The Socialist Movement/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
IN THE SOCIALIST STATE
Some of the critics of Socialism insist that its advocates should not only supply every detail in its working, but even the most minute particulars of these details. There is a certain ephemeral controversial advantage in this. One of the greatest difficulties which the propaganda of Socialism has to encounter is the incapacity of people to imagine any different state of society to that in which they live. A new social relationship, a new combination of human motives, a new mode of wealth production, is at once set aside as something beyond their vision, and consequently something that bears the stamp of the impractical. Their consideration of Socialism therefore ends where it began.
The utopian Socialist had to produce these details because his New Harmony was supposed to work straight away like a patented invention. Also, if the modern Socialist proposed to adopt revolution as the means to his end, he would require to produce his whole plan, because it would be required on the morrow of the upheaval. That, however, is not his method. He approaches Socialism as Hannibal crossed the Alps, and all he has to prove is that his theory is rational, that it is justified by modern tendencies which have not yet worked themselves out, that its criticisms on the existing condition of things are accurate and open out a practical way of social development. He can quite properly argue that the details must be settled by experience—the experimental method—and that it is vain to construct a complete social fabric theoretically, when the various elements which must enter into it will have to be made, tested and valued by the knowledge that will be gained whilst it is being built.
There are certain general considerations regarding these details which, however, may be profitably discussed with a view to ascertaining whether there are any fundamental grounds for the conclusion that the Socialist state must remain for ever a mere figment of the sentimental imagination.
1. Ability.
Let us consider first of all the objection that under Socialism the mechanism of production must remain fixed, that invention will be impossible, and that labour will not be put to more and more efficient use.
With this point in mind, Mr. Mallock—to whom I must refer somewhat frequently in this chapter, because he is the only writer in this country who has undertaken a systematic examination of Socialism that is worthy of serious consideration—in an unguarded outburst of grandiloquence has declared: "Socialism has never inaugurated an improved chemical process."[1] He might as well have proclaimed that the Binomial Theorem has never woven a nightcap nor patched a pair of dilapidated trousers. I know a Socialist who has "inaugurated an improved chemical process"; and I know another who, by the discovery of radium, has opened out the way for a revision of our physical theorising; I know a third who shares with Darwin the honour of having established the greatest scientific generalisation of the century, and of having revolutionised every department of thought in consequence. But that is not the question. It is: Can Socialism guarantee the conditions under which improved chemical processes will be inaugurated? If it can, we may think more about it; if it cannot, we may dismiss it altogether from our minds, and pay attention to Mr. Mallock's amusing theories about Ability and Aristocracy.
Every system of production must bear the cost of its own improvement. A recognition of this has been the secret of German business success. We got our markets under the favourable smiles of our political conditions; we have lost many of them because we were not prepared to pay for the brains of discoverers and inventors, and this was necessary to enable us to keep our customers. America got its markets because the forceful wills of its people enabled them to take the fullest and the most brutal advantage of the economic laws of concentration of capital and management. Germany got its markets because it established scientific laboratories and linked them up with industrial processes.
Now, under Socialism, our educational institutions would be revolutionised. Science would be our guide in everything. Even to-day, thanks mainly to the state or to public corporations working with the aid and the mind of the state, this change is beginning. Agricultural, technical, industrial laboratories are being opened. Universities are running experimental farms, are testing seeds, manures, soils, are advising farmers about crops, stock, diseases, dairy products, and everything else that concerns them; they are establishing industrial laboratories where post-graduate students may work not only on experiments relating to pure science, but on those relating to applied science; town councils and county councils are aiding the work and are supplementing it by independent efforts of their own. All these activities have been hampered and delayed in this country, in the first place, owing to the blindness and lack of education amongst our "captains of industry," who have followed the profit-making ideals of commercialism only too closely; and, in the second place, owing to our mistrust of state action making us look in other directions for our aid, and also making that state action inefficient and inadequate when it was at last begun. It must not be overlooked that it is in Germany where the grip of commercialism has been least deadening, because it has been modified by other national impulses, and where the activities of the state have been greatest, that this development of scientific investigation is most marked and has yielded the best results.
