A Critical Examination of Socialism | Page 6

of
socialism.
CHAPTER XVI
THE SOCIAL POLICY OF THE FUTURE
THE MORAL OF THIS BOOK
This book, though consisting of negative criticism and analysis of facts,
and not trenching on the domain of practical policy and constructive
suggestion, aims at facilitating a rational social policy by placing in
their true perspective the main statical facts and dynamic forces of the
modern economic world, which socialism merely confuses.
In pointing out the limitations of labour as a productive agency, and the
dependence of the labourers on a class other than their own, it does not
seek to represent the aspirations of the former to participate in the
benefits of progress as illusory, but rather to place such aspirations on a
scientific basis, and so to remove what is at present the principal
obstacle that stands in the way of a rational and scientific social policy.

A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SOCIALISM
CHAPTER I
THE HISTORICAL BEGINNING OF SOCIALISM AS AN
OSTENSIBLY SCIENTIFIC THEORY
Socialism, whatever may be its more exact definition, stands for an

organisation of society, and more especially for an economic
organisation, radically opposed to, and differing from, the organisation
which prevails to-day. So much we may take for granted; but here,
before going further, it is necessary to free ourselves from a very
common confusion. When socialism, as thus defined, is spoken of as a
thing that exists--as a thing that has risen and is spreading--two ideas
are apt to suggest themselves to the minds of all parties equally, of
which one coincides with facts, while the other does not, having,
indeed, thus far at all events, no appreciable connection with them; and
it is necessary to get rid of the false idea, and concern ourselves only
with the true.
The best way in which I can make my meaning clear will be by
referring to a point with regard to which the earlier socialistic thinkers
may be fairly regarded as accurate and original critics. The so-called
orthodox economists of the school of Mill and Ricardo accepted the
capitalistic system as part of the order of nature, and their object was
mainly to analyse the peculiar operations incident to it. The abler
among the socialists were foremost in pointing out, on the contrary, a
fact which now would not be denied by anybody: that capitalism in its
present form is a comparatively modern phenomenon, owing its origin
historically to the dissolution of the feudal system, and not having
entered on its adolescence, or even on its independent childhood, till a
time which may be roughly indicated as the middle of the eighteenth
century. The immediate causes of its then accelerated development
were, as the socialists insist, the rapid invention of new kinds of
machinery, and more especially that of steam as a motor power, which
together inaugurated a revolution in the methods of production
generally. Production on a small scale gave way to production on a
large. The independent weavers, for example, each with his own loom,
were wholly unable to compete with the mechanisms of the new factory;
their looms, by being superseded, were virtually taken away from them;
and these men, formerly their own masters, working with their own
implements, and living by the sale of their own individual products,
were compelled to pass under the sway of a novel class, the capitalists;
to work with implements owned by the capitalists, not themselves; and
to live by the wages of their labour, not by their sale of the products of

it.
Such, as the socialists insist, was the rise of the capitalistic system; and
when once it had been adequately organised, as it first was, in England,
it proceeded, they go on to observe, to spread itself with astonishing
rapidity, all other methods disappearing before it, through their own
comparative inefficiency. But when socialists or their opponents turn
from capitalism to socialism, and speak of how socialism has risen and
spread likewise, their language, as thus applied, has no meaning
whatever unless it is interpreted in a totally new sense. For in the sense
in which socialists speak of the rise and spread of capitalism, socialism
has, up to the present time, if we except a number of small and
unsuccessful experiments, never risen or spread or had any existence at
all. Capitalism rose and spread as an actual working system, which
multiplied and improved the material appliances of life in a manner
beyond the reach of the older system displaced by it. It realised results
of which previously mankind had hardly dreamed. Socialism, on the
other hand, has risen and spread thus far, not as a system which is
threatening to supersede capitalism by its actual success as an
alternative system of production, but merely as a theory or belief that
such an alternative is possible. Let