A Critical Examination of Socialism | Page 6

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each with his own loom, were wholly unable to compete with the mechanisms of the new factory; their looms, by being superseded, were virtually taken away from them; and these men, formerly their own masters, working with their own implements, and living by the sale of their own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 us take any country or any city we please--for example, let us say Chicago, in which socialism is said to be achieving its most hopeful or most formidable triumphs--and we shall look in vain for a sign that the general productive process has been modified by socialistic principles in any particular whatsoever. Socialism has produced resolutions at endless public meetings; it has produced discontent and strikes; it has hampered production constantly. But socialism has never inaugurated an improved chemical process; it has never bridged an estuary or built an ocean liner; it has never produced or cheapened so much as a lamp or a frying-pan. It is a theory that such things could be accomplished by the practical application of its principles; but, except for the abortive experiments to which I have referred already, it is thus far a theory only, and it is as a theory only that we can examine it.
What, then, as a theory, are the distinctive features of socialism? Here is a question which, if we address it indiscriminately to all the types of people who now call themselves socialists, seems daily more