I can imagine that under Socialism every centre of higher and scientific education will have its applied departments and laboratories, every industry and group of industries will have their staff of scientific and technical experts, whilst the skill of the workmen in every factory and workshop, and their mental keenness will have been brought to a pitch of excellence which is hardly reached by our most expert workmen to-day.
This is the foundation, this is the atmosphere, of all improvements in industrial processes.
But the critic again appears with an objection. The Socialist cannot find managers of ability. Mr. Mallock writes a great deal about this, and though he does his best, by neglecting to represent Socialist methods with accuracy, to reason out his conclusion, he really fails, and in the end he simply jumps to it.[2] I propose to discuss it, however.
Whatever may be our conclusions regarding the reward which we are to give to ability, the Socialist system of education, the Socialist organisation of scientific laboratory and workshop, and the Socialist care to provide equality of opportunity will, unless nature herself fail us, train our brains and produce the ability which is to be rewarded. Our critics are particularly fond of using the argument that such and such a thing is unthinkable and is contrary to human nature, and that argument has to be used by us here. For what we are told by our critics to assume is, that there will be a great production of ability and a provision of the richest opportunities for it to show itself, but that it will yield no results. The demand to believe such a thing is palpably absurd. The intellectual and scientific atmosphere of the Socialist state will be pregnant with discovery, invention, and improvement; ability will be so general that it will not be confined to one class or to one type of mind, and it will therefore be available to all kinds of prompting from monetary award to public honour. To-day, let us assume (though the assumption is not just) that it can be had only at a high monetary price. Under Socialism it will belong to so many that it will exert itself sometimes from the sheer love of exercising itself, sometimes for honours, sometimes for money perhaps; but in any event that it should exist and do nothing is as unthinkable as that the sun should shine without emitting light and heat. There will be places in laboratories, places in workshops, places in the public administrative services, open for it and demanding to be filled. Skill can act as teacher, as experimenter, as foreman, as manager, as director, for industry under Socialism will be carried on by the same differentiation of function as is the case now. Therefore we can safely conclude that there will be ability; that its monopoly will be broken down, and that there will be plenty of opportunity for its exercise under Socialism. The precise method of rewarding it can be safely left to experience in the calm assurance that if special monetary payment is necessary, Socialism will adapt itself to that necessity.
But, again our critic objects, experience has shown that "public opinion" has been against mechanical invention, and as "public opinion" will control the production of wealth under Socialism, the ability produced in the way described will be as ruthlessly sacrificed as certain primitive peoples sacrificed their female offspring. There will be just enough of it preserved to keep things going. And here they remind us of the wild Luddites, of the tribulations of Arkwright with the crowd, and so on, and defy us to get our necks out of that noose.
I must, however, point out a distinction between the present state and Socialism which robs these historical instances of any value for the purpose of this argument. The immediate and local effect of the introduction of machinery to-day is to displace labour. Labour saving machinery under the operations of our present system is labour substituting. That was the first effect of the Arkwright inventions. It must not be forgotten that the years when the new machines were being introduced lay in the period when labour sunk to the darkest depths of economic misery. Labour was clutching at straws rather than calmly thinking out a policy of salvation. Moreover, be it not forgotten, Adam Smith himself admitted the displacement of labour and the change in the kind of labour demanded after the introduction of new machinery, and so much has this influenced economists that they have frequently discussed whether men so displaced have a claim for compensation. (Cf. Foxwell, Irregularity of Employment.)
From this distance we can see and appreciate the after effects of the mechanical inventions, but the weaver who had to compete with them in the middle of the eighteenth century neither could see nor appreciate. Ned Ludd was not a historian surveying the nineteenth century; he was a workman (or something of the kind) who found that the machines were emptying his cupboard. Such a system as that must inevitably bring "public opinion" into conflict with mechanical invention.
