Chapter VI (1)

I once heard a Socialist of world-wide renown accuse Bernard Shaw of an inconsistency which, to him, was little short of inexplicable. To every charge of inconsistency, Shaw is always ready with the effective rejoinder: “_l'homme absurde est celui qui ne change jamais_.” To Shaw, the stationary is the stagnant, evolution is progress. That rare literary phenomenon, a master of the comic spirit, Shaw is not only willing to admit for the nonce the inconsistencies in his own make-up: he is positively eager to make thereof genuine comic capital.

To the public, Shaw is his own greatest paradox. What defence, they ask, can be devised for a man rooted in Nietzscheism, who champions the Socialism which Nietzsche mocked? Reconcile the ardent apostle of the levelling democracy of a Social-Democratic Republic with the avowed advocate of the doctrines of Ibsen and Nietzsche, the intellectual aristocrats of this distinctly social era? Identify the agitation for international disarmament, for universal peace, with one who sings of arms and the superman? The Irish Nietzsche, the daring pilgrim in search of a moral Ultima Thule, with one who has forcibly declared the impossibility of anarchism? The evangelist preaching the brotherhood of man with one who repudiates the pacifying sedative: “Sirs, ye are brothers,” in the statement that he has no brothers, and if he had, he would in all probability not agree with them? What faith is to be put in the economic grounding of one who, in the course of two or three years, turned from vigorous defence of Marx's value theory to its “absolute demolition, on Jevonian lines, with his own hand”?

It is very difficult to understand Shaw's fundamental philosophy of Socialism without a thorough knowledge of the evolutionary course of his thought. The particular brand of Socialism denominated Shavian is not a bundle of prejudices of an immature youth, but the integration of years of day-by-day observations of life and character, as well as of political and economic science. The diversities of Socialistic faith have been wittily exhibited by Shaw in the opening scenes of the third act of _Man and Superman_. Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of Socialists: theoretical, Utopian and practical. Lassalle and Marx, Liebknecht and Bebel, Guèsde and Jaurès, Hyndman and Kropotkin, Shelley and Morris, George and Bellamy, Shaw and Webb, carry the stamp of the cobweb-spinner, the dreamer, or of the man of affairs. It is Shaw's supreme distinction that, beginning as doctrinaire, he has ended as practical opportunist. He has sought to traverse the chasm between democracy and social-democracy, by the aid of a solid economic structure, rather than by the rainbow bridge of sentimentality and Utopism. No scheme finds favour in his eyes which does not irresistibly commend itself to his intelligence. He has found the “true” doctrine of Socialism in repudiation of the follies of Impossibilism.

Shaw has unhesitatingly given credit to Henry George for the great impetus he gave to Socialism in England, and, in particular, for the important part George played in his own career. In speaking of the memorable evening in 1882, when, under the inspiration of George's stirring and eloquent words, he first began to realize the importance of the economic basis, Shaw recently wrote:[66]

“One evening in the early eighties I found myself--I forget
how and cannot imagine why--in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon
Street, London, listening to an American finishing a speech
on the Land Question. I knew he was an American, because he
pronounced 'necessarily'--a favourite word of his--with the
accent on the third syllable instead of the first; because he
was deliberately and intentionally oratorical, which is not
customary among shy people like the English; because he spoke
of Liberty, Justice, Truth, Natural Law, and other strange
eighteenth-century superstitions; and because he explained with
great simplicity and sincerity the views of the Creator, who
had gone completely out of fashion in London in the previous
decade and had not been heard of there since. I noticed, also,
that he was a born orator, and that he had small, plump, pretty
hands.

“Now at that time I was a young man not much past twenty-five,
of a very revolutionary and contradictory temperament, full of
Darwin and Tyndall, of Shelley and De Quincey, of Michelangelo
and Beethoven, and never having in my life studied social
questions from the economic point of view, except that I had
once, in my boyhood, read a pamphlet by John Stuart Mill
on the Irish Land Question. The result of my hearing the
speech, and buying from one of the stewards of the meeting
a copy of 'Progress and Poverty' for sixpence (Heaven only
knows where I got that sixpence!), was that I plunged into
a course of economic study, and at a very early stage of it
became a Socialist and spoke from that very platform on the
same great subject, and from hundreds of others as well,
sometimes addressing distinguished assemblies in a formal
manner, sometimes standing on a borrowed chair at a street
corner, or simply on the kerbstone. And I, too, had my
oratorical successes; for I can still recall with some vanity
a wet afternoon (Sunday, of course) on Clapham Common, when I
collected as much as sixteen and sixpence in my hat after my
lecture, for the Cause. And that all the work was not mere gas,
let the feats and pamphlets of the Fabian Society attest!

“When I was thus swept into the great Socialist revival of
1883, I found that five-sixths of those who were swept in with
me had been converted by Henry George. This fact would have
been far more widely acknowledged had it not been that it was
not possible for us to stop where Henry George stopped.... He
saw only the monstrous absurdity of the private appropriation
of rent, and he believed that if you took that burden off
the poor man's back, he could help himself out as easily as
a pioneer on a pre-empted clearing. But the moment he took
an Englishman to that point, the Englishman saw at once that
the remedy was not so simple as that, and that the argument
carried us much further, even to the point of total industrial
reconstruction. Thus George actually felt bound to attack
the Socialism he had created; and the moment the antagonism
was declared, and to be a Henry Georgeite meant to be an
anti-Socialist, some of the Socialists whom he had converted
became ashamed of their origin and concealed it; whilst others,
including myself, had to fight hard against the Single Tax
propaganda.”

