Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

Mr. Berger, moreover, has also used the threat of revolution, not as a progressive but as a reactionary force, not in the sense of Marx, who believed that a revolution, when the times were ripe and the Socialists ready, would bring incalculably more good than evil, but in the sense of the capitalists, for whom it is the most terrible of all possibilities. It is common for conservative statesmen to use precisely the same threat to secure necessary capitalist reforms.

"Some day there will be a volcanic eruption," said Berger in his first speech in Congress; "a fearful retribution will be enacted on the capitalist class as a class, and the innocent will suffer with the guilty. Such a revolution would throw humanity back into semi-barbarism and cause even a temporary retrogression of civilization."

Such is the language used against revolutions by conservatives or reactionaries. Never has it been so applied by a Marx or an Engels, a Liebknecht, a Kautsky or a Bebel. Without underestimating the enormous cost of revolutions, the most eminent Socialists reckon them as nothing compared with the probable gains, or the far greater costs of continuing present conditions. The assertion of manhood that is involved in every great revolution from below in itself implies, in the Socialist view, not retrogression, but a stupendous advance; and any reversion to semi-barbarism that may take place in the course of the revolution is likely, in their opinion, to be far more than compensated in other directions, even during the revolutionary period (to say nothing of ultimate results).

Revolutionary phrases and scares are of course abhorred by capitalistic parties, and considered dangerous, unless there is some very strong occasion for reverting to their use. But such occasions are becoming more and more frequent. Conservative capitalists are more and more grateful for any outbreak that alarms or burdens the neutral classes and serves as a useful pretext for that repression or reaction which their interests require. Progressive capitalists, on the other hand, use the very same disturbances to urge reforms they desire, on the ground that such measures are necessary to avoid "revolution." The disturbance may be as far as possible from revolutionary at bottom. It is only necessary that it should be sufficiently novel and disagreeable to attract attention and cause impatience and irritation among those who have to pay for it. Like the British strikes of 1911, it may not cost the capitalist class as a whole one-hundredth part of one per cent of its income. And it might be possible to repress, within a short time and at no greater expense, a movement many times more menacing. Provided it serves to put the supporters of capitalism on their feet, whatever they do as a result, whether in the way of repression or of reform, will be but to carry out long-cherished plans for advancing their own interests, plans that would have been the same even though there had been no shadow of a "revolutionary" movement on the horizon. The only difference is that such pseudo-revolutionary or semi-revolutionary disturbances serve as stimuli to put the more inert of the capitalist forces in motion, and, until the disturbances become truly menacing, strengthen the capitalist position.

The use of revolutionary phrases does not then, of itself, demonstrate an approach to the revolutionary position, though we may assume, on other grounds, that the majority of the reformist Socialists, who take a revolutionary position as regards certain future contingencies, are in earnest. But this indicates nothing as to the character of their Socialism to-day. The important question is, how far their revolutionary philosophy goes when directed, not at a hypothetical future situation but to questions of the present moment.

In all the leading countries of the world, except Great Britain, the majority of Socialists expect a revolutionary crisis in the future, because they recognize, with that able student of the movement, Professor Sombart, that "history knows of no case where a class has freely given up the rights which it regarded as belonging to itself."[189] This does not mean that Socialists suppose that all progress must await a revolutionary period. Engels insisted that he and his associates were profiting more by lawful than by unlawful and revolutionary action. It means that Socialists do not believe that the capitalists will allow such action to remain lawful long enough materially to increase the income of the working class and its economic and political power as compared with their own.

Jaurès's position as to present politics is based on the very opposite view. "You will have to lead millions of men to the borders of an impassable gulf," he says to the revolutionists, "but the gulf will not be easier for the millions of men to pass over than it was for a hundred thousand. What we wish is to try to diminish the width of the gulf which separates the exploited in present-day society from their situation in the new society."[190] The revolutionaries assert, on the contrary, that nothing Socialists can do at the present time can moderate the class war, or lessen the power of capitalism to maintain and increase the distance between itself and the masses. In direct disagreement with Jaurès, they say that when a sufficient numerical majority has been acquired, especially in this day when the masses are educated, it will be able to overcome any obstacle whatever, even what Jaurès calls the impassable gulf—whether in the meanwhile that gulf will have become narrower or wider than it is to-day, and they believe that the day of this triumph would be delayed rather than brought nearer if the workers were to divert their energies from revolutionary propaganda and organization, to political trading in the interest of reforms that bring no greater gains to the workers than to their exploiters. The revolutionary majority believes that the best that can be done at present is for the workers to train and organize themselves, and always to devise and study and prepare the means by which capitalism can be most successfully and economically assaulted when sufficient numbers are once aroused for successful revolt.

When revolutionary Socialism is not pure speculation, it takes the form of the present-day "class struggle" against capitalism. The view that existing society can be gradually transformed into a social democratic one, Kautsky believes to be merely an inheritance of the past, of a period "when it was generally believed that further development would take place exclusively on the economic field, without the necessity of any kind of change in the relative distribution of political institutions." (Italics mine.)[191]

"Neither a railroad [that is, its administration] nor a ministry can be changed gradually, but only at a single stroke," says Kautsky, to illustrate the sort of a change Socialists expect. The need of such a complete change does not decrease on account of any reforms that are introduced before such a change takes place. "There are some politicians," he says, "who assert that only despotic class rule necessitates revolution; that revolution is rendered superfluous by democracy. It is claimed that we have to-day sufficient democracy in all civilized countries to make possible a peaceable revolutionless development." (My italics.) As means by which these politicians hope to achieve such a revolutionless development, Kautsky mentions the gradual increase of the power of the trade unions, the penetration of Socialists into local governments, and finally the growing power of Socialist minorities in parliaments where they are supposed to be gaining increasing influence, pushing through one reform after another, restricting the power of the capitalists by labor legislation and extending the functions of the government. "So by the exercise of democratic rights upon existing grounds, the capitalist society is [according to these opportunists] gradually and without any shock growing into Socialism."[192]