Chapter I: Socialism and the "class Struggle"

Socialists have always taught that Socialism can develop only out of the full maturity of capitalism, and so favor the normal advance of capitalist industry and government and the reforms of capitalist collectivism--on their constructive side. But if capitalism in its highest form of "State Socialism" is the only foundation upon which the Socialism can be built, it is at the same time that form of capitalism which will prevail when Socialism reaches maturity and is ready for decisive action; and it is, therefore, the very enemy against which the Socialist hosts will have been drilled and the Socialist tactics evolved.

The older capitalism, which professed to oppose all industrial activities of the government, must disappear, but it is not the object of attack, for the capitalists themselves will abandon it without Socialist intervention in any form. Socialists have urged on this evolution from the older to the newer capitalism by taking the field against the reactionaries, but they do not, as a rule, claim that by this action they are doing any more for Socialism than they are for progressive capitalism.

Socialism can only do what capitalism, after it has reached its culmination in State capitalism, leaves undone; namely, to take effective measures to establish equal opportunity and abolish class government. To accomplish this, Socialists realize they must reckon with the resistance of every element of society that enjoys superior opportunities or profits from capitalist government, and they must know just which these elements are. It must be decided which of the non-privileged classes are to be permanently relied upon in the fight for this great change, to what point each will be ready to go, and of what effective action it is capable. Next, the classes upon which it is decided to rely must be brought together and organized. And, finally, the individual members of these classes must be developed, by education and social struggles, until they are able to overcome the resistance of the classes now in control of industry and government.

The popular conviction that the very _existence_ of social classes is in complete contradiction with the principles of democracy, no amount of contrary teaching has been able to blot out. What has not been so clearly seen is the active and constant _resistance_ of the privileged classes to popular government and industrial democracy, _i.e._ the class struggle.

"We have long rested comfortably in this country on the assumption," says Senator La Follette, "that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results. Now there is nothing mysteriously potent about the forms and names of democratic institutions that should make them self-operative. Tyranny and oppression are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other. We are slowly realizing that democracy is a life, and involves continual struggle."[207]

Senator La Follette fails only to note that this struggle to make democracy a reality is not a struggle in the heart of the individual, but between groups of individuals, that these groups are not formed by differences of temperament or opinion, but by economic interests, and that nearly every group falls into one of two great classes, those whose interests are with and those whose interests are against the capitalists and capitalist government.

Why is the sinister rôle of the upper classes not universally grasped? Because the ideas and teachings of former generations still survive, however much contradicted by present developments. At the time of the American and French Revolutions and for nearly a century afterwards, when political democracy was first securing a world-wide acceptance _as an ideal_, it was looked upon as a creed which had only to be mentally accepted in order to be forthwith applied to life. The only forces of resistance were thought to be due to the ignorance or possibly to the unregenerate moral character of the unconverted. The democratic faith was accepted and propagated by the French and others almost exactly as religion had been. As late as the middle of the last century this conception of democracy, due to the wide diffusion of small and in many localities approximately equal farms and small businesses, continued to prevail.

About the middle of the nineteenth century the first advance was made. It became recognized with the coming of railroads and steamships that society could never become fixed as a Utopia or in any other form, but must always be subject to change,--and the ideal of social evolution gained a considerable acceptance even before the evolution theory had been generally applied to biology. It was seen that if the ideal of democracy was to become a reality, a certain degree of intellectual and material development was required,--but it was thought that this development was at hand. It was a period when wealth was rapidly becoming more equally distributed, when plenty of free land remained, and when it was commonly supposed that universal free trade and universal peace were about to dawn upon the nations, and equal opportunity, if not yet achieved, was not far away. The obstacles in the way of progress were not the resistance of privileged classes, but the time and labor required for mankind to conquer the world and nature. With the establishment of so-called democratic and constitutional republics in the place of monarchies and landlord aristocracies, and the abolition of slavery in the United States, all systematic opposition to social progress, except in the minds of a few perverted or criminal individuals, was supposed to be at an end.

A generation or two ago, then, though it was now recognized that the golden age could not be attained immediately by merely converting the majority to a wise and beneficent social system (as had been proposed in the first half of the century), yet it was thought that, with the advance of science and the conquest of nature, and without any serious civil strife, "equality of opportunity" was being gradually and rapidly brought to all mankind. This state of mind has survived and is still that of the majority to-day, when the conditions that have given rise to it have disappeared.