However carefully other English Socialists have endeavoured to minimize or deny outright the momentous influence of Henry George, certainly Shaw has neither denied nor belittled their debt. “If we outgrew 'Progress and Poverty' in many ways, so did he himself too; and it is perhaps just as well that he did not know too much when he made his great campaign here; for the complexity of the problem would have overwhelmed him if he had realized it; or, if it had not, it would have rendered him unintelligible. Nobody has ever got away, or ever will get away, from the truths that were the centre of his propaganda: his errors anybody can get away from.” And yet Shaw's insularity and sense of British superiority sticks out in the statement that certain of the English Socialists, including himself, regretted that George was an American, and, therefore, necessarily about fifty years out of date in his economics and sociology from the point of view of an older country! The absurdity of such a contention is glaringly patent on comparison of _Progress and Poverty_ with the tracts of the Fabian Society during its early period: George was at least fifty years ahead of the English Socialists, instead of the reverse. With that grandiose conceit which is an essential item of his “stock in trade,” Shaw has expressed his eagerness to play the part of Henry George to America. “What George did not teach you, you are being taught now by your great Trusts and Combines, as to which I need only say that if you would take them over as national property as cheerfully as you took over the copyrights of all my early books, you would find them excellent institutions, quite in the path of progressive evolution, and by no means to be discouraged or left unregulated as if they were nobody's business but their own. It is a great pity that you all take America for granted because you were born in it. I, who have never crossed the Atlantic, and have taken nothing American for granted, find I know ten times as much about your country as you do yourselves; and my ambition is to repay my debt to Henry George by coming over some day and trying to do for your young men what Henry George did nearly a quarter of a century ago for me.”

While Henry George and his _Progress and Poverty_ were the prime motors in directing Shaw to Socialism, it was Karl Marx and his _Capital_ that first shunted Shaw on to the economic tack. In 1884, the Unitarian minister, Mr. Philip H. Wicksteed, contributed to _To-Day_ a criticism of Marx from the point of view of the school of mathematician-economists founded in England on the treatise on Political Economy published by the late Stanley Jevons in 1871.[67] Mr. Wicksteed, whose writings on Dante and Scandinavian literature are well known, was a remarkable linguist, a popular preacher, and an excellent man. To the fact, however, that he was a mathematician is largely attributable his deep interest in Jevons' theory of value, which scientifically demolished the classical theory of Adam Smith, Ricardo and Cairnes, with its adaptation to Socialism by Hodgskin and Marx. To his mathematical training, also, may be ascribed the lucidity and logical clarity of his application of the Jevonian machinery to Marxian theory. So abject was the deification of Marx by English Socialists at that time that Hyndman, whom Shaw thought should answer the article, pooh-poohed Wicksteed as beneath his notice. But the Omniscience and Infallibility of Marx were rudely shaken: Mr. Wicksteed's article had to be answered. Some years later Hyndman accused Shaw of having “rushed in” to defend Marx; but the question here is not of what Mr. Hyndman thinks: it is a question of fact. Shaw was earnestly requested by the proprietors of _To-Day_ to answer Mr. Wicksteed; but he replied at once that though he had read _Das Kapital_ he was not an economist, and that the reply should come from someone with a real mastery of the subject. At last, after a discussion one day in St. Paul's Churchyard, Frost disconsolately remarked to Shaw that if he wouldn't do it, he supposed he, Frost, must. Suddenly Shaw realized, as he very recently told me, that none of the others, so far as he could see, knew any more about the subject than he himself did; and he consented on the solemn condition that Wicksteed was to be allowed space for a rejoinder. Shaw was not so blind as not to be deeply impressed by his own ignorance of what Carlyle called the “dismal science”; he realized the importance to himself of getting a sound theoretic basis. “I read Jevons,” he afterwards wrote, “and made a fearful struggle to guess what his confounded differentials meant; for I knew as little of the calculus as a pig does of a holiday.” In his article entitled _The Jevonian Criticism of Marx_, which was more of a counterblast than a thorough analysis and discussion of Mr. Wicksteed's epoch-making article, Shaw had not a word to say in defence of Marx's oversight of “abstract utility.”[68] Quite clever in its Shavian way, Shaw's article did not get at the root of the matter at all, which was not unnatural, considering that he was a novice, and, as he afterwards freely admitted, completely wrong in the bargain. After the appearance of Mr. Wicksteed's brief rejoinder on pages 177-179 of the same volume, the incident was, for some time, closed.

The discussion only whetted Shaw's interest and left him determined to get to the bottom of the economic question. He had been tremendously impressed by the first volume of _Das Kapital_, “the real European book,” as he called it, which he had read in the French translation. Even when he was under this first tremendous impression, his misgivings found expression in a published letter, in which he jocularly pointed out that what Marx had proved was that we were all robbing each other, and not that one class was robbing another. A joke, founded on clever ignorance, may be a poor beginning for a career; yet in this way was Shaw's career as an economist begun. Shaw never doubted, so green was he, that Hyndman or some other leader would at once expose the fallacy in his letter, and teach him something thereby. The fact that nobody did probably started the misgiving that led him to devote so much time and thought to economics.

