"In their negative proposals the socialists and anarchists are
fairly agreed. It is in the metaphysical postulates of their
protest and in their constructive aims that they part company. Of
the two, the socialists are more widely out of touch with the
established order. They are also more hopelessly negative and
destructive in their ideals, as seen from the standpoint of the
established order." THORSTEIN VEBLEN in "The Theory of Business
Enterprise." Page 338.
To label a truth a truism is too often regarded as equivalent to placing
it in the category of the negligible. It is precisely the salient
obviousness, which makes a truth a truism, that places it in the direst
peril of oblivion in the stress of modern life. Such a truth was well
stated by Enrico Ferri, the Italian criminologist, in a recent lecture
before the students of the University of Naples:
"Without an ideal, neither an individual nor a collectivity can live,
without it humanity is dead or dying. For it is the fire of an ideal
which renders the life of each one of us possible, useful and fertile.
And only by its help can each one of us, in the longer or shorter course
of his or her existence, leave behind traces for the benefit of
fellow-beings."
Platitude though this may be, our greatest poets have not hesitated to
use their highest powers to impress it upon us. Robert Browning put this
truth into the mouth of Andrea del Sarto in one of the strongest lines
in all English verse,
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp."
Mr. George S. Street, in a very interesting paper in Putnam's Monthly
for November (1906), points out that the most significant contrast
between our time and Early Victorian days is a decrease in idealism.
"The most characteristic note," he tells us, "in the mental attitude of
the forties and fifties in England, and that in which they contrast most
sharply with our own times, was confidence.... In party politics this
confidence was almost without limit. There was a section of Conservatism
which really believed in things as they were, and thought it undesirable
to attempt any change for the better.... It was simply—I speak of a
section, not the party as a whole—the articulate emotion of privileged
and contented people and their parasites, and its denomination as
'stupid' was an accurate description, though hardly the brilliant
epigram for which, in our poverty of political wit, it has been taken.
On the other hand, there was a confident Liberalism which inspired a
whole party. Some wished to go faster, some slower, but all believed
sincerely in a broad scheme of domestic policy. They were to reform this
and that at home; they were to assist, or at least applaud, the
reforming of this and that abroad. So believing and intending, they
naturally conceived themselves made very little indeed lower than the
angels.
"The contrast with our own day hardly needs pointing. You might now
search long and in vain for a Conservative in public life who would not
admit that reforms are desirable or even urgent, though few might be
prepared with precise statements about particulars.... But their (the
Liberals') confidence in reform, in their ability to improve the body
politic by certain definite measures, is gone. The old Liberal spirit
animating a whole party is dead. It may seem an odd remark to make just
after the late election, but the evidence is abundant, and the
explanation simple. Domestic reform on a large scale and on
individualist lines has reached its limit; but to many Liberals, to many
eminent and authoritative Liberals, reform on socialist lines is
abhorrent.... Consequently there is a large party called Liberal, which,
through the faults of its opponents and the accidents of time, is
successful and has the high spirits of success, but is no more now than
it has been for twenty years a party of homogeneous confidence in
domestic reform, while on the world outside the British islands it looks
with passivity, perhaps timidity, certainly with no intention of
assisting oppressed peoples."
"Theoretical Socialism of a logical and thoughtful kind, not entangled
with Radicalism, has made much progress of late years, more especially,
so far as my own experience goes, in the educated and professional
classes; but in practice it bides its time, with confidence perhaps, but
with a consciousness that the time will be long coming. That is a
different spirit from the buoyant expectancy of the old Liberalism."
Granted the necessity of idealism to individual and social health, Mr.
Street's views do not conduce to optimism. Here we have a competent
observer telling us that the only note of idealism he finds in
contemporary intellectual life is a growing, but half-hearted, belief in
Socialism, which is more noticeable "in the educated and professional
classes."
There is another note of idealism in the life of to-day which Mr. Street
ignores. This is the tendency toward the apotheosis of the individual in
antithesis to society. This is a sign of health, in so far as it is a
revolt against the stifling pressure of outworn conventionality, and it
has found worthy expression in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the
poetry of Browning and Walt Whitman.
But this form of idealism cannot be said to differentiate our time from
the Early Victorian era, for it found its classic expression back in the
middle of the last century in Max Stirner's Der Einzige und sein
Eigentum, a book which has been forgotten amid the growing
consciousness of the organic solidarity of society. But Mr. Street is
possibly justified in ignoring this tendency, for as a school of thought
it has committed suicide in the person of Nietzsche's Overman attempting
to construct out of materials drawn from his inner consciousness a pair
of stilts on which to tower above "the herd."
What is the lure of Socialism that is appealing, according to Mr.
Street, to more and more of our "educated and professional" people? For,
in spite of what Professor Veblen truly says of the "negative and
destructive" (in the quotation at the head of this paper) character of
socialist ideals, Socialism must hold up some positive ideals to attract
such growing numbers of the educated classes. To convince oneself of the
actuality of this appeal it is only necessary to run over the writers'
names in the tables of contents in our popular magazines. The proportion
of socialists is surprisingly large and is constantly growing. There can
be no doubt that the percentage of Socialists among writers of
distinction is larger than the percentage of socialists in the
population at large.