But that is not the Socialist system. When we have public ownership of the machines, they will be labour saving immediately and not in the long run, and the interest of the working population to maintain an income and keep it as big as possible, will welcome mechanical improvements under Socialism as heartily as it opposed them under capitalism. A man working with his own machinery is glad to be told of methods to economise his labour; men working with other people's machinery regard such methods as a notice for some of them to begin walking the streets. Historical references must be used with some discrimination.
Now I can complete my argument. Under Socialism there will be more ability, there will be more opportunities for its exercise, and a heartier welcome will be given to its results than under the present system.
The mechanism of production will not stand still, but will steadily improve under Socialism. Production will be cheapened. There will be a larger volume of national wealth to enjoy; labour will be more efficiently directed and be more productive; non-producers will be reduced to a minimum; and the common incentive to which every one will respond will be the steady reduction of the necessary drudgery labour, so that the free time during which a man's will has full play may be as ample as possible. All that means industrial progress.
2. Artistic Genius.
I now come to another department of the same survey. The arts will die, it is said, when Socialism comes, because there will be no intellectual freedom under this "coming tyranny," and no encouragement to. the imagination under this "reign of materialism." This objection approaches as nearly to the unthinkable as it can do. That, in a community organised industrially as I have just described, the mind of man must become servile and dull is impossible. Surely, rather, as there is to be ability, leisure and a generally diffused enjoyment of private property and leisure, a great impetus will be given to all intellectual pursuits, to culture, to every activity of the free mind, and the grandeur of public buildings and the richness of public treasures which will then embody the dignity of the communal life, will augment that impetus. The crushing misery of the slum as a home and the street as a playground, the deadening dulness of the respectable quarters of our towns, where our middle classes strive in vain to breathe the atmosphere of culture, will have gone, and openness, variety taste, freshness will have taken their place. The individual himself, the community of which he is a part, the surroundings in which he lives, will be charged with mental invigoration. What is called the "reign of materialism" will be the very opposite of that.
But the critic smiles, "I know the Socialist is at home in speculative Sociology; come and tell me in practice how this can work."[3] In response I propose to take two points, one which justifies me in my belief that the intellectual life is possible to the great majority of people, and the other, which justifies me in setting aside the "practical" arguments of our opponents as being of no substantial value in this connection.
My belief in the possibility of an intellectual life for those who do the hardest labour has been greatly strengthened in recent years by my contact with the Adult School and similar movements. To find, Sunday morning after Sunday morning, crowds of men who have been working laboriously for long hours in factories at exhausting drudgery all through the week, appearing carefully dressed at hours when most people in better circumstances are only getting up or have got no further than the commencement of breakfast, and to observe the intellectual keenness which these men show for subjects of serious import, compel one to think on somewhat utopian lines of what might be under better circumstances. And when, in addition to that, one also discovers that these factory workers are tenants of some near-by allotment, where they grow excellent kitchen produce and cultivate beautiful flowers for the æsthetic enjoyment of the work, one's optimism for the future is increased, and one’s assurance that an intellectual response will be made to the changes which Socialism proposes becomes fixed on a rock.
I now come to my matter of practical detail. If there is any citizen of the Socialist state who has drawn out the sympathies of the whole body of Socialist critics more than any other, it is the poet. His case seems to have weighed on the minds of most of our critics. How is he to be discovered? How is he to be published? How is he to make a living? The press is to be in the hands of the state. Manuscripts must be read by a state official with, perhaps, less taste than one of our own poets laureate or our censor of plays. Books will not be allowed to bear royalties. This net of posers is thrown over the head of the Socialist with all the dexterity shown by a retiarius in a Roman gladiatorial show. Is the Socialist enmeshed? Let us see.
