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SEVENTH SERIES
VOLUME LVI.

No. 3560 September 28, 1912

FROM BEGINNING
VOL. CCLXXIV

CONTENTS

1. The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Socialism and Syndicalism as a
Proposed Substitute. By W. H. Mallock

II. Two Modern Plays. By George Lowther

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NATIONAL REVIEW 771

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE REVIEW 778 III. The Staying Guest. Chapters V and VI. By Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick. (To be continued.)

TIMES 784

IV. The Franchise Bill and Women's Suffrage. By W. H. Dickinson CONTEMPORARY REVIEW 794

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THE INTELLECTUAL BANKRUPTCY OF SOCIALISM

AND SYNDICALISM AS A PROPOSED SUBSTITUTE.

All schemes of extreme social reform have, for sixty years at all events, claimed to be forms of Socialism. But, owing partly to the criticism of thinkers, and partly to that of events, Socialism has become of late, to an appreciable degree discredited; and the ideas and desires of many of its most ardent advocates have sought to reembody themselves in what claims to be a new creed, different from though kindred to it, which goes by the name of Syndicalism.

I propose in these few pages to summarize the fundamental features of Socialism, considered as a theory and also as a working scheme, as it was under the influence of Marx, and as it has come to be to-day; and then to point out that Syndicalism, in so far as it means anything coherent at all, is nothing but Socialism reduced to its most degraded form by a rejection of everything which, in the course of two generations, the more competent Socialistic thinkers have learnt, and by a return to the lowest of those crudities which they have now agreed in repudiating.

The Evolution of Socialism as a Theory since the Days of 'Marx.

The sole practical object in respect of which Socialism is peculiar being the redistribution of purely material wealth on principles of equality which have never as yet been realized, it is plain that for Socialists the whole of their constructive proposals must turn on their theory of how wealth is produced.

Accordingly, we find, as a prominent fact of history, that the early Socialistic experiments made (for the most part by European settlers in America) between the close of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century,

were based on the idea that the one and only agency involved in the production of material wealth is labor. This idea, however, was hardly more than a loosely assumed axiom till Kar! Marx, in a work (published 1865) which has since been called "the Bible of Socialism," claimed to have raised it to the rank of an exact scientific formula, defining "labor" as that kind of manual effort which the masses of mankind, under the existing capitalistic system, sell for wages to a small minority of employers.

Now in favor of this doctrine there are two things to be said.

One is that, if it be once accepted, the conclusions which it aims at establishing follow from it with instantaneous certainty.

The other is that, as applied to societies of a very primitive kind, it is true; for in such societies nobody, except as a manual laborer, takes any part in the productive process at all.

But, in spite of its unrivalled utility as a basis for the Socialistic gospel, and in spite of the fact that, as applied to certain actual conditions, it may be true, it has not escaped the criticisms of Socialistic thinkers themselves. For although it may be a sufficient explanation of wealth-production among men in their social infancy (when the total product is small and of a very rudimentary kind) it offers no explanation at all of what is to-day, for Socialists as for everybody else, the crucial fact to be explained. This is the fact that, in countries such as our own, the amount of wealth produced per head of the population annually is now incomparably greater, not only than it is amongst savage or semicivilized tribes, but than it was even in

countries like our own at the close of the eighteenth century.

Accordingly, during the last twenty years, gradually at first, and of late with marked rapidity, the Socialistic theory of production has undergone a fundamental change. Nearly all its exponents who have any pretensions to be thinkers have by this time practically repudiated the doctrine of Marx altogether, and vie with each other in proclaiming their full recognition of the fact that the enhanced production of wealth in the modern world is not due to the labor of the average man alone, but to the co-operation with such labor of activities of a different kind, which are found to an efficient degree in exceptional men only.

Thus Mr. Sidney Webb in a remarkable passage, after advocating, as all Socialists do, the extinction of private ownership in any of the means of production, goes on to observe that the accomplishment of this result would be no more than half the battle. After all private monopolies of a material kind had been abolished, one other monopoly, he said, would still remain to be dealt with-the most obstinate and fundamental of all; this being, to use his own words, "the natural monopoly of business ability, or of that special energy with which some men are born," and in which the majority of men are lacking.