Socialism does present certain very definite positive ideals. The first
of these is "Comfort for All" (to use a chapter-heading from Prince
Kropotkin's too little known book, "La Conquête du Pain"). The second
is Leisure for All, or, in Paul Lafargue's witty phrase, "The Right to
be Lazy." The third is the fullest possible physical and intellectual
development of every individual, considered not as an isolated,
self-centred entity, but as a member of an interdependent society; or,
in the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist
Manifesto, the socialist ideal is "an association in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
It may be noted that all that is vivifying in the ideal of individualism
is included in this third positive ideal of Socialism, so that, it is
now seen, Mr. Street was fully justified in making no separate mention
of the ideal of individualism. There can be no doubt that it is the
immensely richer literary and artistic life promised by this third ideal
of Socialism that accounts for the phenomenon noted by Mr. Street.
The beauties of the positive ideals of the socialist Utopias have been
sufficiently lauded by scores of writers from Sir Thomas More to Bellamy
and Mr. H. G. Wells. What it is desired to emphasize here is the
"negative and destructive" (from the standpoint of the established
order) aspects of socialist ideals; for it is the Nihilism of Socialism
that explains why Mr. Street's "educated and professional" socialists
have more patience than confidence in awaiting the realization of their
ideal. The Nihilism of Socialism turns aside many, who have felt the
lure of the socialist ideal, into what Professor Veblen calls, "some
excursion into pragmatic romance,"[7] such as Social Settlements,
Prohibition, Clean Politics, Single Tax, Arts and Crafts, Neighborhood
Guilds, Institutional Church, Christian Science, New Thought, Hearstism,
or "some such cultural thimble-rig." Yet more, there are many of the
"educated and professional classes" who call themselves socialists,
because they cherish the charming delusion that it is possible to
separate the positive from the negative ideals of Socialism, and to work
(in a dilettante fashion) for the former while blithely anathematizing
the latter.
It is the purpose of this paper to show that Socialism is not a scheme
for the betterment of humanity to be accomplished by a sufficiently
zealous and intelligent propaganda, but that it is, on the contrary, a
consistent, (though to many repellent) monistic philosophy of the
cosmos; that it is from its Alpha to its Omega so closely and
inextricably interlocked that its component parts cannot be
disassociated, save by an act of intellectual suicide; that, in a word,
the Nihilism[8] of Socialism is of the very essence of Socialism.
But, here, a most important distinction should be noted. Socialism,
viewed as a political propaganda, is purely positive in its demands. In
fact, all its demands may be reduced to two—Collectivism and Democracy.
That the people shall own the means of production, and the producers
shall control their products—that is the sum and substance of all
Socialist platforms. Socialist parties do not attack Religion, the
Family, or the State. But socialist philosophy proves conclusively that
the realization of the positive political and economic ideals of
Socialism involves the atrophy of Religion, the metamorphosis of the
Family, and the suicide of the State.
The Nihilism of Socialism springs from the Materialist Conception of
History, and this is precisely the portion of the socialist doctrine
that is usually ignored or half-understood by the enthusiastic young
intellectuals who are in growing numbers joining the Socialist movement
on both sides of the Atlantic. While the Communist Manifesto, written
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847, is throughout founded on this
conception, the first clearly formulated statement of the conception
itself is to be found in the Preface to the "Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy," published by Karl Marx in 1859, the same
year in which Darwin and Wallace made public their independent and
almost simultaneous discoveries of the theory of Natural Selection. This
first statement runs thus:
"In the social production which men carry on they enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their
will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage
of development of their material powers of production. The sum
total of these relations of production constitutes the economic
structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and
political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness. The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social, political, and
spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social
existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material forces of production in society
come in conflict with the existing relations of production,
or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the
property relations within which they had been at work before. From
forms of development of the forces of production these relations
turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social
revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire
immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."[9]
This statement contains a whole Revolution in embryo. Viewed from the
standpoint of the established order, it is the very Quintessence of
Nihilism. In a word, it teaches the material origin of Ideas. In the
last analysis, every idea can be traced back to the economic and
telluric environments. In the words of Joseph Dietzgen, "philosophy
revealed to them (Marx and Engels) the basic principle that, in the last
resort, the world is not governed by Ideas, but, on the contrary, the
Ideas by the material world." This doctrine involves a new epistemology,
the distinguishing mark of which is its denial of the immaculate
conception of thought. The human mind, according to Marx and Dietzgen,
can only bring forth thought after it has been impregnated by the
objects of sense perception.[10]
Here we have a thorough-going system of materialist monism. "Ours is
the organic conception of history," says Labriola. "The totality of the
unity of social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is
economics itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to
reappear in as many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as
a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend
the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all
the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else,
to form an historic conception of economics, and to explain the other
changes by means of its changes."[11]
In another place he says: "Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing
comes to us in a dream.... The change in ideas, even to the creation of
new methods of conception, has reflected little by little the experience
of a new life. This, in the revolutions of the last two centuries, was
little by little despoiled of the mythical, religious and mystical
envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical and precise
consciousness of its immediate and direct conditions. Human thought,
also, which sums up this life and theorizes upon it, has little by
little been plundered of its theological and metaphysical hypotheses to
take refuge finally in this prosaic assertion: in the interpretation of
history we must limit ourselves to the objective co-ordination of the
determining conditions and of the determined effects." He reiterates:
"Ideas do not fall from heaven; and, what is more, like the other
products of human activity, they are formed in given circumstances, in
the precise fulness of time, through the action of definite needs,
thanks to the repeated attempts at their satisfaction, and by the
discovery of such and such other means of proof which are, as it were,
the instruments of their production and their elaboration. Even ideas
involve a basis of social conditions; they have their technique; thought
also is a form of work. To rob the one and the other, ideas and thought,
of the conditions and environment of their birth and their development,
is to disfigure their nature and their meaning."[12]
This socialist materialism does not refuse the inspiration of ideals.