It was not without many struggles, however, that Shaw was eventually persuaded to see the fallacies in Marx's economics. In the Hampstead Historic Society, that mutual aid association, and in long private discussions with Sidney Webb, Shaw kept at the subject of Marx, defending him by every shift he could think of. All the time, at bottom, Shaw was satisfied neither with his own position nor with Webb's, which was that of John Stuart Mill. He had always mistrusted mathematical symbols since the time of his school days, when a plausible schoolboy used to prove to him by algebra that one equals two--presumably by one of the inadmissible division-by-zero proofs. The boy always began by saying: “Let x = a.” Shaw saw no harm in admitting that, and the proof followed with apparently rigorous exactness. “The effect was not to make me proceed habitually on the assumption that one equals two,” I once heard him say with a boyish laugh; “but to impress upon me that there was a screw loose somewhere in the algebraic art, and a chance for me to set it right some day when I had time to look into the subject.” And so, when he saw Jevons' x's, his differentials and his infinitesimals, Shaw at once thought of the plausible boy, and was fired to find that loose screw in Jevonian economics. The difficulty he felt most was that he could not, among Socialists, get into a sufficiently abstract atmosphere to arrive at the pure theory of the thing. It was essential to divorce the discussion absolutely from the social question. Fortunately, yet oddly enough, it was Wicksteed himself who helped Shaw to what he wanted. One of Wicksteed's friends, a prosperous stockbroker named Beeton, began inviting a circle of friends interested in economics to his house. The _To-Day_ discussion had established friendly relations between Shaw and Wicksteed; and Shaw secured an entry to this circle and “held on to it like grim death” until after some years it blossomed out into The Royal Economic Society, founded the _Economic Journal_, and outgrew Beeton's drawing-room. Mr. Shaw once remarked to me that his great difficulty was to see through Marx's fallacy in assuming that abstract labour was the unique factor by which the celebrated equation of Value was divisible. “I couldn't, for the life of me,” said Mr. Shaw, “see any sense in the equation 2a + 3b = 8c. I actually bought an Algebra and tried to recapture any early knowledge I might have had, but it was all gone.” And only the other day I ran across this book, _The Scholar's Algebra_, by Lewis Hensley, at a second-hand book-shop in London. Under date “22-8-87” appears the following, written in Shaw's remarkably neat stenography: “What sudden freak induced me to purchase this book? I saw it offered at a second-hand book-shop in Holborn for one and sixpence. For a time I was puzzled by a notion that the symbols referred to things instead of to numbers. For instance, 2a + 3b appeared to me as absurd as 2 wrens + 3 apples.”

In a letter to me Mr. Shaw once related the following story of his economic education--a story which gives the lie to his own strictures on University education. And in conversation he recently admitted to me that this economic training corresponded closely to the highest form of University instruction.[69] “During those years Wicksteed expounded 'final utility' to us with a blackboard except when we got hold of some man from the 'Baltic' (The London Wheat Exchange), or the like, to explain the markets to us and afterwards have his information reduced to Jevonian theory. Among university professors of economics Edgeworth and Foxwell stuck to us pretty constantly, and W. Cunningham turned up occasionally. Of course, the atmosphere was by no means Shavian; but that was exactly what I wanted. The Socialist platform and my journalistic pulpits involved a constant and most provocative forcing of people to face the practical consequences of theories and beliefs, and to draw mordant contrasts between what they professed or what their theories involved and their life and conduct. This made dispassionate discussion of abstract theory impossible. At Beeton's the conditions were practically university conditions. There was a tacit understanding that the calculus of utilities and the theory of exchange must be completely isolated from the fact that we lived, as Morris's mediæval captain put it, by 'robbing the poor.'”

In the heated discussions over Marx's economic theories which followed during the next few years, Shaw enjoyed an immense advantage in that nobody else in the Socialist movement had gone through this discipline, which required considerable perseverance and deep scientific conviction. It ended, as Shaw maintains, in his finding out Marx and Hyndman completely as economists. In Shaw's present view Marx was less an economist than a revolutionary Socialist, employing political economy as a weapon against his adversaries: to Marx, the economic theory of Ricardo was simply a “stick to beat the capitalist dog.” To Hyndman, doubt of any part of the “Bible of the working classes” was Socialist heresy: the whole issue resolved itself into the question whether Jevons was a Socialist or an anti-Socialist.[70] No doubt the influence which moved Shaw to devote himself to economic studies was his need of a weapon; but he did not stop to ask whether the steel came from a Socialist foundry or not. “The Marxian steel was always snapping in my hand,” he once remarked to me. “The Jevonian steel held and kept its edge, and fitted itself to every emergency. And then, just as one loves a good sword for its own sake, so one loves a sound theory for its own sake.” As a literary artist also, accustomed to express himself in terse and pointed phrase, Shaw was fired with determination to extricate the theory from its “damned shorthand” of mathematical symbols, and put it into human language.[71]

