Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

It can readily be realized that such arguments will always have great weight with the embittered elements of the working class. Nor do the most representative Socialists altogether disagree with Sladden. They, too, feel that if the war is not levied against individuals, neither is it levied against a mere abstract system, but against a ruling class. However, they make exceptions for such capitalists as the late Paul Singer, who definitely abandon their class and throw in their lot with the Socialist movement, while Sladden would admit neither Singer, nor those other millions mentioned by Liebknecht (see above), for he demands that the Socialist Party must declare that "no one not eligible to the labor unions of the United States is eligible to the Socialist Party."

The high-water mark of this brand of revolutionism was reached in the State of Washington, when these revolutionary elements in the Socialist Party withdrew to form a new workingmen's party, the chief novelty of which was a plank dividing the organization into "an active list and an assistant list, only wage workers being admitted to the active list." The wage workers were defined as the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. These are the active list, and they alone hold office and vote. "The assistant list cannot hold office and cannot vote," and the Party will "do active organizing work among wage earners alone." This reminds one very much of the notorious division into active and passive citizens at the early stages of the French Revolution, which gave such a splendid opportunity to the Jacobines to organize a revolt of the passive citizens and was one of the chief causes leading up to the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic reaction that followed. The Washington plan, however, has been a complete failure. It has had no imitators in the Socialist movement, nor is it likely to have.

On the other hand, the most influential representatives of the extreme revolutionary wing of the movement, like Hervé in France, have championed the non-wage-earning elements of the movement as fearlessly as the reformists.

"In the ranks of our party," writes Hervé, "are to be found small merchants, small employers, wretched, impoverished, educated people, small peasant proprietors, none of whom on account of occupation can enter into the general Federation of Labor, which only admits those receiving wages and salaries. These are revolutionary elements which cannot be neglected; these volunteers of the Revolution who have often a beautiful revolutionary temperament would be lost for the Revolution if our political organization was not at hand to nourish their activity. Besides, the General Federation of Labor is a somewhat heavy mass; it will become more and more heavy as it comprises the majority of the working class which is by nature rather pacific at the bottom."

While there is no sufficient reason for the accusation that the Socialist movement neglects the brain workers of the salaried and professional classes, there is somewhat more solid ground, in spite of the above quoted declarations of Liebknecht and Hervé, for the accusation that it antagonizes those sections of the middle classes which are, even to a slight degree, small capitalists, as, for example, especially the farmers.

"The unimaginative person," says Mr. H. G. Wells, "who owns some little bit of property, an acre or so of freehold land, or a hundred pounds in the savings bank, will no doubt be the most tenacious passive resister to Socialist ideas; and such I fear we must reckon, together with the insensitive rich, as our irreconcilable enemies, as irremovable pillars of the present order."[221]

This view is widespread among Socialists, and is even sustained by Kautsky. "Small merchants and innkeepers," he writes, "have despaired of ever rising by their own exertions; they expect everything from above and look only to the upper classes and to the government for assistance," though they "find their customers only in laboring circles, so that their existence is absolutely dependent upon the prosperity or adversity of the laboring classes." The contradiction Kautsky finds goes even further. He says, "Servility depends upon reaction—and furnishes not only the willing supporters, but the fanatical advocates of the monarchy, the church, and the nobility." With all this they (the shopkeepers, etc.) remain democratic, since it is only through democracy that they can obtain political influence. Kautsky calls them the "reactionary democracy."[222] But if they are democratic and in part economically dependent on the laboring classes, then why should not this part cast its lot economically and politically with the working class?

Kautsky extends his criticism of the small capitalists very far and even seems in doubt concerning the owners of small investments such as savings bank deposits. "Well-meaning optimists," he says, "have seen in this a means of decentralizing capital, so that after a while, in the most peaceable manner, without any one noticing it, capital would be transformed into social property. In fact, this movement really means the transformation of all the money of the middle and lower classes, which is not used by them for immediate consumption, into money capital, and as such placing it at the disposal of the great financiers for the buying out of industrial managers, and thereby assisting in the concentration on industry in the hands of a few financiers."

The classes which have invested their capital directly or indirectly in stocks or bonds through savings banks and through insurance companies number many millions, and include the large majority of all sections of the middle class, even of its most progressive part, salaried employees, and the professional element. It is undoubtedly true, as Kautsky says, that small investors are not obtaining any direct control over capital, and that their funds are used in the way he points out, constituting one of the striking and momentous tendencies of the time. But it does not follow that they are destined to lose such investments altogether, as the legislative reforms to protect banks may be extended to the railroads and other forms of investments. The small investors will scarcely be turned to favor capitalism by their investments, which bring in small profit and allow them nothing to say in the management of industry, but neither will the losses they sometimes suffer from this source be sufficient in themselves to convert them into allies of the working class.