THE everlasting antagonism between capital and labor, and the tyranny which the one exercises over the other, are sufficiently interesting subjects; but they are so difficult, and the remedies proposed for their evils are so vast and sweeping, that the study of a life-time devoted to these questions would not be enough to entitle any one to dogmatise upon them. The problem of Socialism is “menacing, manifold, and multiform,” and one not lightly to be entered upon, and all I shall attempt in this paper is to touch the skirts of the subject, by mentioning the different views which Socialists of light and leading have recently held.
Of course, Socialism is no new thing. The Republic of Plato, written more than two thousand years ago; the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, written in the sixteenth century of our era, alike testify to the zeal with which the best and wisest men of all ages have applied themselves to the solution of the Social problem, though the problem still remains for us to solve. But not to weary my readers with a long list of names, I will merely mention those Socialists who have lived within our own memory. There are many men who maintain that there is no question to be solved, and that individual freedom is the one thing needful to secure health, wealth, and happiness to all the human race. These are they of the Manchester School of Political Economy, and the kindred Birmingham type of politicians, who firmly believe that the dawn of the millennium is only retarded by the obstructive inertia of the House of Lords and the hereditary monarchy. But I do not think that this can be considered the correct view of the situation, or that we should easily assent to the comfortable doctrine that the peers alone are responsible for the presence in the Social body of two such cancerous plague-spots as poverty and prostitution.
The most prominent figure among the Socialists of the present day1 is, undoubtedly, that of Karl Marx, the father of the International, and the author of the work entitled “Capital,” a most powerful and effective attack upon the rights of capital, as at present understood. Assuming only what all English economists have taken for granted, namely, that the value of any object is measured merely by the amount of labor expended in its production, he shows conclusively that the landlord and the capitalist between them manage to deprive the laborer of more than half the result of his toil; and that the laborer, every working day of his life, earns his wages by the result of his morning, while all the rest of the day he is toiling, not for himself, but for others, who fraudulently deprive him of all his afternoon’s earnings. This is a view of the case which the ordinary laborer finds some difficulty in understanding, but when he does realise it, it is hardly to be wondered at that his afternoon’s work is rather more irksome to him than it was before. He learns that if he had free access to land and implements of labor, he would earn more than double his present wages, and he naturally feels indignant that the landlord should monopolise the one and the capitalist the other. Of course, the two cases are different, as the land is not the result of labor, while capital is; but the capitalist generally employs wealth which is not the result of his own labor, but of that of other people. He may urge that it represents the labor of his ancestors, and that he enjoys its powers by right of inheritance; but to this it is replied by Lassalle that the labor of his ancestors accounts for a very small portion of their capital, which is chiefly the result of the labor of workmen, to whom they in their time paid inadequate wages in order that their own capital might grow and multiply. The great point which Marx insists upon is that the average time which the average workman spends on the production of an article is the exact measure of the exchange value of that article, and that the workman is entitled to the full amount of the value with which his work has invested it. That he does not get this he shows to be simply owing to the fact that the land and the implements of labor are monopolised by others, who will only allow him to have access to them on their own conditions. These conditions are that the laborer shall be content with such wages as will keep him and his family alive, leaving to the monopolist more than half the profits of his work. This is what Lassalle calls the iron law of wages, and though at different times and in different countries it varies according to different standards of comfort among the people, yet the truth remains that wages are always fixed by the lowest amount which the laborer will consent to take, and below which he will refuse to work at all. The remedy for this state of things is to be found in the organisation of labor by the State, which is to take into its own hands all the capital of the nation, and to see that the laborer who is judged “worthy of his hire,” shall have reason to “be content with his wages.” The objection generally brought against the possibility of successfully carrying out so vast a scheme is partly met by pointing to the organisation of the Post Office, which is already managed by the State with great success. At the same time it would be more difficult to regulate satisfactorily the scale of payments, since the law of supply and demand would no longer provide a test, and Mr. Fawcett would not be able to refuse to raise the postmen’s wages (as he lately did), merely on the ground that if they were not satisfied he could easily find plenty of people ready to take their places. The point to be considered would be the value of the work done, not the readiness of other unfortunates to do it on starvation wages. This adds to the difficulty of the problem, but does not make it insoluble.
The theory of Lassalle differs somewhat from that of Marx. He maintains that the antagonism between capital and labor is to be put an end to by making all laborers capitalists. The duty of the State is not only to keep order, but to help the progress of civilisation. Is it not to the intervention of the State, he asks, that we owe roads, harbors, telegraphs and schools? The State should grant subsidies to co-operative societies, and he calculates that twenty-five millions would be all that Prussia (his country) would want in order to start this system in the towns, and gradually spread it to the agricultural districts. Lassalle seems to have been a wonderful man, and to have exercised an immense influence on all with whom he came in contact, including in this number Prince Bismarck himself. If he had not been killed in a duel arising out of a love affair, this form of Socialism might perhaps have been tried before now in Prussia.