Not all previous history has a greater economic change to show than the latter half of the nineteenth century, which converted all the leading countries from nations of small capitalists into nations of hired employees. Even such a far-sighted and broad-minded statesman as Lincoln, for example, had no idea of the future of his country, and regarded the slaveowners and their supporters as the only classes that dreamed that we could ever become a nation of "hired laborers" (the capitalism of to-day), any more than we could remain in part a nation of "bought laborers." Lincoln puts a society based on hired labor in the same class with a society based on owned labor, on the ground that both lead to an effort "to place capital on an equal footing, if not above labor in the structure of the government." This effort, marked by the proposal of "the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the denial to the people of the right to participate in the selection of public officers except the legislative" (so similar to tendencies prevailing to-day), he calls "returning despotism." And so inevitable did it seem to Lincoln that a nation based on hired labor would evolve a despotic government, that he fell back on the fact that the population was composed chiefly not of laborers, but of small capitalists, and would probably remain so constituted, as the only convincing ground that our political democracy would last. In a word, our greatest statesman recognized that our political democracy and liberty were based on the wide distribution of the land and other forms of capital. (See Lincoln's Message of December 3, 1861.) If Lincoln foresaw no class struggle between "hired labor" and the "returning despotism," this was only because he mistakenly expected that the nation would continue to consist chiefly of small capitalists. Yet his conclusions and those of his contemporaries, so clearly limited to conditions that have passed away, are taught like a gospel to the children in our public schools to-day.

The present generation, however, is slowly realizing, through the development of organized capitalism in industry and government, and the increase of hired laborers, that it is not nature alone that civilization must contend against, not merely ignorance or poverty or the backwardness of material development, but, more important than all these, the systematic opposition of the employing and governing classes to every program of improvement, except that which promises still further to increase their own wealth and power.

The Socialist view of the evolution of society is that the central fact of history is this struggle of classes for political and economic power. The governing class of any society or period, Marx taught, consists of the economic exploiters, the governed class of the economically exploited. The governing class becomes more and more firmly established in power, until it begins to stagnate, but the machinery of production continues to evolve, and falls gradually into the hands of some exploited element which is able to use this economic advantage as a means for overthrowing its rulers. Marx felt that with the vast revolution in society marked by modern science and modern machinery, the time is fast approaching when the exploited classes of to-day will be able to overthrow the present ruling class, the capitalists, and at the same time establish an industrial democracy, where all class oppression will be brought to an end.

However his predictions may turn out in the future, Marx's view of the past is rapidly gaining ground and is possibly accepted by the majority of those most competent to speak on these questions to-day, including many leading economists and sociologists and prominent figures in practical political life. Winston Churchill, for example, says that "the differences between class and class have been even aggravated in the passage of years," that while "the richer classes [are] ever growing in wealth and in numbers, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remain plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery." This being the case, he predicts "a savage strife between class and class," unless the most radical measures are taken to check the tendency. Nor are his statements mere rhetoric, for he shows statistically "that the increase of income assessable to income tax is at the very least more than ten times greater than the increase which has taken place in the same period in the wages of those trades which come within the Board of Trade returns."[208] In other words, the income of the well-to-do classes (which increased nearly half a billion pounds, that is, almost doubled, in ten years) is growing ten times more rapidly than that even of the organized and better paid workmen, who alone are considered in the Board of Trade returns.

Here is a situation which is world-wide. The position of the working class, or certain parts of it, may be improving; the income of the employing and capitalist class is certainly increasing _many fold_ more rapidly. Here is the financial expression of the growing _divergence_ of classes which Marx had in mind, a divergence that we have no reason whatever for supposing will be checked, as Mr. Churchill suggests, even by his most "Socialistic" reforms, short of surrendering the political and economic power to those who suffer from this condition.

At the German Socialist Congress at Hanover in 1899, Bebel said that even if the income of the working class was increasing, or even if the purchasing power of total wages was becoming greater, the income of the nation as a whole was increasing much more rapidly and that of the capitalist class at a still more rapid rate. The great Socialist statesman laid emphasis on the essential point that capitalists are absorbing continually a greater and a greater proportion of the national income.