Some honest work has never been bad for the good poet. Indeed, when our industrial towns were "nests of singing birds," as some of them have been before commercialism transformed craftsmanship into toil, the industrial experience of the poet added strength to the wings of his song.[4] The democratic poets have become mute because the darkness of commercialism has settled on their souls. The work which the poet will have to do under Socialism will be congenial, for it will be provided automatically by the organisation which provides equality of opportunity, and it will therefore not hamper his muse. So Socialism will have its poets.
How will they publish? This is one of the questions which can be satisfactorily answered only by time. That they must publish is quite apparent, and it is simply perversity for any one to argue seriously that such an insignificant problem as that will baffle society. But let me try to construct a little bit of Socialist society by using the past as an indication of the future. When time went more leisurely than it does and the hustle and bustle of commercialism had not struck us like a cyclone, people lived a pretty full intellectual life in societies like the famous Edinburgh Select Society or in those mournful gatherings of cronies which fill so much of the canvas of the life of Burns. There seems little doubt but that if we could possess ourselves once more of our lost leisure (say, by subordinating machines to men instead of men to machines) these circles and coteries would revive, for man's intellectual life is as social in its requirements as his industrial life. If they did revive general culture would leap forward with a bound. One of the reasons why an unworthy literature is finding such a market to-day is that the destruction of intellectual coteries has withdrawn the great part of the intellectual stimulus which the best of men require. Individualism in reading and thinking gives, first, trashy journalism, and then trashy literature, a chance. Well, under the conditions which would come with Socialism, Science, Art, Literature would have their associations everywhere. This is the audience for our poet. He delights and charms his friends. He appears before the connoisseurs as Burns did in Edinburgh, or before the socially select as Tennyson did, or before the public as Dickens, or Carlyle, or Thackeray did. Thus the poet gets his reputation. But he has yet to find a printing-press and a publisher, and the Socialist state owns the one and is the other, we are told!
The Socialist state, however, is only an instrument of public opinion, and I have a firm conviction that the divine poet, or any other kind of poet, would have no more difficulty with a literary faculty of the Socialist state than with the reader of a London publisher. Still, I shall not leave it at that, because I desire to show in a greater fulness the elasticity of the Socialist state. I return to the literary coterie which first encouraged and applauded the genius.
Where men have leisure, culture and means, the literary output is great, and the most natural thing in the world for those coteries to do would be to publish. They would take the place of the ancient patron; they will do the publishing—just as the Royal Society to-day publishes monographs, or the Early English Text Society or the New Spalding Club issues historical records. Not only that, for I can easily imagine that these societies will have control of presses. I do not say that will be so, but I do say that if it were so the poet would have a much better chance of publication than he has now, and also that such a thing would not be inconsistent with Socialist theory and requirements.
Then the market! If a better distribution of wealth would turn the imperfectly clad millions of backs into a field for the employment of British labour as the prairie-land of Canada is made a field for British capital, what a fruitful soil for British art would be the British home. To-day the patronage of art belongs to a small class; under Socialism it would belong to the whole people. On this wide field all art would flourish. To-day the patrons are so few that the original genius has a bitter struggle. It will not tread upon worn ways, and its feet are pierced with briars. It gets soured; it declares war; it becomes ugly with the pain at its heart. Under Socialism and with the opportunities which a vast patronage affords, it will remain natural and sweet. Nothing is more certain than that the advance of Socialism will be heralded by an invigoration of the æsthetic tastes.
Still, there is the remuneration to be settled. I was never able to see the alleged difficulties about this until I read Mr. Mallock's proof of its impossibility. The value of a book, he says, as determined by Socialist economics is its cost of setting up and binding, and consequently, according to that economics, if Dickens made a living off his books it was "by robbing his compositors."[5] If the working of a Socialist state is examined by a mind so blind as to facts, and so confused as to economic reasoning, one can see how these mysterious difficulties arise. The argument used above is this. The value of a knife is the cost of labour of the knife grinder and his assistants; if the iron ore quarryman and the smelter make anything out of it, it is "by robbing the knife-grinder.” A book consists of two things. It is the physical thing produced by binding up printed sheets; it is also the intellectual thing of ideas, of art, of information, or the like. Its cost must cover the purchase of both. Mr. Mallock gets into his bog of difficulties by forgetting what a book is, not by applying a critical mind to the Socialist state. Now, the payment for the second aspect of a book can be determined in a variety of ways. The writer could be put on a civil list, he could be subsidised by his patron coterie—but this is the point, there is nothing in Socialist theory preventing his being rewarded in the simplest of all fashions, from the sales of his book. If the cost of composing and otherwise producing and publishing the book is x and it is sold at x + y to cover remuneration for the author, I have yet to learn that such a transaction violates any canon of Socialist economics.
