Читать книгу British Socialism - J. Ellis Barker - Страница 29

Having, by the fundamental doctrines enumerated in the foregoing, proved that all misery of the working masses is caused by the existence of a capitalist class which has enslaved the workers, the Socialists conclude that there is a natural antagonism between capital and labour; that social life is dominated by the Class War.

"The Socialists say that the present form of property-holding divides society into two great classes."[216] "Capitalist society is divided into two classes: owners of property and owners of no property."[217] "Society is to-day divided into two classes with opposing interests, one class owning the means of life, and the other nothing but their power to work. Never in the history of society was the working-class so free from all traces of property as to-day."[218] "There are in reality but two classes, those who live by labour and those who live upon those who labour, the two classes of exploiter and exploited."[219] "Society has been divided mainly into two economic classes, a relatively small class of capitalists who own tools in the form of great machines they did not make and cannot use, and a great body of many millions of workers who did make these tools and who do use them, and whose very lives depend upon them, yet who do not own them."[220]

It is usually said that society has three classes, but Socialists maintain that there are in reality only two classes. William Morris still divided society into three groups, which, however, at closer inspection will be found to form but two classes. According to Morris, "Civilised States consist of (1) the class of rich people doing no work, who consume a great deal while they produce nothing. Therefore, clearly they have to be kept at the expense of those who do work, just as paupers have, and are a mere burden on the community. (2) The middle class, including the trading, manufacturing, and professional people of our society. It is their ambition and the end of their whole lives to gain, if not for themselves, yet at least for their children, the proud position of being obvious burdens on the community. Here then is another class, this time very numerous and all-powerful, which produces very little and consumes enormously, and is therefore supported, as paupers are, by the real producers. (3) The class that remains to be considered produces all that is produced and supports both itself and the other classes, though it is placed in a position of inferiority to them, real inferiority, mind you, involving a degradation both of mind and body. To sum up, then, civilised States are composed of three classes—a class which does not even pretend to work, a class which pretends to work but which produces nothing, and a class which works."[221] In other words, William Morris divided society into two classes: propertied non-producers and non-propertied toilers.

According to practically all living English Socialists, there are but two classes in society. "Modern society is divided into two classes—the possessors of property and the non-possessors: the dominant class and the subject class; the class which rules and the class which has to obey. He who possesses sufficient wealth to exercise control over the labour of others, to exploit that labour for his own profit, belongs to the one class; he who possesses nothing but the power to labour contained in his own body, and who is therefore compelled to sell that labour power in order to live, belongs to the other. It is this struggle and conflict between these two classes that Socialists call the class war, a recognition of which is essential to a clear conception of what the Socialist movement involves."[222] "Society is divided into two opposite classes, one, the capitalists and their sleeping partners the landlords and loanmongers, holding in their hands the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and being therefore able to command the labour of others; the other, the working class, the wage-earners, the proletariat, possessing nothing but their labour power, and being consequently forced by necessity to work for the former."[223] "In society there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce, and those who produce but do not possess."[224] "The people of this unfortunate country have been aptly divided by Mr. Gladstone into the 'masses' and the 'classes'—that is to say, into those who live by their own labour and those who live on the labour of others. Among the latter tribe of non-producers are included all manner of thieves, pick-pockets, burglars, sharpers, prostitutes, Peers of Parliament, their families and menials, all, or nearly all, the 'six hundred and odd scoundrels of the House of Commons,' the twenty thousand State parsons, who every Sunday shamelessly travesty the Christian religion in the interest of the 'classes.'"[225]

The theory of dividing society into two classes, capitalists and workers, or as others put it, "exploiters and exploited," is manifestly absurd, and its absurdity has been pointed out by a few Socialists. "It is not true that there are only two great economic classes in the community. The Communist Manifesto, even in its day, admitted as much, but made no place for the fact in its theories. There is an economic antagonism between landlords and capitalists as well as between capitalists and workmen."[226] Besides, most capitalists are workers, and probably the great majority of English workers are capitalists to a larger or smaller extent.

Now let us study the Socialists' description of the hostile forces which are engaged in the Class War.

According to the Socialist teaching, the property-owners as a class are useless idlers who impoverish the workers and who shamelessly spend their whole income on demoralising luxuries. "The idlers and non-workers produce no wealth and take the greater share. They live on the labour of those who work. Nothing is produced by idleness; work must be done to obtain a thimble, a pin, and even a potato for dinner. The non-workers get the greater share of the wealth, and the greater part of this share is wasted. Therefore it is not good to have any people in the land who do not work. Only those who are old or sick should be kept by the toil of the rest."[227] Taking their figures from the pamphlet "Facts for Socialists," of which details have been given on pp. 41–48, the Independent Labour party states under the heading of "Wealth Makers and Wealth Takers": "The total incomes of persons in the United Kingdom amount in round figures to 1,800,000,000l. How is this wealth distributed? 250,000 persons actually receive a total of 585,000,000l.—that is, one-thirtieth of the population receive one-third of the national income. Nearly the whole of these large incomes are unearned—i.e. they are made up of rents, interest, dividends, &c. This small class of rent and interest receivers perform no useful function. We may describe these people as social parasites, absolutely useless, yet levying toll to the extent of 6s. 8d. in every 20s. value of wealth created."[228] "At present more than 600,000,000l. of the national income goes in the form of unearned rent and interest to support an idle class who spend it mainly on profitless and demoralising luxuries."[229]