The class struggle, says Kautsky, rests not upon the fact that the misery of the proletariat is growing greater, but on _its need to annihilate a pressure that it feels more and more keenly_.

"The class struggle," he writes, "becomes more bitter the longer it lasts. The more capable of struggle the opponents become in and through the struggle itself, _the more important become the differences in their conditions of life, the more the capitalists raise themselves above the proletariat by the ever growing exploitation_."[209]

This feature of present-day (capitalistic) progress, Socialists view as the very essence of social injustice, no matter whether there is a slight and continuous or even a considerable progress of the working class. The question for them is not whether from time to time something more falls to the workingman, but what proportion he gets of the total product. It would never occur to any one to try to tell a business man that he ought not to sell any more goods because his profits were already increasing "fast enough." It is as absurd to tell the workingman that the moderate advance he is making either through slight improvements as to wages and hours, or through political and social reforms, ought to blind him to all the possibilities of modern civilization from which he is still shut off, and which will remain out of his reach for generations, unless his share in the income of society is rapidly increased to the point that he (and other non-capitalist producers) receive the total product.

The conflict of class interests is not a mere theory, but a widely recognized reality, and the worst accusation that can be made against Socialists is not that they are trying to create a war of classes where none exists, but that some of them at times interpret the conflict in a narrow or violent sense (I shall discuss the truth or untruth of this criticism in later chapters). Yet Mr. Roosevelt voices the opinion of many when he calls the view that the maximum of progress is to be secured only after a struggle between the classes, the "most mischievous of Socialist theses," says that an appeal to class interest is not "legitimate," and that the Socialists hope "in one shape or another to profit at the expense of the other citizens of the Republic."[210]

"There is no greater need to-day," said Mr. Roosevelt in his Sorbonne lecture, "than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, not parallel to, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position."

This is as much as to say that there are only individuals, but no class, which it is better to have outside than inside of a progressive majority. The Socialist view is the exact opposite. It holds that _the very foundation of Socialism as a method_ (which is its only aspect of practical importance) is that the Socialist movement assumes a position so militant and radical that every privileged class will voluntarily remain on the outside; and events are showing the wisdom and even the necessity of these tactics. Socialists would say, "Ruin looks us in the face if, in politics, we judge the men who occupy a certain position (the members of a certain class) by their conduct as individuals, instead of judging them by the fact that they occupy a certain position and are members of a certain class."

Again, to the Chamber of Commerce at New Haven, Mr. Roosevelt expressed a view which, to judge by their actions, is that of all non-Socialist reformers: "I am a radical," he said, "who most earnestly desires to see a radical platform carried out by conservatives. I wish to see great industrial reforms carried out, not by the men who will profit by them, but by the men who will lose by them; by such men as you are around me."

Socialists, on the contrary, believe that industrial reforms will never lead to equality of opportunity except when carried out wholly independently of the conservatives who will lose by them. They believe that such reforms as are carried out by the capitalists and their governments, beneficent, radical, and even stupendous as they may be, will not and cannot constitute the first or smallest step towards industrial democracy.

Mr. Roosevelt's views are identical on this point with those of Mr. Woodrow Wilson and other progressive leaders of the opposite party. Mayor Gaynor of New York, for example, was quoted explaining the great changes that took place in the fall elections of 1910 on these grounds: "We are emerging from an evil case. The flocking of nearly all the business men, owners of property, and even persons with $100 in the savings bank, to one party made a division line and created a contrast which must have led to trouble if much longer continued. The intelligence of the country is asserting itself, and business men and property owners will again divide themselves normally between the parties, as formerly." Here again is the fundamental antithesis to the Socialist view. Leaving aside for the moment the situation of persons with $100 in the savings bank, or owners of property in general (who might possess nothing more than a small home), Socialists are working, with considerable success, towards the day when at least one great party will take a position so radical that the overwhelming majority of business men (or at least the representatives of by far the larger part of business and capital) will be forced automatically into the opposite organization.

