Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

The best known of the Socialist critics of Marxism, Edward Bernstein, shares with some of Marx's most loyal disciples in this excessive idealization of the industrial working class. Indeed, he says, with more truth than he realizes, that in proportion as revolutionary Marxism is relegated to the background it is necessary to affirm more sharply the class character of the Party. That is to say, if a Socialist Party abandons the principles of Socialism, then the only way it can be distinguished from other movements is by the fact that it embraces other elements of the population, that it is a class movement. But Socialism is something more than this, it is a class movement of a certain definite character, composed of classes that are naturally selected and united, owing to certain definite characteristics.

"The social democracy," says Bernstein, "can become the people's party, but only in the sense that the workingmen form the essential kernel around which are grouped social elements having identical interests.... Of all the social classes opposed to the capitalist class, the working class alone represents an invincible factor of social progress," and social democracy "addresses itself principally to the workers." (My italics.)

Perhaps the most orthodox Socialist organ in America, and the ablest representative in this country of the international aspects of the movement (the New Yorker Volkszeitung), insists that "the Socialist movement consists in the fusion of the Socialist doctrine with the labor movement and in nothing else," and says that students and even doctors have little importance for the Party. The less orthodox but more revolutionary Western Clarion, the Socialist organ of British Columbia, where the Socialists form the chief opposition party in the legislature, asserts boldly, "We have no leaning towards democracy; all we want is a short supply of working-class autocracy."

Some of the ultra-revolutionists have gone so far in their hostility to all social classes that do not work with their hands, that they have completed the circle and flown into the arms of the narrowest and least progressive of trade unionists—the very element against which they had first reacted. The Western Socialist, Thomas Sladden, throwing into one single group all the labor organizations from the most revolutionary to the most conservative, such as the railway brotherhoods, says that all "are in reality part of the great Socialist movement," and claims that whenever "labor" goes into politics, this also is a step towards Socialism, though Socialist principles are totally abandoned. Mayor McCarthy of San Francisco, for instance, satisfied his requirements. "McCarthy declares himself a friend of capital," says Sladden, but, he asks defiantly, "Does any sane capitalist believe him?" Here we see one of the most revolutionary agitators becoming more and more "radical" until he has completed the circle and come back, not only to "labor right or wrong," but even to "labor working in harmony with capital."

"The skilled workingman," he says, "is not a proletarian. He has an interest to conserve, he has that additional skill for which he receives compensation in addition to his ordinary labor power."

Mr. Sladden adds that the real proletarian is "uncultured and uncouth in appearance," that he has "no manners and little education," and that his religion is "the religion of hate." Of course this is a mere caricature of the attitude of the majority of Socialists.

Some of the partisans of revolutionary unionism in this country are little less extreme. The late Louis Duchez, for example, reminds us that Marx spoke of the proletariat as "the lowest stratum of our present society," those "who have nothing to lose but their chains," and that he said that "along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this, too, grows the revolt of the working class." It is true that Marx said these things and said them with emphasis. But he did not wish to make any rigid or dogmatic definition of "the proletariat" and much that he has said pointed to an entirely different conception than would be gained from these quotations.

In speaking of "the lowest stratum of society" Marx was thinking, not of a community divided into numerous strata, but chiefly of three classes, the large capitalists, the workers, and the middle class. It was the lowest of these three, and not the lowest of their many subdivisions, that he had in mind. From the first the whole Socialist movement has recognized the almost complete hopelessness, as an aid to Socialism, of the lowest stratum in the narrow sense, of what is called the "lumpen proletariat," the bulk of the army of beggars and toughs. Mr. Duchez undoubtedly would have accepted this point, for he wishes to say that the Socialist movement must be advanced by the organization of unions not among this class, but among the next lowest, economically speaking, the great mass of unskilled workers. This argument, also, that the unskilled have a better strategic position than the skilled on account of their solidarity and unity is surely a doubtful one. European Socialists, as a rule, have reached the opposite conclusion, namely, that it is the comparatively skilled workers, like those of the railways, who possess the only real possibility of leading in a general strike movement (see Chapters [V] and [VI]).

FOOTNOTES:

[234] H. G. Wells, "This Misery of Boots," p. 34.