But leaving the Collectivist school of Socialism, let us look for a moment at the proposals of the opposing party of the Anarchists. Bakunin, the Russian Nihilist, is the chief exponent of their doctrines, and a school which includes Prince Krapotkin among its teachers may not be hastily condemned as immoral and wicked. And yet it is very hard for us to see things from their point of view; and the most sober utterances of Bakunin are apt to appear exceedingly like the ravings of a madman. He glorifies the brigand as the true hero, the people’s avenger, the irreconcilable enemy of the State. He wishes utterly to destroy all existing institutions without any exception whatever, and to reduce society to a condition of “amorphism,” as he calls it, in which no social forms at all will be apparent, and from which a better state of things may be trusted gradually to crystallise. It is a crime even to attempt to foresee what will be the organisation of this new society in the future. “All arguments about the future,” he says, “are criminal, because they are a hindrance to destruction pure and simple, and impede the march of the revolution.” “While not approving of any other agency but that of destruction, we declare that the forms which it may take are very various—poison, the dagger, or the running noose. The revolution sanctifies them all.” This was written before dynamite had taken its place in the revolutionary arsenal, and it now seems almost to have superseded all other weapons. To bring about “pan-destruction,” which extraordinary word he chooses in order to express his most cherished design, what is first necessary is, according to him, “a series of attempts and audacious, and even mad, enterprises, terrifying those in power, and awakening the people until they gain faith in the triumph of the revolution.” His writings teem with expressions of this sort. He is possessed with the idea of destruction like a man possessed of the devil, and yet only as a means to some brighter hereafter which a new generation will enjoy. I will give one more extract, in which he describes the ideal revolutionary, the apostle of the sacred cause of destruction. “The revolutionary is a devoted man. He has no right to have either personal interests, or business, or feelings, or property. He must devote himself utterly to one exclusive interest, to one sole thought, to one passion alone, the revolution. He has but one aim, but one study, and it is destruction. For that, and for that alone, he studies mechanical and physical science, chemistry, and sometimes medicine. He scrutinises with the same purpose men and the characters of men, and all the arrangements and conditions of the social order. He despises and detests the existing morality. For him all is moral which favors the triumph of the Revolution, all is immoral and criminal which hinders it. Between him and society there is an incessant and irreconcilable death-struggle. He must be ready to die, or to undergo torture, or to slay with his own hands all those who oppose the Revolution. If he has in this world any ties of relationship, friendship, or love, so much the worse for him. He is no true revolutionary if he allows affection to arrest his arm. And yet he must live in the midst of society, feigning to be that which he is not. He must penetrate every where, in the upper classes as in the middle, in the shop, in the church, in the official world, in the army, in the literary class, in the secret police, and even in the imperial palace. He must draw up the list of those who are condemned to death, and execute sentence upon them according to their different misdeeds. No new member may be received into the association without unanimity, or before he has approved himself, not by words but by deeds. Every member must have at his disposal several revolutionaries of the second and third degree, not fully initiated. He must look on them as part of the revolutionary capital placed in his command, and it is his duty to expend them economically and in such fashion as to get the greatest possible profit from them. The most precious element are the women who are fully initiated, and who completely accept our programme. Without their help we could do nothing.”
These extracts from the writings of Bakunin will give some idea of the spirit and temper of the Anarchists, and we know that their devotion and courage are quite as strong as their opinions. Their own lives are never allowed to weigh a feather in the balance, and this partly explains their indifference to the lives of other people. St. Paul’s account of his own perils and sufferings at the hands of his persecutors is not the least exaggeration of those of the Anarchists at the hands of the authorities. Every official hand is against them. Their life is one long act of running the gauntlet, and immense is the yearly tribute which is yielded by their ranks to Siberia or the scaffold. They penetrate Russia from end to end, and permeate society from the top to the bottom, taking for their watchword “Land and Liberty,” and preaching always to all men their right to both, while faster than Siberia can claim its victims new recruits are converted to the cause.
Having thus given the barest possible outline of the leading ideas of the two opposing sections of Socialism, I will just touch on the two different programmes which are set forth by the members of the section which altogether repudiates Anarchy. They are summed up in two maxims. The first is that of Cabet and is as follows: “From every man according to his ability, to every man according to his wants.” This treats society as a family, where, as a matter of course, the strong support the weak, and each does his best to promote the general good of all. The other maxim is that of Saint-Simon: “To each according to his capacity, to each capacity according to its work.” This aims merely at securing to every man the full reward of his labor, and has not the high ideal of society which appears in the other, but would probably be found easier of application to practical purposes, at least until individuals are educated to a higher conception of their duties to the society in which they live. But unless one of these two maxims is adopted and actually carried out before very long, we may look forward to seeing a rapid spread of the principles of the Anarchists with their comfortable doctrine that destruction itself is infinitely preferable to the existing social order. The present state of luxury among the wealthy classes would be enough to condemn any society as utterly rotten. As Wordsworth says: “Plain living and high thinking are no more;” but it is in the power of each one of us to revive them as far as we personally are concerned. Rich wines and rich meats, even if they do not, lead to drunkenness and gluttony, unfit a man for higher thoughts. As a proof of this we may note the revulsion of feeling which is experienced when the mind’s eye proceeds to contemplate the feasters at a great City dinner after studying Hamlet’s rhapsody on man; “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a God! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!” Compare with this description the attitude of the guests of the City companies with their heads well down to the turtle soup. Alas! comparisons are odious indeed. For my own part, I think that the existing society is so bad that, if things were reduced to chaos and then reorganised, the result could not fail to be an improvement, but I cling to the idea that we may realise this improvement without going through the preliminary of chaos and “pan-destruction,” which would certainly be a very painful necessity for us all. We can do very little to help or hinder the solution of the great question, to hasten or to postpone the reconciliation between capital and labor, but I think that, however little it may be, we can all do something. If all who look forward to a better state of things would resolve that it should be realised at least in their own individual lives, I think we should gradually get within a more measurable distance of the millennium. The way to realise it seems to me to be by treating every one with whom we come in contact, as if he or she were a member of our own family. This would deprive even the present system of competition of half its accursed sting; over-reaching, and extortion of the uttermost farthing are not usually considered laudable virtues when practised between brothers. We recognise in theory the brotherhood of the whole human race. Let us, each for himself, try to reduce his theory to practice.
1 Since these lines were written, Karl Marx has become of the past.
J. L. Joynes
Our Corner, May 1, 1882, pp. 267-272