A history of socialism

by Thomas Kirkup

The same children who were thus early acquainted with hunger have gone to be racked at the mill of labour before they were eight, or even six years of age. We need not wonder that they were stunted and dwarfed in growth, that they were wrinkled, deformed, attenuated, grey, and decrepit before their time; and they have suffered all this hunger and privation through a long agony of years, they and their fathers and mothers before them, while the classes which have held economic and political power have wasted the means so much needed for worthier uses in war and in the preparation for war, in the luxury and extravagance of society and of courts.

Nor has this condition of rags, hunger, and privation come to an end. We may see it in the course of a casual walk in almost any quarter of any of the towns of Great Britain to-day.

In many countries the democracy assumes a more serious and a menacing form. Among the trade unions of France there is a pronounced distrust in the efficacy of parliamentary action and a predilection for more direct and energetic methods. We see a like tendency in a stronger form in Italy. The new Italy has endeavoured to play a rôle as a great military and naval power, for which she was hardly fitted by her natural resources or her economic development. A large majority of her people suffer all the miseries that flow from extreme ignorance, poverty, and degradation. Strikes, riots, and other tumultuary outbreaks have been put down by the police and the soldiers with a rough hand. The misery of the people of Italy finds expression in a very large emigration. In a single year as many as 270,000 go abroad, chiefly to the countries of Central Europe, for a period of six months, while 350,000 leave the country as permanent emigrants, chiefly to America. We must regard them as driven by poverty and hunger rather than impelled by the spirit of enterprise.

But the most active revolutionary centre of Europe has now shifted eastwards. In Russia the development of modern methods of industry has only added to the depth and intensity of the struggle. Great capitalists have joined the great landlords in giving support to the Czardom and the bureaucracy in the mighty conflict with the growing revolutionary parties which represent rural and town workers. It has been an appalling struggle, in which the oldest forms of rule have contended with the newest forces of change. What the end may be no man can foresee. So long as the Czardom receives adequate support from the military forces it may continue to survive, but the course of the revolution has shown that the loyalty of army and fleet has been seriously shaken. The Socialist Revolutionary Party contemplate a victory of the working class led by them, and in case of necessity the provisional establishment of its revolutionary dictatorship. But we may fear that the anarchy which might ensue on the overthrow of the Czardom might lead to the supremacy of a military chief. In either case the danger to the neighbouring countries, and especially to South-Eastern Europe, already distracted by racial differences, is only too obvious.

In a well-informed article on the rising of the Roumanian peasantry in 1907 the Spectator said that their cause was the cause of a hundred million of peasantry in Eastern Europe. The remark was a true one. The revolt of labour in Russia is for the most part a rising of peasants for ‘land and liberty.’ It has been a rising full of terror, of omen, and of warning to all who undertake the rule and guidance of men. In Eastern Europe Enceladus has risen. Long buried under heavy mountain loads of privation, of oppression, and of neglect even worse than oppression, he has risen to claim his rights. If well guided he might have been a kindly and beneficent giant, for the Russian peasant is essentially good-humoured and well-disposed. But the powers that be have contented themselves with the exaction of recruits and taxes, of labour and rent. They have otherwise done nothing for him, and have given him no scope for doing anything for himself. With little light or guidance, too frequently suffering the worst privations of cold and famine, and goaded by the sense of immemorial wrong, he could not be expected to resist the fiery draughts from the winepress of the revolution, and he committed such excesses as we know! The Czardom and its servants have prevailed. The giant has been driven back to his prison. He is neither dead nor asleep, but lies moaning and restless on his bed of pain. He will rise again!

The Socialist Revolutionary Party declare that it is from no love for sanguinary methods that they have taken up arms. It was their stern duty before the revolution, before the cause of the workers. It was a decision serious and full of responsibility. The party ‘will not cease to employ terrorist tactics in the political struggle till the establishment of institutions which will make the will of the people the source of power and of legislation.’

Its task has been to lead the masses of the people in revolt, and it has done so with a resolution and self-sacrifice seldom equalled in history. Its members have been ready to kill and to be killed. There can be no doubt that the revolutionary feeling in Russia has increased enormously in depth and width since the days of Alexander II. The composition of the second Duma, which was probably the most revolutionary assembly that has ever met on this planet, was a proof and symptom of the extent to which the spirit of revolt had spread. Out of 500 members 200 belonged to the left, and of these 60 were social democrats, 40 socialist revolutionaries, 15 populist socialists, and 60 were labour men, the small remainder being independent radicals. But the same spirit of revolution has pervaded rural and town workers, has penetrated to fleet and army, to the teachers and the intellectual classes. We may be assured that the drama of the revolution is not ended. The revolution has been spreading among a population of 135,000,000 having racial affinities with numerous peoples in Central and South-Eastern Europe. The Ukase of November 1906, which gave the right to every member of a village community to claim complete possession of his present allotment as permanent private property, will, so far as it is operative, tend greatly to aggravate the unrest. It will disintegrate the village community, break up old forms of life, give more power to the village usurer, and in many ways add to the violence of the revolutionary forces. Enceladus will rise again, with results to Russia and to Europe that no man can forecast.

The division into two nations of Rich and Poor, which the Earl of Beaconsfield described in his novel, Sybil, as existing in England, has become international. A chasm more or less wide and abrupt extends throughout the civilised world. Even Japan now has an active socialist party, and when the industrial revolution has fairly begun to run its course in China we may expect to see its people among the foremost in the social revolution. The real economic and political power still lies in the hands of a small minority, while over against it stands the democracy composed of workers who are every day advancing in intelligence, in organisation, and in the resolute endeavour towards a common goal. Wealth, power, and enjoyment go together. Labour is attended by poverty and privation.

A great struggle is going on, and there can be no doubt that it will go on. How is it to be fought out? This is the supreme question which the twentieth century must try to solve.

It is of unspeakable importance that it should take a wise and peaceful course. In all countries which have a genuine system of universal suffrage fairly carried out, a peaceful solution is practicable. But for such a peaceful solution it will be necessary that all autocratic and bureaucratic government should cease, and that an executive, not only formally responsible to the people but really responsive to their wishes, and in close touch with them, should be established. Such a government could accomplish a beneficent social and economic transformation without violence, without spoliation or confiscation, without even giving an undue shock to the reasonable claims and habits of any section of the people. This might be effected by a truly democratic government, or by the steady pressure of the democracy on the old governments, which would be gradually changed. So much for the peaceful transformation of the State.