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CHAPTER III

SOCIALISM: ITS ORGANIZATION AND IDEA

T

THE COMMUNITY V. CAPITALISM

HE picture of Capitalism which I have in my mind is that of an economic state, born in due time, working out its utility and passing away, also in due time, to give place to a better. In its childhood it explored and competed; in its adult years it organized and combined. In its childhood it exploited nature; in its adult years it threatens to exploit the community. In its childhood it possessed itself of a power which, growing with it, cannot be left in its adult years solely in its own control. Even in its childhood it showed a predatory nature, and it is now over a century ago that legislation had to cut its claws and protect weak youth from it. Indeed, State action curbing the control of Capitalism over human beings, protecting the weak, limiting overtime, ending destructive factory conditions, settling hours and wages, preventing the workers being cheated, has been one of the marked characteristics of the century. Industrial legislation has grown pace by pace with Capitalism itself as though Capitalism were a dangerous animal whose increasing power necessitated a continuous shortening and strengthening of the chain that confined it. And this curbing action of the political and legislating authority has been accompanied by similar protective steps taken by

both workers-Trade Unionism-and consumersCo-operation. These measures, and the movement they have marked, have been the most characteristic features of politics and social philosophy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Finally there came a movement to supplant Capitalism altogether, by organizing communally the services which Capitalism performs or ought to perform. This was the Socialist Movement. It has gone through several phases of expression and activity, for it was a historical growth and not a mathematical discovery.

At first the revolt against Capitalism was moral and social. This new rich class that had risen from the midst of commoners, that made cotton and iron and woollen goods by machines in great factories, and that practised doctrines of pure materialist wealth getting, not only with no respect for, but with an evident menace against, the old order of the squirearchy and the landed aristocracy, was an evil in the eyes of polite Society, and the prejudice against it is well seen in the novels of the Victorian time. Its forceful virtues are also seen there. That kind of prejudice was, from its very nature, a passing phase. When the new class got rich, the county families would find cause to yield to its wealth, and coronets could be purchased by it. A truce by the desire of both sides was only a matter of time. Society always surrenders to wealth, pockets its pride and its tastes, and tries to assimilate it. If the fathers are coarse and vulgar, the children may be veneered.

This social opposition had a better expression than mere prejudice. In a little corner of the old order was a feeling of kindly human responsibility.

It may have been as stilted as the manners of the time and as incapable of surviving, but in its heart it was good. It may have been blind to its own imperfections, but it professed a fine consideration for human beings, and when that was outraged by a new class, and in ways that had nothing to do with land or government, the old was up in protest. It saw in the factory populations that were being gathered into cesspools from hill and dale, cottage and workhouse, in the unadulterated materialism of political economy, in the use of "hands" for profit making without regard for the "hands" themselves, something very devilish, and it set itself to oppose the growth of the new order.

The opposition of prejudice was perhaps the most evident, but that produced no movement, only a stupid boycott and a language of contempt best seen in the political Toryism of the counties. The opposition of heart was different and is best studied in St. Simonism, which was an application of aristocratic principles to the new methods of capitalist production, or in Owenism, a more robust affair, which was an attempt to humanize the new methods, developing, in the end, into schemes for controlling them in the interests of the workingclass community, or still later in Christian Socialism, which was an effort to retain in economic relations some of the sweetness and light of the Christian spirit.

ST. SIMON

Comte Henri de St. Simon belonged to the French aristocracy and was born in 1760 in Paris. He was of the romantically quaint type of humanity,

He was visited

more common then than now. in a dream by his ancestor Charlemagne, who told him that his life was to be notable, and he instructed his valet to address him, the first thing every morning, with the reminder: "Remember, Monsieur le Comte, that you have great things to do." He fought in the American army of Independence against the British, returned to France, and took advantage of the Revolution to engage in very profitable land speculation for the purpose of making himself independent so that he might pursue his projects free of economic

cares.

Then he engaged in studies and experiments that dissipated his fortune, and he ended his days in poverty.

In his day only a glimmering of a better order of Society was possible, because the knowledge of social growth which came a generation or so later, was not at command. His instinct was sound; his scheme was fantastic. He would put men of science into the position of the medieval church, and the available labour of the community was to be organized and controlled by them. Drifting more and more into the simple ethics of Christianity, he proclaimed the principle of brotherhood as the regenerating conception for society, and urged that the condition of the poor was the grand point of attack which, when dealt with, would mean a complete change in communal relations. He was the grandfather of Positivism, and his social theories ended in the usual communities of the select and elect who found that it was difficult enough to think in common, but quite impossible to live in common. The reconstructor of economic organization was still groping in intense darkness. A light glimmered in

his own mind, he felt the spirit in which it had to be done, but his surroundings were hidden in night. He had to dream of his new order and take its architecture from the Charlemagnes who visited him in his slumbers.

ROBERT OWEN

Robert Owen had an advantage which can be seen in his more definite grip of the problem. He was born in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, in 1771; at the age of ten was behind a draper's counter; and in a few years found himself in Manchester, where his business sagacity and application were rewarded by the management of a cotton mill when he was but nineteen years of age. He was a great master employer with an eye closed to nothing that concerned the business in which he was engaged. In 1800, after having married the daughter of their proprietor, and having induced his Manchester partners to purchase them, he appeared as manager of the New Lanark cotton mills on the middle reaches of the Clyde, a little below the famous falls. There were 2,000 employees, one-fourth being children from the workhouses of Glasgow, Edinburgh and the neighbourhood, and the whole community, despite some kindly philanthropy on the part of the previous owner, was a sink of vicious habit and brutal conditions. It was an ordinary specimen of the first human productions of Capitalism. In this degradation the roots of Owenism embedded themselves, and from these roots sprang many plants of refreshment and healing. He was the first to show that humane treatment of labour produced those material profits with which the

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