Here we have an example of genuine intellectual progress of theory gradually adjusting itself to the complexity of actual facts. But if serious Socialistic thought has really thus arrived at a recognition that the faculties involved in the production of wealth to-day are of many kinds, and not of one kind, and that these as embodied in individuals are highly unequal in their efficiency, it might seem that the result would be abandonment of the Socialistic scheme altogether. For if, as is assumed by Marx and by all Socialists

likewise, wealth is due to individuals. in proportion as they contribute to its production, and if it be now admitted that some are indefinitely more productive than others, what becomes of the claim for an approximate equality of reward?

Modern Socialists are well aware of this difficulty; and the whole history of recent Socialistic thought may be described as little else than a series of attempts to get rid of it, and to reconcile a frank recognition of the inequality of individual contribution with the old demand that the total shall be apportioned equally.

These are all reducible to one or other of two arguments. One of these, however, is not so much an argument as a retort. We may dispose of it in a few words, and will then pass on to the other.

The argument which I have described as a retort may be briefly summed up as follows. When various kinds of effort, from that of the great thinker down to that of the wheeler of a wheel-barrow, are equally necessary to the production of a given result, each of these produces an equal part of it. Thus, if common labor, represented by 1000 laborers, produces some product which is worth £1000, and if subsequently the same labor, directed by two of "the monopolists of business ability," results in the production of a product the value of which is £2000, the increment, though it may seem at first sight to be due to ability only, is really due to labor, in precisely the same degree, though the amount and quality of this may have undergone no change whatever; for though labor, had there been no ability to direct it, could certainly not have produced the increased total by itself, ability would have been equally barren if it had not had the labor to direct. Now, whatever other defects may be latent in this argument, it is perfectly useless for the actual pur

pose in view, not because it does not lead to the particular conclusion stated, but because this conclusion is quite other than the one desired. For when Socialists desire to justify a substantial equality of distribution, they mean a distribution which is equal in respect of individual men, whereas this argument relates not to men, but to faculties. Let it be granted that, in the case described, the amount which is due to labor is a full half of the additional £1000, and that ability, however exceptional, has no right to more than £500; yet £500 in the one case would be divided amongst 1000 men and in the other case amongst only two. Thus equality, as between individuals, would be just as far off as .ever. The conclusion desired by Socialists is here not so much as touched.

The other of the two arguments, which alone represents the serious movement of modern Socialistic speculation, is of a very different character. It is really directed towards the result desired, and has, however illusory, a genuine philosophical basis. It sets out with a consideration of the various wealth-producing faculties, not as generalized forces, but as forces embod ied in individual human units; it admits that of these units a few are indefinitely more productive than the many; and that, if we accept as realities the data of crude experience, the principal producers of to-day are a minority and not the masses. But, while admitting these facts, it endeavors to get behind them. It urges that, however great and however necessary to the community may be the special productive energies which exceptional men monopolize, these men would not be what they are, if it had not been for the course of sociological evolution which preceded them, and the mass of general conditions by which, ever since their birth, they have been surrounded. Hence it is urged

that though the exceptional man in industry must no doubt be recognized as the cause of exceptionally large products, yet of these he is, in Herbert Spencer's phrase, “the proximate cause only": the true producer being those conditions and antecedents from which he, in common with the least efficient of his fellow citizens, has sprung.

Now that this line of argument has certain facts at the back of it is obvious, but before we are in a position to judge what it is really worth, we must first note that if it leads to any practical conclusion even remotely resembling that which Mr. Webb and his friends draw from them, both the facts and the conclusion in question are very incompletely stated. In the first place

as to the facts. The exceptionally effi. cient producer in any given community owes his "special activity or energy," not to the generalized conditions of that community only. He owes it to the human race from the earliest beginnings of humanity; to the geological development of the earth, and to the constitution of the solar system. To say, therefore, that such a man, though the proximate, is not the real producer of the products which result from his activity, and would not be produced without it, is merely to say that, in order to work at anything, he must firstly have come into existence, and must secondly have a world to work in.

But the matter does not end here. This is no more than the beginning of it. If the exceptional producer has really no claim to his own products, because he has no claim to any property in his special industrial efficiency, he has similarly no claim to any property in his own general character, nor is he the proper object of any of those feelings, whether of affection or otherwise, which ever since the human race began human beings have entertained for one another, and without which human life would be empty. In short, if the the

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