On the appearance of the English translation from the third German edition of _Das Kapital_, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, in 1887, Shaw reviewed it in three consecutive articles.[72] These articles of Shaw's show that in 1887 his conversion by Wicksteed was complete. In Shaw's article, _Stanley Jevons: His Letters and Journal_, a review of the _Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons_, which appeared in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, May 29th, 1886, he says: “He (Jevons) was far too orthodox in his practical conclusions for those materialists of the science--the revolutionary Socialists--who saw in him a mere 'bourgeois economist,' as their phrase goes. He does not seem to have had any suspicion that Mr. Hyndman and his friends made any economic pretensions at all; but it is remarkable that the most successful attack so far on the value theory of Karl Marx has come from Mr. Philip Wicksteed, a well-known Unitarian minister, who is an able follower of Jevons in economics.” Shaw was now the complete Jevonian, had thrown the Marxian theory completely over, and exactly located the step Marx missed. Shaw himself readily admits that Marx came within one step of the real solution. Whilst Marx left Shaw unconvinced as to Marxian economics, he left him profoundly imbued with Marxian convictions. In Marx, Shaw discerned one who “wrote of the nineteenth century as if it were a cloud passing down the wind, changing its shape and fading as it goes; whilst Ricardo the stockbroker and De Quincey the high Tory, sat comfortably down before it in their office and study chairs as if it were the Great Wall of China, safe to last until the Day of Judgment with an occasional coat of whitewash.” While refusing to deify Marx as a god, Shaw lauds him with what is, for him, the rarest of panegyrics. “He (Marx) never condescends to cast a glance of useless longing at the past: his cry to the present is always, 'Pass by: we are waiting for the future.' Nor is the future at all mysterious, uncertain, or dreadful to him. There is not a word of hope or fear, nor appeal to chance or providence, nor vain remonstrance with Nature, nor optimism, nor enthusiasm, nor pessimism, nor cynicism, nor any other familiar sign of the giddiness which seizes men when they climb to heights which command a view of the past, present and future of human society. Marx keeps his head like a god. He has discovered the law of social development, and knows what must come. The thread of history is in his hand.”

The point to be grasped, however, is contained in Shaw's admonition: “Read Jevons and the rest for your economics, and read Marx for the history of their working in the past, and the conditions of their application in the present. And never mind the metaphysics.” Shaw stood upon the shoulders of giants, for Jevons had laid the foundations, and Wicksteed it was who first pointed out to English Socialists the flaw in Marx's analysis of wares.[73] But in that remarkably succinct and lucid style for which he is justly famous, Shaw elaborately analyzed the questionable points in the Marxian structure and explained the latent errors involved, for the comprehension, not simply of the economist, but of the man-in-the-street. It is neither possible, nor even desirable, here to give the steps by which Shaw controverted Marx; reference to Shaw's numerous articles on the subject will give these to the curious. But the conclusions he reached are worthy of enumeration.[74] In the first place, Shaw objected to Marx's dogmatic assertion of the generally accepted Ricardian theory that “wares in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value”; and for the simple reason that the Jevonian theory called this dogma into question. In the second place, following Wicksteed, Shaw takes Marx to task for first insisting that the abstract labour used in the production of wares does not count unless it is useful, and then contradicting himself by stripping the wares of the abstract utility conferred upon them by abstractly useful work. The logical consequence of admitting abstract utility as a quality of wares produced by abstract human labour is conclusively to disconnect value from mere abstract human labour. Marx thus adroitly begs the question: as Shaw says: “It is as if he (Marx) had proved by an elaborate series of abstractions that liquids were fatal to human life, and had finished by remarking: 'Of course, the liquids must be poisonous.'” Armed with the fact of abstract utility, and the Jevonian weapons of “the law of indifference” and “the law of the variation of utility,” Shaw was enabled to prove with mathematical rigour that value does not represent the specific utility of the article, but its abstract utility; and not its total abstract utility, but its final abstract utility--at the “margin of supply,” in Wicksteed's phrase--_i.e._, the utility of the final increment that is worth producing. Translated into terms of labour, this means that the value of the ware represents, not the quantity of human labour embodied in it, but the “final utility,” in Jevonian phrase, of the abstract human labour socially necessary to produce it. As Shaw puts it: “Instead of wares being equal in value because equal quantities of labour have been expended on them, equal quantities of labour will have been expended on them because they are of equal value (or equally desirable), which is quite another thing. That slip in the analysis of wares whereby Marx was led to believe that he had got rid of the abstract utility when he had really only got rid of the specific utility, was the first of his mistakes.” Under certain ideal conditions, there is a coincidence between “exchange value” and “amount of labour contained”; but as these ideal conditions seldom, if ever, occur in practice, no scientific validity attaches to the Marxian statement that “commodities in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value.” Lastly, Shaw insists that if Marx's theory of value were correct, it would refute, not confirm, Marx's theory of “surplus value.” The proprietor's monopoly completely upsets those ideal conditions on which Marx's theory of value is based. It can be demonstrated by Jevonian principles that Marx's assumption, that the subsistence wage is the value of the labour force, is untenable, even on Marxian principles. Marx did not see that it is impossible, according to the “law of indifference,” for one part of the stock of a commodity available at any given time to have value whilst another part has none, since no man will give a price for that which he can obtain for nothing. Moreover, when he attempts to differentiate labour power from steam power, Marx's logic breaks down. As Shaw says: “Marx's whole theory of the origin of surplus value depends on the accuracy of his demonstration that steam power, machinery, etc., cannot possibly produce surplus value. If Marx were right then a capital of ten thousand pounds, invested in a business requiring nine thousand pounds for machinery and plant, and one thousand pounds for wages (or human labour power), would only return one-ninth of the surplus value returned by an equal capital of which one thousand pounds was in the form of plant and nine thousand pounds in wage capital. As a matter of fact, the 'surplus value' from both is found to be equal.”[75]

From a drawing by H. G. Wells, here reproduced by his permission.

