Kautsky's is probably the prevailing opinion among German Socialists. Let us see how he proposes to compose a Socialist majority. Of course his first reliance is on the manual laborers, skilled and unskilled. Next come the professional classes, the salaried corporation employees, and a large part of the office workers, which together constitute what Kautsky and the other Continental Socialists call the new middle class. "Among these," Kautsky says, "a continually increasing sympathy for the proletariat is evident, because they have no special class interest, and owing to their professional, scientific point of view, are easiest won for our party through scientific considerations. The theoretical bankruptcy of bourgeois economics, and the theoretical superiority of Socialism, must become clear to them. Through their training, also, they must discover that the other social classes continuously strive to debase art and science. Many others are impressed by the fact of the irresistible advance of the Social Democracy. So it is that friendship for labor becomes popular among the cultured classes, until there is scarcely a parlor in which one does not stumble over one or more 'Socialists.'"
It is difficult to understand how it can be said that these classes have no special "class interest," unless it is meant that their interest is neither that of the capitalists nor precisely that of the industrial wage-earning class. And this, indeed, is Kautsky's meaning, for he seems to minimize their value to the Socialists, because as a class they cannot be relied upon.
"Heretofore, as long as Socialism was branded among all cultured classes as criminal or insane, capitalist elements could be brought into the Socialist movement only by a complete break with the whole capitalist world. Whoever came into the Socialist movement at that time from the capitalist element had need of great energy, revolutionary passion, and strong proletarian convictions. It was just this element which ordinarily constituted the most radical and revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement.
"It is wholly different to-day, since Socialism has become a fad. It no longer demands any special energy, or any break with capitalist society to assume the name of Socialist. It is no wonder, then, that more and more these new Socialists remain entangled in their previous manner of thought and feeling.
"The fighting tactics of the intellectuals are at any rate wholly different from those of the proletariat. To wealth and power of arms the latter opposes its overwhelming numbers and its thorough organization. The intellectuals are an ever diminishing minority, with no class organization whatever. Their only weapon is persuasion through speaking and writing, the battle with 'intellectual weapons' and 'moral superiority,' and these 'parlor Socialists' would settle the proletarian class struggle also with these weapons. They declare themselves ready to grant the party their moral support, but only on condition that it renounces the idea of the application of force, and this not simply where force is hopeless,—there the proletariat has already renounced it,—but also in those places where it is still full of possibilities. Accordingly they seek to throw discredit on the idea of revolution, and to represent it as a useless means. They seek to separate off a social reform wing from the revolutionary proletariat, and they thereby divide and weaken the proletariat."[219]
In the last words Kautsky refers to the fact that although a large number of "intellectuals" (meaning the educated classes) have come into the Socialist Party and remain there, they constitute a separate wing of the movement. We must remember, however, that this same wing embraces, besides these "parlor Socialists," a great many trade unionists, and that it has composed a very considerable portion of the German Party, and a majority in some other countries of the Continent; and as Kautsky himself admits that they succeed in "dividing the proletariat," they cannot be very far removed politically from at least one of the divisions they are said to have created. It is impossible to attribute the kind of Socialism to which Kautsky objects to the adhesion of certain educated classes to the movement (for reasons indicated in Part II).
While many of the present spokesmen of Socialism are, like Kautsky, somewhat skeptical as to the necessity of an alliance between the working class and this section of the middle class, others accept it without qualification. If, then, we consider at once the middle ground taken by the former group of Socialists, and the very positive and friendly attitude of the latter, it must be concluded that the Socialist movement as a whole is convinced that its success depends upon a fusion of at least these two elements, the wage earners and "the new middle class."
A few quotations from the well-known revolutionary Socialist, Anton Pannekoek, will show the contrast between the narrower kind of Socialism, which still survives in many quarters, and that of the majority of the movement. He discriminates even against "the new middle class," leaving nobody but the manual laborers as a fruitful soil for real Socialism.
"To be sure, in the economic sense of the term, then, the new middle class are proletarians; but they form a very special group of wage workers, a group that is so sharply divided from the real proletarians that they form a special class with a special position in the class struggle.... Immediate need does not compel them as it does the real proletarians to attack the capitalist system. Their position may arouse discontent, but that of the workers is unendurable. For them Socialism has many advantages, for the workers it is an absolute necessity." (My italics.)[220]
The phrase "absolute necessity" is unintelligible. It is comparatively rarely that need arises to the height of actual compulsion, and when it does instances are certainly just as common among clerks as they are among bricklayers.