So, under Socialism, we may have the poet, and he may have his public, his publisher and his remuneration.
And I have taken the poet to represent the intellectual worker of every kind who would be treated mutatis mutandis in a similar way.
There is not much fear of intellectual stagnation in the Socialist state.
3. Minority Rights.
The difficulty of the poet is generally but a preliminary to what is meant to be the still greater difficulty of an opposition between the powers that be and the critical newspaper, which must lead to the suppression of the latter. If Socialism were a divinely ordered society the critical newspaper—especially the daily one—might be suppressed altogether in the intellectual and moral interest of the public, for there is no more melancholy spectacle to-day than the party press, with its misrepresentations, its suppressions, and its tongue in its cheek—unless it be the spectacle of those who read it and believe it.
The supposition of our critics is that the "powers that be" under Socialism will be all powerful and that, whilst remaining quite sane, they will be oppressively tyrannical. They will stamp out hostile opinion. They will not permit a whisper of criticism. They will govern like a South American president with an army at his back, with venial judges on the bench, and with political police in their communes. In other words, they will have forgotten all the world's experience of how to make governments stable, they will have ceased to appreciate the safety of free speech and of open criticism, they will have departed from the axiom that civic peace is maintained by the liberty to discuss and to grumble. One must grant this extraordinary revolution in the art and science of government, this unthinkable loss of capacity on the part of governors, before one can even conceive the objection with which I am dealing. And be it noted in the passing, when one has granted that, one has destroyed the political conditions of freedom under which alone Socialism can not only exist, but actually come into existence. My answer to the objection, therefore, is that its very conception is inconsistent with the principles of Socialism and, in the light of history, is a palpable absurdity.
I am, however, unwilling to part with it at that, because I am again anxious to face the real problems of Socialist administration so far as reason and experience have as yet thrown light upon them, and this objection leads to some important considerations. There will be parties in the Socialist state; there will be governments and oppositions—majorities and minorities. Truth and progress will be then, as they have always been, hammered out by rival tongues and opposing brains.
In discussing Socialist administration, the critics of Socialism have always overlooked the large part that voluntary organisations are to play inside the state. For instance, the family will probably enjoy an influence which it could not acquire under commercialism, for under commercialism it has been steadily decaying.[6] The relation between parents and children will be closer, and be continued for longer periods than is now possible, and, consequently, the home will resume its lost religious significance. It will be altar fires that will burn on its hearths, and sacramental meals that will lie on its tables. The free man with leisure will show his social nature not only by living in crowds, but by forming for his own delight groups of men like-minded to himself. One of these voluntary organizations will undoubtedly be a political party, for I cannot conceive of a time when different practical proposals in statecraft will not exist or not be transformed into great rival policies and principles of government. The state will have to give these parties free and fair play, because the state will be democratically governed. Each party will have to look after its own interest, and it will, therefore, be essential that each party has its own organs. To-day, in the Palace of Westminster, the various parties have their own rooms; they are recognised by the Speaker and the other officers of the House of Commons; Hansard reports all speeches impartially. Under Socialism I can, therefore, easily imagine that the party newspapers would be under party control, parties and groups having certain rights of publication, just as a member of the American House of Representatives has the right to hand in the manuscript of a speech and get it printed as though he had delivered it. The presses might be under party management with safeguards, or party rights might consist in a power to claim the use of presses. The point is trivial, and if critics busy themselves devising all kinds of possible anomalies and difficulties, all I can say is that if even to-day the country decided to nationalise its printing-presses and to make parties officially responsible for the papers published in their interests, two or three business men connected with party newspapers could draw up within a week a scheme of working which could set the whole plan going, and produce a freer and a more responsible press than we have now.