Shaw saw plainly enough that the theory of value did not matter in the least so far as the soundness of Socialism was concerned. For, as he once expressed it in a letter to me, “if you steal a turnip the theory of the turnip's value does not affect the social and political aspect of the transaction.” But, of course, Hyndman and the few Socialists who had read Marx and nothing else, were furious over Shaw's iconoclastic articles in the _National Reformer_. In view of the fact that the opponents of Socialism continually damaged the cause of the Socialists by alleging that the Socialists' economic basis was Marx's theory and was untenable, with the result that the Socialists persisted in accepting the allegation and defending Marx, Shaw resolutely forced the quarrel into publicity as far as he could. His prime object was to make it clear that the Fabians were quite independent of the Marxian value theory. A heated controversy on the subject in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ of May, 1887, engaged in by Shaw, Hyndman, and Mrs. Besant, did not down the ghost of the value theory; for the controversy was reopened in _To-Day_ two years later. _An Economic Eirenicon_, by Graham Wallas, was followed by _Marx's Theory of Value_, contributed by H. M. Hyndman, in which, it seems, he merely repeated the old Marxian demonstration without making any attempt to meet the Jevonian attack. Whereupon Shaw “went for” Hyndman in his most aggravating style in an article entitled _Bluffing the Value Theory_, which finished the campaign except for a series of letters in _Justice_ by various hands, the tenth of which, in July, 1889, was written by Shaw. There were other letters by Shaw on the same subject, written at different times, which appeared in the _Daily Chronicle_. William Morris never made any pretence of having followed the controversy on its abstract technical side; and perhaps the most amusing feature of the entire campaign was a sort of manifesto which Belfort Bax induced Morris to sign, in which Hyndman, Bax, Aveling and Morris declared that all good Socialists were Marxites! Shaw was once denounced in public meeting by a Marxian Socialist for pooh-poohing Marx as an idiot. His own position, as he himself once remarked to me, lay somewhere between this and that of worshipping Marx as a god. In one of the most remarkable essays ever written by Shaw, entitled _The Illusions of Socialism_, Shaw pointed out why it was that a difficult and subtle theory like that of Jevons could never be as acceptable as a crude and simple labour theory like that of Marx, which seemed to imply that wealth rightly belonged to the labourer.[76]

From the standpoint of the Marxian religionist, the second heresy of which Shaw is guilty consists in his recognition of the Class War doctrine as a delusion and a suicidal political policy. To Shaw, the form of organization deduced from the Class War doctrine is always the same. “All you have to do is to form a working-class association, declare war on property, explain the economic situation from the platform and at the street corner, and wait until the entire proletariat (made 'class-conscious' by your lucid lectures) joins you. This being done simultaneously in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Vienna, etc., etc., nothing remains but a simultaneous movement of the proletarians of all countries, and the sweeping of capitalism into the sea because 'ye are many: they are few.' What can be easier or more scientific?” But a study of the history of Socialism led Shaw to the discovery that the Class War theory had gone to pieces every time it had been invoked. Lassalle attempted to organize the imaginary class-conscious proletariat, only to be disillusioned before the end of the first year by the “damned wantlessness” of the real proletariat. Owen before him likewise had failed, after apparently converting all Trade-Unionism to his New Moral World. When Marx planned the Socialist side of “The International” in the sixties, he showed his contempt for the trade-union side, with the result: “On the trade-union side a great success.... On the Socialist side, futility and disastrous failure, culminating, in 1871, in one of the most appalling massacres known to history.” Marx can scarcely be said to have tried to organize the class-conscious proletariat; but the moment his useless vituperation of Thiers, “brilliant as a sample of literary invective, but useless for the buttering of parsnips,” made known to English workmen his real opinion of bourgeois civilization, they abandoned him in horror and left the International memberless. In Germany, “Liebknecht made no serious headway until he became a parliamentarian, playing the parliamentary game more pliably than Parnell did, though always 'old-soldiering' his way with the greenhorns by prefacing each compromise with the declaration that Social Democracy never compromised.” In France, Jaurès and Millerand have not so much abandoned the Class War doctrine as wholly neglected and ignored it, thus reducing the old Guèsdist Marxism to absurdity. In England, “the once revolutionary Social-Democratic Federation has been forced by the competition of the quite constitutional Independent Labour Party to give up all its ancient Maccabean poetry, and, after a period of uselessness and surpassing unpopularity as an anti-Fabian Society with a speciality for abusing Mr. John Burns, to settle down into a sort of Ultra-Independent Labour Party, ready to amalgamate with its rival if only an agreement can be arrived at as to which is to be considered as swallowing the other.”

Not merely a study of the Class War doctrine from the historical standpoint, but also an examination into the assumptions upon which it rests, have thoroughly convinced Shaw that Socialists have for long been making overdrafts upon their _Capital_. Shaw has never sought to shirk the real point at issue by the quibble of substituting the sort of class-consciousness called snobbery, mighty as is that social force, for the economic class-consciousness of the German formula. In Shaw's interpretation, Hyndman and the Marxists use the term “Class War” to denote a war between all the proletarians on one side and all the property-holders on the other--in Schaeffle's phrase “a definite confrontation of classes”--which will be produced when the workers become conscious that their economic interests are opposed to those of the property-holders. Shaw's position is effectively summed up in his words:

“The people understand their own affairs much better than Marx
did, and the simple stratification of society into two classes
... has as little relation to actual social facts as Marx's
value theory has to actual market prices. If the crude Marxian
melodrama of 'The Class War; or, the Virtuous Worker and the
Brutal Capitalist,' were even approximately true to life, the
whole capitalist structure would have tumbled to pieces long
ago, as the 'scientific Socialists' were always expecting it
to do, instead of consolidating itself on a scale which has
already made Marx and Engels as obsolete as the Gracchi had
become in the time of Augustus. By throwing up fabulous masses
of 'surplus value,' and doubling and trebling the incomes of
the well-to-do middle classes, who all imitate the imperial
luxury and extravagance of the millionaires, Capitalism
has created, as it formerly did in Rome, an irresistible
proletarian bodyguard of labourers whose immediate interests
are bound up with those of the capitalists, and who are, like
their Roman prototypes, more rapacious, more rancorous in their
Primrose partisanship, and more hardened against all the larger
social considerations, than their masters, simply because they
are more needy, ignorant and irresponsible. Touch the income of
the rich, and the Conservative proletarians are the first to
suffer.”[77]

In Shaw's opinion, the social struggle does not follow class lines at all, because the people who really hate the capitalist system are, like Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy, Hyndman, Marx and Lassalle, themselves capitalists, whereas the fiercest defenders of it are the masses of labourers, artisans, and employees whose trade is at its best when the rich have most money to spend. Socialists like Shaw, who “do not accept the class war,” are simply expressing “first, a very natural impatience of crying 'War, War!' where there is no war; and, second, their despair at seeing Socialism, like Liberalism, perishing because it is trying to live on the crop of home-made generalizations so plentifully put forth during the great Liberal boom of 1832-80 by middle-class paper theorists like Malthus, Cobden, Marx, Comte and Herbert Spencer--fine fellows, all of them, but stupendously ignorant of the industrial world.” The basic divergence between the Fabian and the “S. D. F.” policy is epitomized in Shaw's words: “There is a conflict of interests between those who pay wages and those who receive them; and this is organized by the trade unions. There is another conflict of interests between those workers and proprietors whose customers live on rent (in its widest economic sense), and those whose customers live on wages; but the lines of this conflict run, not between the classes, but right through them, and do not coincide with the lines of the trade union conflict. And any form of Socialist organization, or any tactics toward the trade union movement, based on the theory that the lines of battle _do_ run between the classes and not through them, or _do_ coincide with the trade union lines of battle, will prove, and always has proved, disastrously impracticable.” Shaw exasperatingly said in a recent article[78] that he refused to agree with anybody on any subject whatsoever. “Let them agree with me if my arguments convince them. If not, let them plank down their own views. I will not have my mouth stopped and my mind stifled.” And those mystic forces--historical development and Progress with a large P--in which the Marxists rest their firmest hope, Shaw regards in the spirit of Ingoldsby's sacristan:

“The sacristan he said no word to indicate a doubt;
But he put his thumb unto his nose, and he spread his fingers out.”

There are two factors which strongly militate against the progress of Socialism; the resolute adherence of Socialists to those theories and policies of Marx which time, experience, and modern economic science have combined to discredit; and the tendency of the popular mind to confuse Socialism with Anarchism.[79] Shaw's most important negative and destructive achievements consist in those amazingly clever and interesting papers in which he attempts to expose Marx's theory of value as an exploded fallacy, to show that the Class War will never come, and to demonstrate the impossibilities of Anarchism. In the _technical_ sense of Socialist economics, Shaw occupies the opposite pole to Individualism and Anarchism. And yet in a very definite and general sense, Shaw is a thorough-paced individualist and anarchist. If individualist means a believer in the Shakespearean injunction “To thine own self be true!”, in the Ibsenic doctrine “Live thine own life!”, then Shaw is an individualist heart and soul. If anarchist means an enemy of convention, of tradition, of current modes of administering justice, of prevailing moral standards, then Shaw is the most revolutionary anarchist now at large. If, on the other hand, Individualist means one who distrusts State action and is jealous of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, then Shaw is most certainly not an Individualist. If Anarchist means dynamitard, incendiary, assassin, thief; champion of the _absolute_ liberty of the individual and the removal of all governmental restraint; or even a believer, as Communist, in a profound and universal sense of high moral responsibility present in all humanity, then Shaw is a living contradiction of Anarchism.

Shaw opposes Individualist Anarchism since, under such a social arrangement, the prime economic goal of Socialism: the just distribution of the premiums given to certain portions of the general product by the action of demand, would never be attained. As this system not only fails to distribute these premiums justly, but deliberately permits their private appropriation, Individualist Anarchism is, in Shaw's view, “the negation of Socialism, and is, in fact, Unsocialism carried as near to its logical completeness as any sane man dare carry it.” The Communist Anarchism of Kropotkin, Shaw also opposes because of his own lack of faith in humanity at large, in the present state of development of the social conscience. If bread were communized, the common bread store obviously would become bankrupt unless every consumer of the bread contributed to its support as much labour as the bread he consumed cost to produce. Were the consumer to refuse thus to contribute, there would be two ways to compel him: physical force and the moral force of public opinion. If physical force is resorted to, then the Anarchist ideal remains unattained. If moral force, what will be the event? The answer reveals Shaw as a confirmed sceptic in regard to the value of public opinion as a moral agent. “It is useless,” he avers, “to think of man as a fallen angel. If the fallacies of absolute morality are to be admitted into the discussion at all, he must be considered rather as an obstinate and selfish devil who is being slowly forced by the iron tyranny of Nature to recognize that in disregarding his neighbours' happiness, he is taking the surest way to sacrifice his own.” Under Anarchistic Communism, public opinion would no doubt operate as powerfully as now. But, in Shaw's opinion, public opinion cannot for a moment be relied upon as a force which operates uniformly as a compulsion upon men to act morally. Keen, incisive, pitiless, his words descriptive of _public opinion_ show how little he is tinged with the poetry, the passion, and the religion which are the very life blood of Socialism.

