Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

However his predictions may turn out in the future, Marx's view of the past is rapidly gaining ground and is possibly accepted by the majority of those most competent to speak on these questions to-day, including many leading economists and sociologists and prominent figures in practical political life. Winston Churchill, for example, says that "the differences between class and class have been even aggravated in the passage of years," that while "the richer classes [are] ever growing in wealth and in numbers, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remain plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery." This being the case, he predicts "a savage strife between class and class," unless the most radical measures are taken to check the tendency. Nor are his statements mere rhetoric, for he shows statistically "that the increase of income assessable to income tax is at the very least more than ten times greater than the increase which has taken place in the same period in the wages of those trades which come within the Board of Trade returns."[208] In other words, the income of the well-to-do classes (which increased nearly half a billion pounds, that is, almost doubled, in ten years) is growing ten times more rapidly than that even of the organized and better paid workmen, who alone are considered in the Board of Trade returns.

Here is a situation which is world-wide. The position of the working class, or certain parts of it, may be improving; the income of the employing and capitalist class is certainly increasing many fold more rapidly. Here is the financial expression of the growing divergence of classes which Marx had in mind, a divergence that we have no reason whatever for supposing will be checked, as Mr. Churchill suggests, even by his most "Socialistic" reforms, short of surrendering the political and economic power to those who suffer from this condition.

At the German Socialist Congress at Hanover in 1899, Bebel said that even if the income of the working class was increasing, or even if the purchasing power of total wages was becoming greater, the income of the nation as a whole was increasing much more rapidly and that of the capitalist class at a still more rapid rate. The great Socialist statesman laid emphasis on the essential point that capitalists are absorbing continually a greater and a greater proportion of the national income.

The class struggle, says Kautsky, rests not upon the fact that the misery of the proletariat is growing greater, but on its need to annihilate a pressure that it feels more and more keenly.

"The class struggle," he writes, "becomes more bitter the longer it lasts. The more capable of struggle the opponents become in and through the struggle itself, the more important become the differences in their conditions of life, the more the capitalists raise themselves above the proletariat by the ever growing exploitation."[209]

This feature of present-day (capitalistic) progress, Socialists view as the very essence of social injustice, no matter whether there is a slight and continuous or even a considerable progress of the working class. The question for them is not whether from time to time something more falls to the workingman, but what proportion he gets of the total product. It would never occur to any one to try to tell a business man that he ought not to sell any more goods because his profits were already increasing "fast enough." It is as absurd to tell the workingman that the moderate advance he is making either through slight improvements as to wages and hours, or through political and social reforms, ought to blind him to all the possibilities of modern civilization from which he is still shut off, and which will remain out of his reach for generations, unless his share in the income of society is rapidly increased to the point that he (and other non-capitalist producers) receive the total product.

The conflict of class interests is not a mere theory, but a widely recognized reality, and the worst accusation that can be made against Socialists is not that they are trying to create a war of classes where none exists, but that some of them at times interpret the conflict in a narrow or violent sense (I shall discuss the truth or untruth of this criticism in later chapters). Yet Mr. Roosevelt voices the opinion of many when he calls the view that the maximum of progress is to be secured only after a struggle between the classes, the "most mischievous of Socialist theses," says that an appeal to class interest is not "legitimate," and that the Socialists hope "in one shape or another to profit at the expense of the other citizens of the Republic."[210]

"There is no greater need to-day," said Mr. Roosevelt in his Sorbonne lecture, "than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, not parallel to, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position."

This is as much as to say that there are only individuals, but no class, which it is better to have outside than inside of a progressive majority. The Socialist view is the exact opposite. It holds that the very foundation of Socialism as a method (which is its only aspect of practical importance) is that the Socialist movement assumes a position so militant and radical that every privileged class will voluntarily remain on the outside; and events are showing the wisdom and even the necessity of these tactics. Socialists would say, "Ruin looks us in the face if, in politics, we judge the men who occupy a certain position (the members of a certain class) by their conduct as individuals, instead of judging them by the fact that they occupy a certain position and are members of a certain class."

Again, to the Chamber of Commerce at New Haven, Mr. Roosevelt expressed a view which, to judge by their actions, is that of all non-Socialist reformers: "I am a radical," he said, "who most earnestly desires to see a radical platform carried out by conservatives. I wish to see great industrial reforms carried out, not by the men who will profit by them, but by the men who will lose by them; by such men as you are around me."