Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

Indeed the word "Socialism" has been extended in England to include measures far less radical than those contemplated by the present government. The Fabian Society, the chief advocate of "municipal Socialism" and a professed and recognized Socialist organization, considers even the post office and factory legislation as being installments of Socialism, while the Labour Party would restrict the term to the nationalization or municipalization of industries—but the difference is not of very great importance. The latter class of reform will undoubtedly mark a revolution in the policy of the British government, but, as Kautsky says, this revolution may only serve "to Prussianize it," i.e. to introduce "State Socialism."

"The best government," says Mr. Webb, "is no longer 'that which governs least,' but 'that which can safely and advantageously administer most.'"

"Wherever rent and interest are being absorbed under public control for public purposes, wherever the collective organization of the community is being employed in place of individual efforts, wherever in the public interest, the free use of private land or capital is being further restrained—there one more step toward the complete realization of the Socialist Ideal is being taken."

The fight of the British Socialists has thus been directed from the first almost exclusively against the abstraction, "individualism," and not against the concrete thing, the capitalist class. John Morley had said that the early Liberals, Cobden, Bright, and others, were systematic and constructive, because they "surveyed society and institutions as a whole," because they "connected their advocacy of political and legal changes with theories of human nature," because they "considered the great art of government in connection with the character of man, his proper education, his potential capacities," and could explain "in the large dialect of a definite scheme what were their aims and whither they were going."

"Is there," Mr. Morley had asked, "any approach to such a body of systematic political thought in our own day?" Mr. Webb announced that the Fabians proposed to fill in this void. It was primarily system and order rather than any particular principle at which he aimed. The keynote of his system was to be opposition to the individualistic theory of the philosophic Liberals whom the Fabians hoped to succeed rather than opposition to the principles of capitalism, which lend themselves equally well either to an individualistic or to a collectivistic application.

Just as Mr. Webb is the leading publicist, so Mr. Bernard Shaw is the leading writer, among the exponents of Fabian Socialism. It is now more than twenty years since he also began idealizing the State, and he is doing the same thing to-day. "Who is the people? What is the people?" he asked in the Fabian Essays in 1889. "Tom we know, and Dick; also Harry; but solely and separately as individuals: as a trinity they have no existence. Who is their trustee, their guardian, their man of business, their manager, their secretary, even their stockholder? The Socialist is stopped dead at the threshold of practical action by this difficulty, until he bethinks himself of the State as the representative and trustee of the people."[128] It will be noticed that Mr. Shaw does not say the State may become the representative and trustee of the people, but that it is their representative. "Hegel," he continues, "expressly taught the conception of the perfect State, and his disciples saw that nothing in the nature of things made it possible or even difficult to make the existing State if not absolutely perfect, at least trustworthy;" and then, after alluding with the greatest brevity to the anti-democratic elements of the British government, Mr. Shaw proceeds to develop at great length the wonderful possibilities of the existing State as the practically trustworthy trustee, guardian, man of business, manager, secretary, and stockholder of the people.[129]

Yet Mr. Shaw says that a Social-Democrat is one "who desires through democracy to gather the whole people into the State, so that the State may be trusted with the rent of the country, and finally with the land and capital and the organization of national industry." He reasons that the transition to Socialism through gradual extensions of democracy and State action had seriously begun forty-five years before the writing of the Essays, that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century (when scarcely one sixth of the adult male population of Great Britain had a vote, and when, through the unequal election districts, the country squires practically controlled the situation—W. E. W.). In Mr. Shaw's reasoning, as in that of many other British Socialists, a very little democracy goes a long way.[130]

Later Mr. Shaw repudiated democracy altogether, saying that despotism fails only for want of a capable benevolent despot, and that what we want nowadays is not a new or modern form of democracy, but only capable benevolent representatives. He shelved his hopes for the old ideal, government by the people, by opposing to it a new ideal of a very active and beneficent government for the people. In "Fabianism and the Empire" Shaw and his collaborators say frankly: "The nation makes no serious attempt to democratize its government, because its masses are still in so deplorable a condition that democracy, in the popular sense of government by the masses, is clearly contrary to common sense."[131]

Mr. H. G. Wells, long a member of the Fabian Society, has well summed up the character of what he calls this "opportunist Socialist group" which has done so much to shape the so-called British Socialism. He says that Mr. Sidney Webb was, during the first twenty years of his career "the prevailing Fabian."