Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

With "the national efficiency" in view, Mr. Webb asks the British government to take up the policy of a "national minimum," including not only a minimum below which wages are not to fall, but also a similar minimum of leisure, sanitation, and education.[67] Mr. Edward Devine, editor of the leading philanthropic and reform journal in America, the Survey, outlines an identical policy and also insists like Mr. Webb that the Socialist can lay no exclusive claim to it.

"The social economist [i.e. reformer]," writes Mr. Devine, "is sometimes confused with the Utopian [i.e. Socialist]. They are, however, very distinct types of reformers. The Utopian dreams of ideals. The social economist seeks to establish the normal.... The social worker is primarily concerned, not with the lifting of humanity to a higher level, but with eradicating the maladjustments and abnormalities, the needless inequalities, which prevent our realizing our own reasonable standards."

Speaking in the name of American reformers in general, Mr. Devine demands for the lower levels of society "normal standards" of life, which are equivalent to Mr. Webb's national minimum, and definitely denies the applicability of "the question-begging epithet of Socialism which is hurled at all the reformers engaged in such work."

"Whether it belongs to the Socialist program," Mr. Devine objects, "is a question so far as we can see of interest only to the Socialists. Our advocacy of such laws as we enumerate has no Socialist origin." He claims that the "expenditures legitimately directed towards the removal of adverse social conditions, are not uneconomic and unproductive," and that "they do not represent a mere indulgence of altruistic sentiment," but are "investments"; of which prison reforms and the expenditures for the prevention of tuberculosis are examples.[68]

Another phrase for the proposed saving of the national labor resources and the introduction of minimum standards in its philanthropic aspect is "the abolition of poverty." When he speaks of this as a definite and by no means a distant reform, the reformer refers to that extreme form of poverty, so widely prevalent to-day, which results in the physical deterioration and the industrial inefficiency of a large part of the population.

This sort of poverty is a burden on industry and the capitalists, and Mr. Lloyd George was widely applauded when he said that it can and must be done away with. He has calculated, too, that this abolition can be accomplished at half the cost of the annual increase in armaments.

"This is a War Budget," said Mr. Lloyd George in presenting the reform program of 1910. "It is for waging implacable war against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step toward the time when poverty, and the wretchedness and the human degradation which always follows in its camp, will be as remote from the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests."

Mr. H. G. Wells, who has been a leading figure in the British reform world and in the Fabian Society for many years, speaks on this reform movement not merely as a keen outside observer. As an advocate of more radical measures, he argues that there is nothing Socialistic about "the national minimum." This "philanthropic administrative Socialism," as Mr. Wells calls it, is very remote, he says, from the spirit of his own.[69] Yet, critical as Mr. Wells is, he also advocates a policy that could be summed up in the single phrase, "industrial efficiency." "The advent of a strongly Socialistic government would mean no immediate revolutionary changes at all," he says. "There would be no doubt an educational movement to increase the economic value and productivity of the average citizen of the next generation, and legislation upon the lines laid down by the principle of the 'minimum wage' to check the waste of our national resources by destructive employment. Also a shifting of the burden of taxation of enterprise to rent would begin." (My italics.) The Liberals who are already setting these reforms on foot disclaim any connection whatever with Socialism, but Mr. Wells argues that they do not realize the real nature of their policy.

The establishment of this paternal "State Socialism," whether based on a philanthropic "national minimum" or a scientific policy of "industrial efficiency," many other "Socialists" besides those of Great Britain consider to be the chief task of Socialism itself in our generation. Among the latter was the late Edmond Kelly, a member of the Socialist party in this country at the time of his death, who, in his posthumous work, "Twentieth Century Socialism," has summed up his political faith in much the same way as the anti-Socialist reformer might have done. He says that three of the four chief objects of Socialism are the organization of society, first "to prevent that overwork and unemployment which lead to drunkenness, pauperism, prostitution, and crime"; second, "to preserve the resources of the country"; and third, "to produce with the greatest economy, with the greatest efficiency."[70] Yet Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, as well as Mr. Roosevelt, agree to all three of these policies. They are precisely what the leading Socialists have called "State Socialism."

A part of the working people, also, are disposed to subordinate their own conceptions of what is just, in spite of their own better judgment, to an exclusive longing for an immediate trial of this kind of State benevolence. This is expressed in the widely used phrase, "every man to have the right to work and live,"—employed editorially, for example, by Mr. Berger, now Socialist Congressman. What is demanded by this principle is not a greater proportion of the national income or an increasing share of the control over the national government, but the "State Socialist" remedies, employment, and the minimum wage. In its origin this is the begging on the part of the economically lowest element, a class which Henry George well remarks has been degraded by poverty until it considers that "the chance to labor is a boon."