"By granting that society is dominated by material interests," Dietzgen
explains, "we do not deny the power of the ideals of the heart, mind,
science, and art. For we have no more to deal with the absolute
antithesis between idealism and materialism, but with their higher
synthesis which has been found in the knowledge that the ideal depends
on the material, that divine justice and liberty depend on the
production and distribution of earthly goods."[13]
Religions, schools of ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, art, political
and juridical institutions are all to be explained in the last analysis
by the economic and telluric environments, present and past. This
ruthless materialism crushes belief in God, in the Soul, in immortality.
It leaves no room for any shred of dualism in thought. It is true that
the German Social Democracy included in the famous Erfurt Programme
(adopted in 1891—the first clearly Marxian socialist platform ever
promulgated) a demand for a "Declaration that religion is a private
matter. Abolition of all expenditure from public funds upon
ecclesiastical and religious objects. Ecclesiastical and religious
bodies are to be regarded as private associations, which order their
affairs independently." It will be seen that this is nothing more than a
demand that the State withdraw its sanction of religion as France has
recently done in the Clemenceau law. But Ferri does nothing but draw the
necessary conclusions from socialist premises when he writes: "God, as
Laplace has said, is an hypothesis of which exact science has no need;
he is, according to Herzen, at the most an X, which represents not the
unknowable—as Spencer and Dubois Raymond contend—but all that which
humanity does not yet know. Therefore, it is a variable X which
decreases in direct ratio to the progress of the discoveries of science.
"It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio to
each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same proportion
that the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle against the
unknown."[14]
Joseph Dietzgen has thus stated what may be called the law of the
atrophy of religion: "The more the idea of God recedes into the past the
more palpable it is; in olden times man knew everything about his God;
the more modern the form of religion has become, the more confused and
hazy are our religious ideas. The truth is that the historic
development of religion tends to its gradual dissolution."[15]
The characteristic attitude of the socialist materialist toward
Christianity appears very clearly in the following excerpt from
Professor Ferri's "Socialism and Modern Science":
"It is true that Marxian Socialism, since the Congress held at Erfurt
(1891), has rightly declared that religious beliefs are private
affairs[16] and that, therefore, the Socialist party combats religious
intolerance under all its forms.... But this breadth of superiority of
view is, at bottom, only a consequence of the confidence in final
victory.
"It is because Socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs,
whether one regards them, with Sergi, as pathological phenomena of human
psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are destined
to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary scientific
culture. This is why Socialism does not feel the necessity of waging a
special warfare against these religious beliefs which are destined to
disappear. It has assumed this attitude, although it knows that the
absence or the impairment of the belief in God is one of the most
powerful factors for its extension, because the priests of all religions
have been, throughout all the phases of history, the most potent allies
of the ruling classes in keeping the masses pliant and submissive under
the yoke by means of the enchantment of religion, just as the tamer
keeps wild beasts submissive by the terrors of the cracks of his whip"
(page 63).
It is also well to remember that a prevalent animistic habit of thought
in viewing the events of life, whether it take the form of a belief in
luck, as in gamblers and sporting men, or the form of a belief in
supernatural interposition in mundane affairs, as in the case of the
devotees of the anthropomorphic cults, or merely the tendency to give a
teleological interpretation to evolution, to attribute a meliorative
trend to the cosmic process, as in Tennyson's "through the ages one
increasing purpose runs," tends, by retarding the prompt perception of
relations of material cause and effect, to lower the industrial
efficiency of the community.[17]
The socialist materialist can look forward with unruffled serenity to
the passing of religion, since his very definition of religion as "a
popular striving after the illusory happiness that corresponds with a
social condition which needs such an illusion,"[18] implies that it
cannot pass away till it has ceased to be needful to human happiness.
From the point of view of this Socialist materialism, the monogamous
family, the present economic unit of society, ceases to be a divine
institution, and becomes the historical product of certain definite
economic conditions. It is the form of the family peculiar to a society
based on private property in the means of production, and the production
of commodities for sale. It is not crystallized and permanent, but, like
all other institutions, fluid and subject to change. With the change in
its economic basis, the code of sexual morality and the monogamous
family are sure to be modified; but, in the judgment of such socialists
as Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, we shall probably remain
monogamous, but monogamy will cease to be compulsorily permanent.[19]
"What we may anticipate," says Engels, "about the adjustment of sexual
relations after the impending downfall of capitalist production is
mainly of a negative nature and mostly confined to elements that will
disappear. But what will be added? That will be decided after a new
generation has come to maturity: a race of men who never in their lives
have had any occasion for buying with money or other economic means of
power the surrender of a woman; a race of women who have never had any
occasion for surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or
for refusing to surrender to their lover from fear of economic
consequences. Once such people are in the world, they will not give a
moment's thought to what we to-day believe should be their course. They
will follow their own practice and fashion their own public
opinion—only this and nothing more."[20]
Changed economic conditions are already reflected in the disintegration
of the traditional bourgeois belief in the permanency of the existing
forms of the family and the home. A portentous sign of the times for the
conservatives is the appearance of Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons' book on
"The Family," the most scholarly work on the subject by a bourgeois
writer that has yet appeared. Like all bourgeois writers Mrs. Parsons
has been very chary of using materials furnished by Socialist scholars.