“Its operation is for all practical purposes quite arbitrary,
and is as often immoral as moral. It is just as hostile to the
reformer as to the criminal. It hangs Anarchists and worships
Nitrate Kings. It insists on a man wearing a tall hat and going
to church, on his marrying the woman he lives with, and on his
pretending to believe whatever the rest pretend to believe....
But there is no sincere public opinion that a man should work
for his daily bread if he can get it for nothing. Indeed, it
is just the other way; public opinion has been educated to
regard the performance of daily manual labour as the lot of
the despised classes. The common aspiration is to acquire
property and leave off working. Even members of the professions
rank below the independent gentry, so-called because they are
independent of their own labour. These prejudices are not
confined to the middle and upper classes: they are rampant
also among the workers.... One is almost tempted in this
country to declare that the poorer the man the greater the
snob, until you get down to those who are so oppressed that
they have not enough self-respect even for snobbery, and thus
are able to pluck out of the heart of their misery a certain
irresponsibility which it would be a mockery to describe as
genuine frankness and freedom. The moment you rise into the
higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you find that envy,
ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony, love of petty
titles, precedence and dignities, and all the detestable fruits
of inequality of condition, flourish as rankly among those who
lose as among those who gain by it. In fact, the notion that
poverty favours virtue was clearly invented to persuade the
poor that what they lost in this world they would gain in the
next.”[80]

When Shaw attended the International Socialist Congresses in Zurich and in London, he reported them in the _Star_ as unsparingly as he would have reported a sitting of Parliament. The Socialists, amazed and indignant at their first taste of real criticism, concluded that Shaw was going over to the enemy. This Fabian policy of unsparing criticism, inaugurated and carried out ruthlessly by Shaw, ended in freeing the Fabians, in great measure, from the illusions of Socialism, and in imparting to their Society its rigidly constitutional character. An incident, which Mr. Shaw once described in a letter to me, gives one some insight into the causes of his reaction against the German Socialists' policy of playing to the galleries by spouting revolutionary rant and hinting catastrophically of impending revolutions.

“At the Zurich Congress I first became acquainted with the
leaders of the movement on the Continent. Chief among them was
the German leader Liebknecht, a '48 veteran who, having become
completely parliamentarized, still thought it necessary to
dupe his younger followers with the rhetoric of the barricade.
After a division in which an attempt to secure unanimity by
the primitive method of presenting the resolution before the
Congress to the delegates of the different nations in their
various languages in several versions adapted to their views,
so that whilst they believed they were all saying 'Yes' to the
same proposition, the wording was really very different in the
different translations, and sometimes highly contradictory,
it turned out that the stupidity of the English section had
baffled the cleverness of the German-Swiss bureau, because
the English voted 'No' when they meant 'Yes,' and upset the
apple-cart. Happening to be close to Liebknecht on the platform
at the luncheon adjournment, I said a few words to him in
explanation of the apparently senseless action of the English.
He looked wearily round at me; saw a comparatively young
Socialist whom he did not know; and immediately treated me to a
long assurance that the German Social Democrats did not shrink
from a conflict with the police on Labour Day (the 1st of May);
that they were as ready as ever, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
I turned away as soon and as shortly as I could without being
rude; and from that time I discounted the German leaders as
being forty years out of date, and totally negligible except
as very ordinary republican Radicals with a Socialist formula
which was simply a convenient excuse for doing nothing new.

“When the German leaders visited London in the eighties they
treated the Fabian Society as a foolish joke. Later on they
found their error; and Liebknecht was entertained at a great
Fabian meeting; but to this day the German Socialist press does
not dare to publish the very articles it asks me to write,
because of my ruthless criticism of Bebel, Singer, and the old
tradition of the 'old gang' generally. My heresy as to Marx is,
of course, another horror to the Germans who got their ideas of
political economy in the '48-'71 period.”