Once we disabuse our minds of the totally erroneous idea that a government's interests lie in suppressing every opinion but its own, every serious obstacle in the way of free political speech and writing under Socialism disappears, and the problem becomes one of business arrangement. To-day the syndicated newspaper groups are solving it. The central management from some London office of half-a-dozen papers printed throughout the country, the practice (as every one who gets newspaper cuttings knows) which certain political offices are adopting of sending out special articles, leaders, comments, and even letters signed by individuals, to scores of different newspapers, which print them as though they were of local origin, are paving the way for responsible control of frankly partisan publications. They are doing more, moreover. They are warning the public that with the concentration of capital and the union of the anti-social interests against the common interests, the day is rapidly fading away when every party had a chance of upholding its views through the press. The monopoly of the organs of public opinion, which was long supposed to be inevitable under Socialism, is, as a matter of fact, inevitable under capitalism, and the fading privilege of free discussion will only be restored when economic power is better distributed, or, when concentrated, is democratically controlled. For, it must be observed, the suppression of critical opposition, impossible so far as a government or public authority is concerned, is quite possible when a combination of capitalist interests makes up its mind to effect it.
4. Workshop Management.
In order that one may appreciate the position taken up in the last section, it must be understood quite clearly that the Socialist state is not merely to have a political form. It will not be embodied exclusively in a few politically controlled departments under the shadow of the House of Parliament. It will also consist of an industrial organisation, which will have a very decisive influence on public opinion, and will also act as a check upon the political organisation. At the head of this side of the state will be the ablest business men, economists, scientists, statisticians in the country, all having risen through the lower grades of the particular departments to which they belong. Only some of the means of production will be directly under their charge, like railways and canals. They will be responsible for foreign trade, for general labour legislation, possibly for education; they will regulate the volume of national production and determine exchange ratios; they will have charge of the financial arrangements of the community; they will decide—subject to the assent of the political state—the varying dividing lines between associated and individualist production, for these lines will not be drawn on one day for all time. And if such a scientific control and regulation of production seems strange to minds unfamiliar with the very thought of it, I content myself by reminding such readers that before many years have passed over our heads, trusts of various forms will be doing in certain industries practically the same work. In this respect, as in others, we shall grow into the Socialist state. As Socialism is the child of capitalism, capitalism will show it how to set about its business.
In the industrial state, too, there will be great activity amongst voluntary organisations. The main industrial division under capitalism is between capital and labour—employer and employed. That is "the class war" now. But there will be wars under Socialism too, the main cleavage then being between consumer and producer, It will be the interest of the whole community minus the producers of each article severally, to get the cost of production reduced to a minimum, and though the better conditions of life and the prevailing atmosphere of justice will prevent that opposition from developing hostile camps such as we have at present, no harm is done by assuming the worst that can happen. We must put the most severe tests on our faith.
We must, therefore, look for a survival of trade unionism in the Socialist state. Those engaged in the different sections of production will have their voluntary organisations, which will very likely be international in their scope. They will, in all probability, be utilised for advisory purposes by the central authorities, and they will be consulted when any change in exchange ratios or in industrial processes is being contemplated. They will also be a convenient medium for those insurances which will be necessary to meet temporary displacements of labour and other accidents which must overtake the best organised system of production.