Very striking is the absence from her very extensive bibliographical
notes of the names of Marx, Engels, Bebel and Ferri. But she was
compelled to avail herself freely of the wealth of materials provided by
the scholarly and industrious researches of Morgan, Kautsky, and Cunow.
In her now famous Fifteenth Lecture on "Ethical Considerations," she
suggests various modes of ameliorating the condition of Woman, and
improving conjugal and family relations; but she is again and again
driven to admit that the economic independence of women is a condition
precedent to her "reforms." Most of her suggestions are tinged with the
utopian fancifulness characteristic of the bourgeois theorist. Two
excerpts will illustrate these points sufficiently:
"Again reciprocity of conjugal rights and duties is desirable for
parenthood. If marriage have a proprietary character, neither the owner
nor the owned is entirely fit to develop free personalities in his or
her children. Moreover the idea of marital ownership more or less
involves that of parental ownership, and the latter, as we have seen, is
incompatible with a high type of parenthood. The custom of proprietary
marriage inevitably leads, for example, to restrictions upon female
education. Now just in so far as a woman's education is limited is she
handicapped as an educator of her children. It is unfortunate that in
the emancipation of woman agitation of the past half-century the
reformers failed to emphasize the social as adequately as the
individualistic need of change. If women are to be fit wives and mothers
they must have all, perhaps more, of the opportunities for personal
development that men have. All the activities hitherto reserved to men
must at least be open to them, and many of these activities, certain
functions of citizenship[21] for example, must be expected of them.
Moreover, whatever the lines may be along which the fitness of women to
labor will be experimentally determined, the underlying position must be
established that for the sake of individual and race character she is to
be a producer as well as a consumer of social values.[22] As soon as
this ethical necessity is generally recognized the conditions of modern
industry will become much better adapted to the needs of women workers
than they are now, the hygiene of workshop, factory, and office will
improve, and child bearing and rearing will no longer seem incompatible
with productive activity" (pages 345-347).
Here follows the paragraph upon which the Reverend Doctor Morgan Dix and
other clerical defenders of the economic conditions that cause marital
and non-marital prostitution pounced with such avidity:
"We have therefore, given late marriage and the passing of
prostitution,[23] two alternatives, the requiring of absolute chastity
of both sexes until marriage or the toleration of freedom of sexual
intercourse on the part of the unmarried of both sexes before marriage,
i. e., before the birth of offspring. In this event condemnation of
sex license would have a different emphasis from that at present. Sexual
intercourse would not be of itself disparaged or condemned, it would be
disapproved of only if indulged in at the expense of health or of
emotional or intellectual activities in oneself or in others. As a
matter of fact, truly monogamous relations seem to be those most
conducive to emotional or intellectual development and to health, so
that, quite apart from the question of prostitution, promiscuity is not
desirable or even tolerable. It would therefore, seem well from this
point of view, to encourage early trial marriage,[24] the relation to be
entered into with a view to permanency, but with the privilege of
breaking it if proved unsuccessful and in the absence of offspring
without suffering any great degree of public condemnation.
"The conditions to be considered in any attempt to answer the question
that thus arises are exceedingly complex. Much depends upon the outcome
of present experiments in economic independence for women, a matter
which is in turn dependent upon the outcome of the general labor
'question.' Much depends upon revelations of physiological science. If
the future brings about the full economic independence of women, if
physiologists will undertake to guarantee society certain immunities
from the sexual excess of the individual,[25] if, and these are the most
important conditions of all, increases in biological, psychological and
social knowledge make parenthood a more enlightened and purposive
function than is even dreamed of at present and if pari passu with
this increase of knowledge a higher standard of parental duty and a
greater capacity for parental devotion develop, then the need of sexual
restraint as we understand it may disappear and different relations
between the sexes before marriage and to a certain extent within
marriage may be expected."
The Socialist materialist leaves idle speculations of this nature to the
bourgeois Utopians; he knows that a revolution in economic conditions
must precede any material changes in sexual relations, and that when
such changes take place they will take place in response to the stimuli
of the transformed economic environment, and not in accordance with any
preconceived notions of Mrs. Parsons or others.
Those, who are horrified at such proposed modifications of marriage as
Mr. George Meredith's marriages for a fixed, limited period, and Mrs.
Parsons' "trial marriages," will do well to ponder this posthumous
aphorism of the clearsighted Norse genius, Ibsen, recently published in
Berlin:
"To talk of 'men born free' is a mere phrase. There are none such.
