The radical misconceptions above quoted, almost universal where Socialism is still young, are by no means confined to non-Socialists. Many writers who are supposed, in some degree at least, to voice the movement, are as guilty as those who wholly repudiate it. Mr. H. G. Wells, for instance, says that Socialism is a "system of ideas," and that "Socialism and the Socialist movement are two different things."[7] If Socialism is indeed no more than a "growing realization of constructive needs in every man's mind," and if every man is more or less a Socialist, then there is certainly no need for that antagonism to employers and property owners of which Mr. Wells complains.
Mr. Wells himself gives the true Socialist standpoint when he goes on to write that political parties must be held together "by interests and habits, not ideas." "Every party," he continues, "stands essentially for the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of classes in the existing community.... No class will abolish itself, materially alter its way or life, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is indisposed to coöperate in the unlimited socialization of any other class. In that capacity of aggression upon the other classes lies the essential driving force of modern affairs."[8]
The habits and interests of a large and growing part of the population in every modern country are developing a capacity for effective aggression against the class which controls industry and government. As this class will not socialize or abolish itself, the rest of the people, Socialists predict, will undertake the task. And the abolition of capitalism, they believe, will be a social revolution the like of which mankind has hitherto neither known nor been able to imagine.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] John Spargo, "Karl Marx," pp. 312, 331.
[2] John Spargo, op. cit., p. 116.
[3] John Spargo, op. cit., p. 73.
[4] The Independent (New York), commenting on the Socialist victory in the Milwaukee municipal elections of April, 1910.
[5] "Recent Socialist Literature," by John Graham Brooks, Atlantic Monthly, 1910. Page 283.
[6] Collier's Weekly, July 30, 1910.