insurance funds that draw interest at the same rate that is paid by bourgeois banks, and it has no scruples about putting the latest approved machinery into its workshops and bakeries.

In all this, their activities have remained Socialistic. They compete with the bourgeois, but co-operate among themselves. The profits of their activities go to the members of their societies and to the party. Their competition has brought ruin to the door of many a shopkeeper who finds his customers flocking to their own shop. Government commissions have inquired into the movement at the nervous requests of merchants and tradesmen, but only to find every co-operative enterprise carefully conducted and thriving.

The Belgian Socialist leaders all emphasize the importance of this unity of economic and political activity, and the priority of the economic over the political. It has been a splendid stimulant for the Belgian workman. It has aroused him out of the lethargy that has been his greatest enemy for years. It has taught him to work with others, the value of mass movement, the futility of separateness. It has schooled him, not only in reading and arithmetic, in the night classes established everywhere; but in business, in weights and measures; in percentage, in profit and loss; and most of all, in the real hardships that meet tradespeople and commercial men everywhere in their endeavor to get on. Workingmen often think that a business man is a necromancer juggling profits out of other people's necessities. The Belgian co-operativist has found out that trading is a commonplace and tedious task which requires constant alertness and is merely the drudgery of detail. This experience has taught him, moreover, the futility of laws and the utility of effort. In Belgium I was impressed most of all by the nonchalance, almost contempt, that the workman displays toward mere legislation. "Why should I toy with words when I have this?" And he points proudly to his co-operative store.

The Belgian workman has been taught through his co-operative experience the value of patient toil and frugality. Slowly he has built up these institutions out of his own savings. When he thought his scant wages were barely enough for bread, he discovered means somehow to pay his dues in the "Mutualité." As an instance of his thrift, he saves every year a little fund which is used by the family for an annual holiday, usually a short excursion to a neighboring place of interest. Every member of the family contributes to this fund, and, no matter how poor, they look forward to their yearly holiday.

The Belgian Socialist has also been successful in another field. While in other countries the Socialists have tried usually in vain to lure the peasant and small farmer, the Belgians have made constant progress in this direction. The agrarian movement began with the organizing of the Labor Party.[12]

Vandervelde and Hector Dennis, a Professor of Economics in the University at Brussels, have been constant in their zeal for the agrarian interests. Again, the lure is not Socialism in the abstract, nor the gospel of discontent. It is practical, business co-operation. Dairies, stores, markets are proving powerful propagandists, even in the Catholic lowlands. Dr. Steffens-Frauenweiler quotes from a conservative newspaper: "From different sides we have heard the remark that Socialism would never penetrate into the country. In contradiction to this opinion we must observe that those who express this view, and presume to laugh away the Socialistic movement among the peasants and farmers, are either not well informed or are submitting themselves to illusions. Only a serious attempt to fight Socialism through positive reforms will prove a lasting check upon the ambitions of Socialists."[13]

In Belgium the general strike has been used as an aid in the warfare for political power. We have seen how the first strike was premature, the second effective, and the third proved a boomerang in its reaction upon the Labor Party.

Vandervelde distinguishes between the general strike as a means toward social revolution, and the general strike as a political weapon used for securing a definite object.[14] He says: "The revolutionary general strike is itself the revolution. The reformist general strike, on the contrary, is the attempt of the proletariat to secure partial concessions from the government without questioning the existence of the government, and especially the administration that represents the government." To effect this, it is not essential that all the workmen go out, but only enough to interrupt "the normal course of business, even if the majority of the workers remain at work."[15]

The political general strike has its example, then, in the Belgian movement for the electoral franchise. Whether it would succeed in wresting other political privileges from the state, is conjecture; that it would not succeed except under the most favorable conditions, is certain.