Marriages, the relations of man and woman, have ruined the whole race
and set on all the brand of slavery."[26]
In the same case is what we may call the stage-setting of the
monogamous family, the home. The home ceases to be regarded as the
sacred and eternal Palladium of society. It, too, is destined to change,
if not to disappear. "With the transformation of the means of production
into collective property," Engels writes, "the private household changes
to a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a
public matter."[27]
This does not deny the splendid role that the Home has played in the
history of the last three centuries. Many an English and American home
to-day still merits even such an offensively pretentious epithet as
"Palladium." What morals our people have known and practised they have
learned and been drilled in in the homes. That these morals should have
been warped by a class-bias was inevitable. A home, itself the product
of a society divided into classes, could not teach anything but a
class-morality. A purely social morality (if morality be the proper name
for the highest conduct in a classless society) is even yet impossible.
But, much as we owe to the home, (I pity the reader who can recall his
or her early home life with dry eyes), the Nihilism of Socialism tells
us the day of the home is drawing to its close. So it may be as well for
us to consider for a moment the bad side of the home as we know it
to-day. It may be that when we have done so, we shall be able to
anticipate its passing with greater equanimity.
At this late day—when seventeen years have rolled by since Ibsen's "The
Doll's House" was first introduced to an English-speaking audience at
the Novelty Theatre in London—it is surely not necessary to dwell upon
the dwarfing and stifling effects upon women of even "happy" homes. In
the brilliant preface to "Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant," Bernard Shaw,
referring to middle-class home life, speaks of "the normal English way
being to sit in separate families in separate rooms in separate houses,
each person silently occupied with a book, a paper, or a game of halma,
cut off equally from the blessings of society and solitude." "The
result," he continues, "is that you may make the acquaintance of a
thousand streets of middle-class English families without coming on a
trace of any consciousness of citizenship, or any artistic cultivation
of the senses."
In the following paragraph he adds:
"In proportion as this horrible domestic institution is broken up by the
active social circulation of the upper classes in their own orbit, or
its stagnant isolation made impossible by the overcrowding of the
working classes, manners improve enormously. In the middle classes
themselves the revolt of a single clever daughter (nobody has yet done
justice to the modern clever Englishwoman's loathing of the very word
'home'), and her insistence on qualifying herself for an independent
working life, humanizes her whole family in an astonishingly short time;
and the formation of a habit of going to the suburban theatre once a
week, or to the Monday Popular Concerts, or both, very perceptibly
ameliorates its manners. But none of these breaches in the Englishman's
castle-house can be made without a cannonade of books and pianoforte
music. The books and music cannot be kept out, because they alone can
make the hideous boredom of the hearth bearable. If its victims may not
live real lives, they may at least read about imaginary ones, and
perhaps learn from them to doubt whether a class that not only submits
to home life, but actually values itself on it, is really a class worth
belonging to. For the sake of the unhappy prisoners of the home, then,
let my plays be printed as well as acted."
A concrete picture may give us a better idea of what Shaw means when he
calls women "the unhappy prisoners of the home." In that magnificent
scene in the third act of "Candida," after Morell has called on Candida
to choose between him and the poet, Marchbanks, Candida gives us a vivid
glimpse of what her home life had been, in this speech, addressed to
Marchbanks, and, in reading it, remember that Morell was "a good
husband" and that Candida loved him.
"—You know how strong he (Morell) is—how clever he is—how happy!
Ask James's mother and his three sisters what it cost to save James
the trouble of doing anything but be strong and clever and happy.
Ask me what it costs to be James's mother and three sisters and
wife and mother to his children all in one. Ask Prossy and Maria
how troublesome the house is even when we have no visitors to help
us slice the onions. Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and
spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them off. When
there is money to give, he gives it: when there is money to refuse,
I refuse it. I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love
for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out.
I make him master here, though he does not know it, and could not
tell you a moment ago how it came to be so."
This should make it easy for us to understand why so many women are
ready to sympathize with William Morris in the sentiments he expressed
in the following paragraph in "Signs of Change:"
"As to what extent it may be necessary or desirable for people under
social order to live in common, we may differ pretty much according to
our tendencies toward social life. For my part I can't see why we should
think it a hardship to eat with the people we work with; I am sure that
as to many things, such as valuable books, pictures, and splendor of
surroundings, we shall find it better to club our means together; and I
must say that often when I have been sickened by the stupidity of the
mean, idiotic rabbit warrens that rich men build for themselves in
Bayswater and elsewhere, I console myself with visions of the noble
communal hall of the future, unsparing of materials, generous in worthy
ornament, alive with the noblest thoughts of our time, and the past,
embodied in the best art which a free and manly people could produce;
such an abode of man as no private enterprise could come anywhere near
for beauty and fitness, because only collective thought and collective
life could cherish the aspirations which would give birth to its beauty,
or have the skill and leisure to carry them out. I for my part should
think it much the reverse of a hardship if I had to read my books and
meet my friends in such a place; nor do I think I am better off to live
in a vulgar stuccoed house crowded with upholstery that I despise, in
all respects degrading to the mind and enervating to the body to live
in, simply because I call it my own, or my house."