After 1875, let us recall, the old pressure and discontent of the eighteen-thirties descended upon England with renewed force. In 1881, “as if Chartism and Fergus O'Connor had risen from the dead,” the Democratic Federation, with H. M. Hyndman at its head, inaugurated the revival of Socialist organization in England. Like those other haters of the capitalist system--the capitalists Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy, Marx and Lassalle--Hyndman “had had his turn at the tall hat and was tired of it.” Shortly after the formation of the Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, a revolting sect from the Fellowship of the New Life, founded by Professor Thomas Davidson, came into being. Hyndman and his Marxists, Kropotkin and his Anarchists, did not realize, with Shaw, that the proletariat, instead of being the revolutionary, is in reality the conservative element of society. They refused to accept this situation, not realizing that they were confronted by a condition, not a theory. “They persisted in believing that the proletariat was an irresistible mass of Felix Pyats and Ouidas.” On the point of joining the Democratic Federation, Shaw decided to join the Fabian Society instead. He did accept the situation, helped, perhaps, as he once said, by his inherited instinct for anti-climax. “I threw Hyndman over, and got to work with Sidney Webb and the rest to place Socialism on a respectable _bourgeois_ footing; hence Fabianism. Burns did the same thing in Battersea by organizing the working classes there on a genuine self-respecting working-class basis, instead of on the old romantic middle-class assumptions. Hyndman wasted years in vain denunciation of the Fabian Society and of Burns; and though facts became too strong for him at last, he is still at heart the revolted bourgeois.” Prior to the year 1886, there had been no formal crystallization of the Fabian Society into a strictly economic association, avowedly opportunist in its political policy; after September 17th of that year the thin edge of the wedge went in. The Manifesto of the Fabian Parliamentary League contains the nucleus of the Fabian policy of to-day.[81] The Fabian Society was a dead letter until Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas joined it; from that moment, it became a force to be reckoned with in English life. Almost from the very first, as Mr. Sidney Webb once wrote me, the Society took the colour of Shaw's mordantly critical temperament, and bore the stamp of his personality. The promise of the Fabians lay in their open-mindedness, their diligence in the study of advanced economics, and their resolute refusal of adherence to any formula, however dear to Socialist enthusiasts, which did not commend itself unreservedly to their intelligence. By 1885, it had only forty members; and in 1886, it was still unable to bring its roll of members to a hundred names. In 1900, it boasted a membership of eight hundred, and at present about twenty-six hundred names are found upon its rolls.[82] It is neither possible nor advisable for me to record the history of the Fabian Society--that may be found in the numerous publications of the Society. But I cannot refrain from stating that the membership increased by forty-three per cent, in the year 1906-7, that this was a year of unprecedented activity; and that the Society has recently been greatly strengthened by the accession of many well-known men in English public life. There were then _eight_ Fabians in the London County Council; and in Parliament, Labour and Socialism have in the last five years been better represented, I believe, than ever before in the history of that body. I have recently talked at length with many of the ablest Socialists in England. The remarkable growth of the Fabian Society and the Socialist representation in English literature, I was told again and again, is not due to any sudden and untrustworthy inflation of Socialist values, but is largely due to the fact that Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland, and their coterie have been planting the seeds for twenty years. Such ideas as are embodied in Mr. Lloyd George's budget and the Old Age Pension Bill are unmistakable marks of that gradual Socialist leavening of English political thought upon which the Fabians have been engaged ever since 1884. “The recent steady influx into the Fabian Society,” Mr. Bland said to me energetically, “is a clear proof to my mind that the ideas which have been lurking in the air for a long, long time are at last taking definite shape simultaneously in the minds of a great many people. Such men as Bernard Shaw have brought this thing to pass.”[83]

During the years from 1887 to 1889, the years we are especially concerned with at present, compensation for its paucity of numbers was found not only in the intellectual capacity, but also in the economic inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness of the leaders in the Fabian Society. This is best revealed in Shaw's sketch of this period:

“By far our most important work at this period was our renewal
of that historic and economic equipment of Social-Democracy of
which Ferdinand Lassalle boasted, and which has been getting
rustier and more obsolete ever since his time and that of his
contemporary, Karl Marx.... In 1885 we used to prate about
Marx's theory of value and Lassalle's Iron Law of Wages as if
it were still 1870. In spite of Henry George, no Socialist
seemed to have any working knowledge of the theory of economic
rent: its application to skilled labour was so unheard of that
the expression 'rent of ability' was received with laughter
when the Fabians first introduced it into their lectures and
discussions; and as for the modern theory of value, it was
scouted as a blasphemy against Marx.... As to history, we
had a convenient stock of imposing generalizations about the
evolution from slavery to serfdom and from serfdom to free wage
labour. We drew our pictures of society with one broad line
dividing the _bourgeoisie_ from the proletariat, and declared
that there were only two classes really in the country. We
gave lightning sketches of the development of the mediæval
craftsman into the manufacturer and finally into the factory
hand. We denounced Malthusianism quite as crudely as the
Malthusians advocated it, which is saying a great deal; and we
raged against emigration, national insurance, co-operation,
trade-unionism, old-fashioned Radicalism, and everything
else that was not Socialism; and that, too, without knowing
at all clearly what we meant by Socialism. The mischief was,
not that our generalizations were unsound, but that we had no
detailed knowledge of the content of them: we had borrowed
them ready-made as articles of faith; and when opponents like
Charles Bradlaugh asked us for details we sneered at the demand
without being in the least able to comply with it. The real
reason why Anarchist and Socialist worked then shoulder to
shoulder as comrades and brothers was that neither one nor the
other had any definite idea of what he wanted, or how it was
to be got. All this is true to this day of the raw recruits
of the movement, and of some older hands who may be absolved
on the ground of invincible ignorance; but it is no longer
true of the leaders of the movement in general. In 1887 even
the British Association burst out laughing as one man when an
elderly representative of Philosophic Radicalism, with the
air of one who was uttering the safest of platitudes, accused
us of ignorance of political economy; and now not even a
Philosophical Radical is to be found to make himself ridiculous
in this way. The exemplary eye-opening of Mr. Leonard Courtney
by Mr. Sidney Webb lately in the leading English economic
review surprised nobody, except perhaps Mr. Courtney himself.
The cotton lords of the north would never dream to-day of
engaging an economist to confute us with learned pamphlets as
their predecessors engaged Nassau Senior in the days of the Ten
Hours' Bill, because they know that we should be only too glad
to advertise our Eight Hours' Bill by flattening out any such
champion. From 1887 to 1889 we were the recognized bullies and
swashbucklers of advanced economics.”[84]