The foregoing extracts make it clear that, in the eyes of Socialists, practically all citizens, manual labourers excepted, are "drones and parasites." Directors, managers, doctors, chemists, ships' captains, teachers, &c., and even workmen of exceptional ability also, rob the general body of workers of half their wages and subsist only owing to the monopoly of property-holders who control the distribution of wealth. Upon these curious premisses are based the conclusions: "The profits and salaries of the class who share in the advantages of the monopoly of the instruments of production, or are endowed by Nature with any exceptional ability of high marketable value, amount according to the best estimate that can be formed, to about 460,000,000l. annually, while out of a national income of some 1,800,000,000l. a year the workers in the manual labour class—four-fifths of the whole population—obtain in wages not more than 690,000,000l. It may be safely said that the workers from top to bottom of society pay a fine of one-half the wealth they produce to a parasitic class before providing for the maintenance of themselves and their proper dependents."[230] "It is this robbery and waste on the part of the minority which keeps the majority poor."[231] "So long as the instruments of production are in unrestrained private ownership, so long must the tribute of the workers to the drones continue, so long will the toiler's reward inevitably be reduced by their exactions."[232]

"Socialism regards the capitalist proper not as a useful captain of industry, but as a mere share-holding, dividend-drawing parasite upon labour, and the Socialist party presses forward to his elimination from the field of production."[233] "The workers who have produced all this wealth only get a part—the smallest part at that—of the wealth they produce. Now we Socialists say that this wealth produced by the labour of the workers should belong to them, and not to the capitalists who produce nothing. Seeing that the interest of the worker is to get as much of this wealth, and on the other hand the capitalist wants as much of this wealth, as he can get, therefore we say that the interests of the workers and of the capitalists are not identical, but opposite."[234] "The interest of the working class can only be served even in the smallest degree by the curtailment of the power of the master class; that every material advance is useless except in so far as it helps to effect other achievements, and that the realisation of Labour politics, the well-being of the working class, can only be accomplished by its complete emancipation from capitalism."[235] In other words, the Socialist writers quoted agree in this: that the lot of the wage-earners can be improved only by taking the wealth from the rich. In order to introduce Socialism the present social order must be overturned. With this object in view they have addressed declarations of war to the owners of property.

We owe to Marx not only the Class War doctrine, but also a declaration of war to the propertied class: "The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!"[236]

Marx's disciples have issued similar declarations. For instance, in the official programme of the Social Democratic Federation we read: "The Social Democratic Federation is a militant Socialist organisation whose members, men and women, belong almost entirely to the working class. Its object is the realisation of Socialism, the emancipation of the working class from its present subjection to the capitalist class. To this end the Social Democratic Federation proclaims and preaches the Class War."[237] "There is no way in which the Class War can be avoided. You cannot have the reward of your labour and the idler have it too. There is just so much wealth produced every day. It may be more, it may be less; but there is always just so much, and the more the capitalist gets the less you will get, and vice versa. We preach the gospel of hatred, because in the circumstances it seems the only righteous thing we can preach. The talk about the 'Gospel of Love' is simply solemn rubbish. It is right to hate stealing, right to hate lying, it is right to hate meanness and uncleanness, right to hate hypocrisy, greed, and tyranny. Those who talk of the Gospel of Love with landlordism and capitalism for its objects want us to make our peace with iniquity."[238] "The Class War is inevitable under the present form of property-holding, and for it there can be neither truce, quarter, nor ending, save by the extinction of the class system itself. The identity of interests between capitalism and labour is a shibboleth that can only be given any sane meaning at all in the cynical sense that the interests of the wolf and the lamb are also 'identical' when the wolf has got the lamb inside him."[239]

The doctrine of the Class War is a holy faith, the expropriation of property-owners is a divine task. "Unless we hate the system which prevents us from being what we otherwise might have been, we will not be able to strive against it with the patient, never-flagging zeal which our work, to be well done, requires. And to keep alive and undimmed this flame of hatred, divine not diabolical, we require to not only look around us, but especially to look back upon the world as it has been and to the example of those who have fought the good fight. To Socrates, to Savonarola, to John Ball, Wat the Tyler, and Jack Cade, in our land the first forerunners of Socialism; to Bruno and Vanini, to Cromwell, Milton, Hampden, and Pym, to John Eliot, Harry Vane; to Defoe, Mure, and Thomas Spence; to Ernest Jones, Bronterre O'Brien, and Robert Owen; to Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet; to Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien; to Vera Sassoulitch, Marie Spiridonova, Sophia Perovsky; to Karl Marx."[240] The company of reformers and revolutionists seems somewhat mixed.

The doctrine that the interests of employers and employees are irreconcilably opposed, not identical, is false, Socialist rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. As soon as a calamity threatens capital—for instance, a rise in raw cotton or a cotton famine—masters and men are seen to be in the same boat and devise combined measures for meeting the difficulty. The doctrine of the Class War is opposed to common experience and to common-sense.

Let us now take note of the doctrine