From the viewpoint of this historical materialism, the State loses its
attribute of permanence and becomes the product of definite economic
conditions—in a word, it is the child of economic inequality. "The
State," in the words of Engels, "is the result of the desire to keep
down class conflicts. But, having arisen amid these conflicts, it is as
a rule the State of the most powerful economic class that by force of
its economic supremacy becomes also the ruling political class, and thus
acquires new means of subduing and exploiting the oppressed masses. The
antique State was, therefore, the State of the slave owners for the
purpose of holding the slaves in check. The feudal State was the organ
of the nobility for the oppression of the serfs and dependent farmers.
The modern representative State is the tool of the capitalist exploiters
of wage labor."[28]
"The State, then," Engels says on another page of the same work, "did
not exist from all eternity. There have been societies without it, that
had no idea of any State or public power.[29] At a certain stage of
economic development, which was of necessity accompanied by a division
of society into classes, the State became the inevitable result of this
division. We are now rapidly approaching a stage of evolution in
production, in which the existence of classes has not only ceased to be
a necessity, but becomes a positive fetter on production. Hence, these
classes must fall as inevitably as they once arose. The State must
irrevocably fall with them. The society that is to reorganize production
on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will
transfer the machinery of the State where it will then belong—into the
Museum of Antiquities by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze
ax."[30]
In another work, he says: "The first act by virtue of which the State
really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of
society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of
Society—this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State.
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after
another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of
persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct
of processes of production. The State is not abolished. It dies
out."[31]
It is thus seen that, according to the teaching of historical
materialism, the State is destined, when it becomes the State of the
working-class, to remove its own foundation—economic inequality—and
thus, to commit suicide.
Many of those, who have witnessed with mingled consternation and
amusement the strenuous efforts of Mr. Roosevelt and the frantic zeal of
Mr. Hearst to enlarge the scope of governmental action to cover every
conceivable field of human activity from spelling to beef-canning, will
hail with delight Engels' tidings that the State is to "die out."
The thesis, that the realization of the socialist ideal involves the
atrophy of Religion, the metamorphosis of the Family, and the suicide of
the State, would now appear to be sufficiently demonstrated.
One cannot help wondering what proportion of the "educated and
professional" persons, who, Mr. Street testifies, are in growing numbers
yielding to the lure of Socialism, really desire these results. Many of
them, no doubt, are trying on a new field the old experiment of serving
God and Mammon, of putting new wine into old bottles. Ibsen's Nora,
though she had far less learning than is usual in the "educated and
professional classes" of England and America, was, in this matter, far
wiser than are they. When the falsehood and slavery of life in "The
Doll's House" became unbearable to her, she knew that she must choose
between the Old and the New; and that, if she chose the new life of
revolt and freedom, she must leave behind her all the badges of her
doll's life. Had she taken with her the trinkets and gauds that the
master of the Doll's House had given her, she would not have escaped
from the doll's life when she turned her back on the Doll's House. Her
woman's instinct did not fail her, and, when, with a woman's courage she
chose the New and left the Old, she told Torvald, "Whatever belongs to
me I shall take with me. I will have nothing from you either now or
later on."
Many of the young people of education, who have of late come into the
socialist movement, have left—temporarily, at least—the Doll's House
of conservatism; but they have brought with them many of the habits of
thought, many of the conventions of their old doll's life. Some of them,
doubtless, realizing that the Materialist Conception of History involves
the Nihilism of Socialism, and thus calls on them to abandon their
religious, metaphysical, and dualistic habits of thought, to cast aside
their conventional class morality, to cease vaporing about that
impossible monstrosity, "the Socialist State," attempt to cut the
Gordian knot by denying the Materialist Conception of History, while
clinging to their socialist ideal. They thus repeat in inverted form the
curious feat in intellectual acrobatics performed by Professor Seligman,
who believes in historical materialism, but rejects Socialism. "There
is nothing in common," he asserts, "between the economic interpretation
of history and the doctrine of socialism, except the accidental fact
that the originator of both theories happened to be the same man." And a
few pages further on he reiterates: "Socialism and 'historical
materialism' are entirely independent-conceptions."[32]
To the educated socialists, who deny or mutilate the doctrine of
historical materialism, the materialist socialist might well reply by
asserting that these educated socialists are socialists only because of
the artistic, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual changes they expect
the economic revolution of socialism to produce. The fact that they,
lovers of "the things of the spirit," are socialists proves that they
believe, albeit unconsciously, in economic determinism.
But, although this personal argument might Well be deemed sufficient, it
can readily be proven affirmatively that the whole theory of Modern
Socialism rests upon the foundation of historical materialism. This
clearly appears in the' admirable summary of the teachings of Marx that
Gabriel Deville gives in the Preface to his epitome of Marx's "Capital."
"History, Marx has shown, is nothing but the history of class
conflicts. The division of society into classes, which made its
appearance with the social life of man, rests on economic
relations—maintained by force—which enable some to succeed in
shifting on to the shoulders of others the natural necessity of
labor.
"Material interests have always been the inciting motives of the
incessant struggles of the privileged classes, either with, each
other, or against the inferior classes at whose expense they live.
Man is dominated by the material conditions of life, and these
conditions, and therefore the mode of production, have determined
and will determine human customs, ethics, and institutions—social,
economic, political, juridical, etc.