Without this militant attitude Socialists believe that even the most radical reforms, not excepting those that sincerely propose equal opportunity or the abolition of social classes _as their ultimate aim_, must fail to carry society forward a single step in that direction. Take, as an example, Dr. Lyman Abbott, whose advanced views I have already referred to (see Part I, Chap. III). Notwithstanding his advocacy of industrial democracy, his attack on the autocracy of capitalism and the wages system, and his insistence that the distinction between non-possessing and possessing classes must be abolished, Dr. Abbott opposes a class struggle. Such phrases amount to nothing from the Socialist standpoint, if all of these objects are held up merely as an ideal, and if nothing is said of the rate at which they ought to be attained or the means by which the _opposition_ of privileged classes is to be overcome. No indorsement of any so-called Socialist theory or reform is of practical moment unless it includes that theory which has survived out of the struggles of the movement, and has been tested by hard experience--a theory in which ways and means are not the last but the first consideration,--namely, the class struggle.

Mr. Roosevelt and nearly all other popular leaders of the day denounce "special privilege." But the denouncers of special privilege, aside from the organized Socialists, are only too glad to associate themselves with one or another of the classes that at present possess the economic and political power. To the Socialists the only way to fight special privilege is _to place the control of society in the hands of a non-privileged majority. The practical experience of the movement_ has taught the truth of what some of its early exponents saw at the outset, that a majority _composed even in part_ of the privileged classes could never be trusted or expected to abolish privileges. Neither Dr. Abbott, Mr. Roosevelt, nor other opponents of the Socialist movement, are ready to indorse this practical working theory. For its essence being that all those who by their economic expressions or their acts stand for anything less than equality of opportunity should be removed from positions of power, it is directed against every anti-Socialist. Dr. Abbott, for example, demands only "opportunity," instead of equal opportunity, and Mr. Roosevelt wishes merely "to start all men in the race for life on a _reasonable_ equality." (My italics.)[211]

Let us see what Marx and his successors say in explanation of their belief that the "class struggle" must be fought out to an end. Certainly they do not mean that each individual capitalist is to be regarded by his working people as their private enemy. Nor, on the other hand, can the expression "class struggle" be interpreted, as some Socialists have asserted, to mean that there was no flesh and blood enemy to be attacked, but only "the capitalist system." To Marx capitalism was embodied not merely in institutions, which embrace all classes and individuals alike, but also in the persons of the capitalist class. And by waging a war against that class he meant to include each and every member of it who remained in his class, and every one of its supporters. To Marx the enemy was no abstraction. It was, as he said, "the person, the living individual" that had to be contended with, but only as the embodiment of a class. "It is not sufficient," he said, "to fight the general conditions and the higher powers. The press must make up its mind to oppose _this_ constable, _this_ attorney, _this_ councilor."[212] These individuals, moreover, he viewed not merely as the servants or representatives of a system, but as part and parcel of a class.

The struggle that Marx had in mind might be called _a latent civil war_. It was not a mere preparation for revolution, since it was as real and serious in times of peace as in those of revolution or civil war. But it was a civil war in everything except the actual physical fighting, and he was always ready to proceed to actual fighting when necessary. Throughout his life Marx was a revolutionist. And when his successors to-day speak of "the class struggle," they mean a conflict of that depth and intensity that it may lead to revolution.

None of the classical Socialist writers, however, has failed to grasp the absolute necessity to a successful social movement, and especially to a revolutionary one, of making the class struggle broad, inclusive, and democratic. In 1851 Marx wrote to the Socialists: "The forces opposed to you have all the advantages of organization, discipline, and habitual authority; unless you bring _strong odds_ against them you are defeated and ruined." (The italics are mine.)

Edward Bernstein, while representing as a rule only the ultra-moderate element of the Party, expresses on this question the views of the majority as well. "Social Democracy," he says, "cannot further its work better than by taking its stand unreservedly on the theory of democracy." And he adds that in practice it has always favored coöperation with all the exploited, even if "its literary advocates have often acted otherwise, and still often do so to-day."

Not many years ago, it is true, there was still a great deal of talk in Germany about the desirability of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," the term "proletariat" being used in its narrow sense. That is, as soon as the working class (in this sense) became a political majority, it was to make the government embody its will without reference to other classes--it being assumed that the manual laborers will only demand justice for all men alike, and that it was neither safe nor necessary to consult any of the middle classes. And even to-day in France much is said by the "syndicalists" and others as to the power of well-organized and determined minorities in the time of revolution--it being assumed, again, that such minorities will be successful only in so far as they stand for a new social principle, to the ultimate interest of all (see