Whether these organisations will appoint, or have any voice in appointing, workshop managers and business directors, is a matter upon which no definite opinion can as yet be formed. Let us remind ourselves of the system. There is a mass of workmen at the base of the structure, above them is a large army of foremen, over them departmental managers, and over them general workshop directors. Then we come to the organisation of groups of industries and of districts. A graded body of managers will be responsible for that, ending perhaps with a district director. The widest area of all—the national community—will be co-ordinated by the bodies to which I have already referred. If there is anything unfamiliar about all this, I again commend the troubled spirit to study the organisation of the Railway Clearing House, a trust like the American Steel Corporation, or a German Kartel formed for the purpose of distributing markets and profits. The organisation of the best trade unions, particularly the German organisation, also throws light upon this subject.
Then the question which I have already put to myself may be considered: How are all these grades to be fed? The workers will be provided from the schools. In the great majority of cases youths have their own bent. The Socialist child must work, and he will, as a rule, choose his own calling. Should he desire to follow some profession, and there are more applicants than vacancies, a well-devised examination of selected students will provide the desired "equality of opportunity." Should he desire to follow a technical line, the schools will be in the closest touch with the workshops, and the best advice will be given him regarding openings and demand.[7] The coercion about which we hear so much will rarely be experienced, all the more so as a large part of our unpleasant work will have disappeared, owing to mechanical and other invention and discovery. It will certainly be no prominent feature in the Socialist state.
What of the selection of managers? Two schools of co-operative thought dispute this point between them, and are experimenting with it, and until the contest and the experiments have gone on a little longer we may regard it as unsettled. There is, in the first place, the school which believes in the self-governing workshop. It believes that the workpeople should appoint their managers, either directly, or indirectly through some representative committee. The objection to this view is that it regulates production by the producer himself, whereas production should be regulated by the whole community. The argument in favour of it is that it secures just treatment to the producer, and protects him against exploitation. The objection to the other view is that under it the consumer can tyrannise over the producer, and can deprive him of what is a fair reward for his labour. The productive works of the Co-operative Wholesale Society in England are often charged with this lapse from co-operative grace. In favour of it is the fact that only by such a scheme of management can all the producing functions be put upon terms of equality and even-handed justice be done to them.
The two schools of co-operative propaganda used to be in pretty sharp conflict with each other, but they are now coming into a more friendly touch, with the result that they are blending together. This is the common history of such rival theories. They unite; one does not crush the other out. Socialist management will be determined by the further experience of co-operation. The directors of areas and the central controlling staff will undoubtedly represent the consuming public; the managers in direct touch with workshop organisation will have to carry the confidence of the workers as well as serve the needs of the consumers. The argument that this double task will produce deadlocks, that it will produce managers incapable of doing their duty and over-indulgent to the workpeople, is a mere bogey. Problems of precisely this character are now being solved by the co-operative movement, and if they have given this movement some trouble, as they undoubtedly have, we must not forget that the co-operative experience will be handed down, not only as a guide, but as an industrial habit.
- ↑ A Critical Examination of Socialism, p. 4.
- ↑ A Critical Examination of Socialism, chap. vii. Especially the shipyard illustration, p. 77, where imaginary difficulties are gratuitously assumed and the most incompetent actions on the part of the authorities coolly taken for granted.
- ↑ This is a favourite corner into which our critics run. They favour it because whilst in it they can make all kinds of unwarranted assumptions whilst they pose as practical business men. The student can find illustrations of this in nearly every chapter of A Critical Examination of Socialism. The point is stated categorically at p. 101.
- ↑ The great outburst of lyrical song in Scotland, in the latter part of the eighteenth century,was purely democratic; and was greatly enriched by the fact that the singers were ploughmen, weavers, shoemakers and such-like.
- ↑ A Critical Examination of Socialism, p. 53.
- ↑ It is an amusing commentary upon the charge against Socialism that it seeks to abolish marriage, that so soon as there was a Socialist municipal control at Lille it abolished fees for getting married in order that difficulties in regulating family connections might be removed. Many people who would not, or could not, pay the old high fees at once presented themselves to be married, and literally blessed "the enemies of the family" for their moral action.
- ↑ This expedient is being adopted in some schools to-day with satisfactory results.