"As soon as one part of society has monopolized the means of
production, the other part, upon whom the burden of labor falls, is
obliged to add to the labor-time necessary for its own support, a
certain surplus-labor-time, for which it receives no
equivalent,—time that is devoted to supporting and enriching the
possessors of the means of production. As an extractor of unpaid
labor, which, by means of the increasing surplus-value whose source
it is, accumulates every day, more and more, in the hands of the
proprietary class the instruments of its dominion, the capitalist
regime surpasses in power all the antecedent regimes founded on
compulsory labor.
"But to-day, the economic conditions begotten by this regime,
trammelled in their natural evolution by this very regime,
inexorably tend to break the capitalist mould which can no longer
contain them, and these destroying principles are the elements of
the new society.
"The historic mission of the class at present exploited, the
proletariat, which is being organized and disciplined by the very
mechanism of capitalist production, is to complete the work of
destruction begun by the development of social antagonisms. It
must, first of all, definitively wrest from its class adversaries
the political power—the command of the force devoted by them to
preserving intact their economic monopolies and privileges.
"Once in control of the political power, it will be able, by
proceeding to the socialization of the means of production through
the expropriation of the usurpers of the fruits of others' toil, to
suppress the present contradiction between collective production
and private capitalist appropriation, and to realize the
universalization of labor, and the abolition of classes."[33]
If the "educated and professional" socialists cannot break the chain of
this logic, they find themselves, as Nora did, face to face with the
necessity of making a choice. Behind them is the old doll's house life
with its manifold conventions—once useful, but through economic
evolution outgrown and thus become false and deadly—a life, easy
enough mayhap, but wholly devoid of idealism; before them is the new
life of freedom, of revolt against outworn beliefs and conventions—a
life of great difficulty, mayhap, but a life cheered by a noble
ideal—an ideal in whose realization the socialist materialists believe
as fully, as passionately as the ancient Hebrews believed in the
fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies.
Theirs is a hard case. Without ideals they cannot, in any worthy sense,
live. The only possible ideal, that even the keen eyes of so shrewd an
observer as Mr. Street can perceive, is the ideal of Socialism. But they
cannot accept this ideal without abandoning much, I do not say that is
dear to them, but much that by habit and tradition has become part and
parcel of their intellectual being.
If they decide to go forward into the New, the old world of dolls'
houses must become a strange land to them. In the difficulties and
trials of the new life, they cannot send back for aid to the old world,
which will have become a world of strangers to them. Nora's woman's
instinct did not fail her here; when Torvald asked if he could send help
to her in case of need, her unhesitating reply was, "No, I say. I take
nothing from strangers."
Far better is the case of the workingman attracted by the socialist
ideal. The Nihilism of Socialism has no deterrent terrors for him, for,
as Karl Marx said long ago, "he has nothing to lose but his chains, and
a whole world to gain." He has long since lost all interest in religion;
the factory by enlisting his wife and children as workers has already
destroyed his home; and to him the State means nothing but the club of
the policeman, the injunction of the judge, and the rifle of the
militiaman.
But for the man of the "educated and professional classes" leaving the
doll's house is indeed a difficult task. For its performance three
things are requisite: a free and open mind, courage, and a vivid
imagination. The Russian genius, Peshkoff (Maxim Gorky), did it, and did
it with relative ease because he was a workingman before he became an
educated man. For the same reason, though in a less degree, Jack London
has also done it successfully, though here and there he still lapses
into the doll's mode of thought. The sex-interest in the latter part of
"The Sea Wolf" is obviously treated from the dolls' point of view; but
it should be remembered that Mr. London necessarily expected the
majority of the purchasers of "The Sea Wolf" to be dolls. But, in spite
of this instance, we may be sure that Jack London brought but little
with him when he left the Doll's House; and I am very sure he never
sends back to have parcels forwarded to him.
When Mr. Upton Sinclair left the Doll's House, he evidently stuffed his
mental pockets with a large assortment of intellectual lingerie and
millinery from the doll wardrobes. In telling us what Life means to him
in a recent magazine, he says that during a certain stress and storm
period of his life he lived in close intimacy with three friends who
"loved" him "very dearly." "Their names are Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley."
Can any one imagine William Morris writing a sentiment so perfectly
satisfying to a doll's sense of beauty? When I read these lines there
rises before me a picture of the author tastefully robed in an exquisite
dress—a doll's dress—of dotted swiss.[34]
Recently he has started a Co-operative Home Colony quite in the spirit
of the bourgeois Utopians who founded Brook Farm more than
half-a-century ago. Colony-founding, historians tell us, was a favorite
amusement of the dolls of that era.
In the "Times Magazine" (for December 1906) he tells us that "the home
has endured for ages, and through all the ages it has stayed about the
same." This belief, I am informed, is almost universal among dolls.
I find myself the prey of a growing suspicion that Mr. Sinclair from
time to time receives express parcels from the "Doll's House."
William Morris was a genius; he had a free and open mind; he had
courage; and he had a vivid imagination. When he left the Doll's House,
he took nothing with him, and he never afterward took anything "from
strangers." It was his poet's imagination that enabled him to write
"News from Nowhere," the only Utopia in whose communal halls the unwary
reader does not stumble over dolls' furniture. Morris is the perfect
type of the man of culture turned revolutionist.[35]
Mr. H. G. Wells has recently written a Utopian romance, "In the Days of
the Comet," which, although it possesses in the fullest measure Mr.