Pannekoek introduces a variety of arguments to sustain his position. For instance, that "the higher strata among the new middle class have a definitely capitalistic character. The lower ones are more proletarian, but there is no sharp dividing line." This is true—but the high strata in every class are capitalistic. The statement applies equally well to railway conductors, to foremen, and to many classes of manual workers.
"And then, too," Pannekoek continues, "they, the new middle class, have more to fear from the displeasure of their masters, and dismissal for them is a much more serious matter. The worker stands always on the verge of starvation, and so unemployment has few terrors for him. The high-class employee, on the contrary, has comparatively an easy life, and a new position is difficult to find."
Now it is precisely the manual laborer who is most often blacklisted by the large corporations and trusts; and the brain-working employee is better able to adapt himself to some slightly different employment than is the skilled worker in any of the highly specialized trades.
"For the cause of Socialism we can count on this new middle class," says Pannekoek, "even less than on the labor unions. For one thing, they have been set over the workers, as superintendents, overseers, bosses, etc. In these capacities they are supposed to speed up the workers to get the utmost out of them."
Is it not even more common, we may ask, that one manual worker is set over another than that a brain worker is set over a manual laborer?
"They [the new middle class] are divided," writes Pannekoek, "into numberless grades and ranks arranged one above the other; they do not meet as comrades, and so cannot develop the spirit of solidarity. Each individual does not make it a matter of personal pride to improve the condition of his entire class; the important thing is rather that he personally struggles up into the next higher rank."
If we remember the more favorable hours and conditions under which the brain workers are employed, the fact that they are not so exhausted physically and that they have education, we may see that they have perhaps even greater chances "to develop their solidarity" and to understand their class interests than have the manual workers. It is true that they are more divided at the present time, but there is a tendency throughout all the highly organized industries to divide the manual laborers in the same way and to secure more work from them by a similar system of promotions.
Pannekoek accuses the brain workers of having something to lose, again forgetting that there are innumerable groups of more or less privileged manual laborers who are in the same position. And finally, he contends that their superior schooling and education is a disadvantage when compared to the lack of education of the manual laborers:—
"They have great notions of their own education and refinement, feel themselves above the masses; it naturally never occurs to them that the ideals of these masses may be scientifically correct and that the 'science' of their professors may be false. As theorizers seeing the world always with their minds, knowing little or nothing of material activities, they are fairly convinced that mind controls the world."
On the contrary, nearly all influential Socialist thinkers agree that present-day science, poorly as it is taught, is not only an aid to Socialism, but the very best basis for it.
Pannekoek is right, for instance, when he says that most of the brain workers in the Socialist movement come from the circles of the small capitalists and bring an anti-Socialist prejudice with them, but he forgets that, on the other side, the overwhelming majority of the world's working people are the children of farmers, peasants, or of absolutely unskilled and illiterate workers, whose views of life were even more prejudiced and whose minds were perhaps even more filled up with the ideas that the ruling classes have placed there.
The arguments of the American Socialist, Thomas Sladden, representing as they do the views of many thousands of revolutionary workingmen in this country, are also worthy of note. His bitterness, it will be seen, is leveled less against capitalism itself than against what he considers to be intrusion of certain middle-class elements into Socialist ranks.
"We find in the United States to-day," writes Sladden, "that we have created several new religions, one of the most interesting of which is called Socialism, and is the religion of a decadent middle class. This fake Socialism or middle-class religion can readily be distinguished from the real Socialist movement, which is simply the wage working class in revolt on both the industrial and political fields against present conditions.... Yesterday I was a bad capitalist—to-day I am a good Socialist, but I pay my wage slaves the same wages to-day as I did yesterday.... They never take the answer of Bernard Shaw, who, when asked by a capitalist what he could do, saying that he could not help being a capitalist, was answered in this manner: You can go and crack rock if you want to; no one forces you to be a capitalist, but you are a capitalist because you want to be. No one forces Hillquit to be a lawyer; he could get a job in a lumber yard. There is no more excuse for a man being a capitalist or a lawyer than there is for him being a Pinkerton detective. He is either by his own free will and accord. The system,—they acclaim in one breath,—the system makes us do what we do not wish to do. The system does nothing of the kind; the system gives a man the choice between honest labor and dishonest labor skinning, and a labor skinner is a labor skinner because he wishes to be, just the same as some men are pickpockets because they wish to be."