Wells' well known charm of style, is in substance at best a very feeble
echo of "News from Nowhere." One of the modes of thought specially
characteristic of eighteenth century French dolls is strongly to the
fore in Mr. Wells' treatment of war. In the conversations "after the
Change" between Melmount, the famous Cabinet Minister, and the pitiful,
cowardly, inefficient hero (?), Leadford, they both appear to be
inexpressibly shocked at the unreasonableness of war. It is true it is
somewhat difficult to tell just what Melmount did think or feel, for
Melmount is in one particular like Boston's distinguished litterateur,
Mr. Lawson,—he appears to be constantly on the point of uttering some
great thought, but never utters it. But so far as light is given us
Melmount after the Change seems to have looked on war much as Carlyle
did long before. Every one remembers Carlyle's two groups of
peasants,[36] living hundreds of miles apart, who never heard of each
other, and had not the slightest quarrel, the one with the other, but
who none-the-less obeyed the orders of their respective kings, and
marched until they met, and at the word of command shot each other into
corpses. Most of us will agree with Carlyle and Melmount that, viewed
from the peasants' standpoint, this was unreasonable to the point of
sheer folly.
But, if I understand Mr. Wells aright, he seems to elevate the reason of
the peasant into something very like the "eternal reason" of Diderot and
Rousseau. He apparently forgets for the nonce that Engels long ago
pointed out that "this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the
idealized understanding of the eighteenth century citizen, just then
evolving into the bourgeois." The difficulty that Mr. Wells will
encounter in trying to bring human society into harmony with "eternal
reason" is the impossibility of getting different classes of men to
agree as to what is reasonable. No one outside of dolls' houses any
longer believes in "eternal reason." Every man and every class has an
ideal of what is reasonable, but these ideals vary. War is unreasonable
to the peasant-target; it is also unreasonable to Melmount and Mr. Wells
so far as they are representatives of the citizens of the classless
society of the future, a society based on social solidarity, on
world-wide brotherhood. But to the socialist materialist, war, in a
world based on private ownership of the means of production used to
produce commodities, with its concomitants, the wage-system,
competition—domestic and international,—and ever-recurring
"over-production," is so very far from unreasonable that it is
absolutely inevitable.[37]
Mr. Wells evidently brought something with him when he left the Doll's
House.
We now begin to realize what a very difficult matter it is to rid the
mind completely of the effects of what Professor Veblen calls "the
institutional furniture handed down from the past." The man, who yields
to the lure of Socialism, must sooner or later effect a revolution
within his own mind; if he does not, he will sooner or later return to
his Doll's House, or make an excursion into some field of "pragmatic
romance" where he will build himself a new doll's house.
Granted the truth of historical materialism, how will future
generations look on the literature of to-day and yesterday? To a
generation wholly untrained in theological, metaphysical and dualistic
modes of thought how much meaning will there be in the poetry of
Tennyson and Browning? For my part, I never read Browning now without
being unpleasantly reminded of the aphorism Nietzsche put into the mouth
of Zarathustra: "Alas, it is true I have cast my net in their (poets')
seas and tried to catch good fish; but I always drew up the head of some
old God."
But I am glad to believe that the matchless melody and the chiseled
beauty of Tennyson's verse will charm the senses of men to whom his
curious mixture of pantheism and Broad Church theology, which the middle
classes of England and America in the latter decades of the nineteenth
century welcomed as the ultimate massage of philosophy, will not be
ridiculous only because it will be meaningless. But I am unable to think
of the men of the future deriving any pleasure from our greatest poet,
Browning. On the other hand it is not impossible that the fame of
Swinburne will stand higher in the twenty-first century than it does in
this opening decade of the twentieth.
The men and women of the future will, I am sure, feel themselves akin
to Shelley. They will probably enjoy Byron too, so far as they
understand him; but men and women, who have never known any relationship
between the sexes but that of independence and equality, will be bored
and baffled by that great bulk of Byron's verse which shocked his
contemporaries.
When we turn to the drama, it appears probable that the revolution in
the relations of the sexes will convert into mere materials for the
historian even our greatest plays, such as Ibsen's "The Doll's House,"
Sudermann's "The Joy of Living," Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna," and Shaw's
"Mrs. Warren's Profession."
Are the "educated and professional" socialists prepared to accept gladly
such tremendous changes? They are confronted by a momentous question. It
was of their class William Morris was thinking when he wrote:
"I have looked at this claim by the light of history and my own
conscience, and it seems to me so looked at to be a most just
claim, and that resistance to it means nothing short of a denial of
the hope of civilization.
This, then, is the claim:—
It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do
which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do: and
which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither
over-wearisome nor over-anxious.
Turn that claim about as I may, think of it as long as I can, I
cannot find that it is an exorbitant claim; yet again I say if
Society would or could admit it, the face of the world would be
changed; discontent and strife and dishonesty would be ended. To
feel that we were doing work useful to others and pleasant to
ourselves, and that such work and its due reward could not fail
us! What serious harm could happen to us then? And the price to be
paid for so making the world happy is Revolution."[38]
Are they willing to pay the price? Nora paid the price for her freedom
and paid it in full.
She took nothing from strangers.
If they are unwilling to pay the price, what is there left for them save
the joyless sensuality and black despair of pessimism?
