II
For all the activities that men engage in we have separate words. This is a great misfortune; for in using these words we tend to believe that each action takes place in a separate compartment. Instead of beginning with a whole man interacting in a whole community, we are likely to consider only a partial man in a partial community, and by a mental sleight of hand, before we know it, we have let the part stand for the whole. It is this sort of abstraction, I believe, that has been responsible for a good deal of fallacious thinking with regard to the place of industry in the community. The economists seem to have made the error first by talking of a creature whom they called the Economic Man, a creature who had no instincts but those of construction and acquisition, no habits but of working and saving, and no other ultimate purpose than to become such a captain of industry as would make him a candidate for the biographic sketches of Mr. Samuel Smiles, and his present successors in the newspapers and popular magazines.
Now this Economic Man was the embodiment of honest labor and rapacious greed. Out of the better quality, Karl Marx painted the picture of the faithful laborer in Coketown whose masters swindled him out of the “surplus value” he produced; out of the worse quality classical economists like Ricardo painted an equally entrancing picture of the beneficent capitalist, through whose foresight, organizing ability, and boldness business could be conducted on a scale a simpler age had scarcely dreamed of. It was out of these conceptions, as they were elaborated and rationalized in books like Porter’s Progress of the Nineteenth Century and Marx’s Capital, that there grew up the notion that the only fundamental problem in the modern world was the labor problem—the problem as to who should control industry, who should profit by its advances, and who should own the complicated instruments by which it was conducted.
Our business here is not to examine the various programs that were offered during the last century in answer to these problems; merely to catalog them with the barest explanation of their purpose would be an imposing task, were it not for the fact that it has been neatly done for us by Mr. Savel Zimand. It is enough to see here the common element in capitalism, copartnery, State Socialism, Guild Socialism, Cooperation, Communism, Syndicalism, the One Big Union, Trades Unionism, and the like; whether these movements represent actual facts, like capitalism, copartnery, or trades unionism, or whether they are simply projections, like Syndicalism and the One Big Union.
If our excursion through the classic utopias has been of any use, it must have shown us how pathetic is this notion that the key to a good society rests simply on the ownership and control of the industrial plant of the community. Is it any less absurd when we confess that most of the movements which were founded upon this assumption were actuated by generous and humane motives, and that Francis Place, the tailor of Charing Cross, who believed in a radical application of laissez faire principles, was just as sincere a believer in the common weal as Karl Marx, who predicted a dictatorship of the proletariat? If a great many of these programs have had the notion that industrial machinery, under socialism or guildism or cooperation was to be used for the common benefit, what was lacking was any common notion as to what the common benefit was.
All that was common to these partisan utopias was a desire to get rid of positive evils such as overwork or starvation or irregularity of employment. In their rejection of the existing order of Coketown, with its rubbish heaps for the disposal of material waste, and its jails, hospitals, sanatoria, doss houses, Salvation Army Headquarters, and charitable organizations for the disposal of the human excrement of industrialism—in turning their backs upon these things and asserting the simple elements of human dignity, all our radical programs were right and inevitable. To reject what industrial society had to offer its members in the filthy factory districts and wretched slums of Coketown was obviously to reject barbarism and degradation of the worst sort: the incredible thing about the industrial revolution, indeed, is not that there were a few riots here and there against the use of machinery, but that the industrial population has not been in a state of continual insurrection, and that the industrial towns have not been looted and razed again and again. It is nothing less than a tribute to the fundamental good nature and sweetness of human beings that the strikes by which the workers have expressed their sense of grievance have not demolished the material hovels that today stand upright in the valleys of York-Riding, in the valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries, or in that terrible slum which stretches in back of the Jersey meadows from Elizabeth into Patterson. There are many districts in these areas which are scarcely worth the respect of orderly demolition. To give a grim rejection to the society that produced them only mildly meets the situation. They should be destroyed by trumpets and God’s wrath—like Jericho!
So much for what is sound and valid in the various one-sided programs for reform. But if their attitude towards the past performances of industrialism was sound, their gesture towards the future, and their attitude towards the whole milieu, was little less than indifferent. There were to be certain gains in money wages, in political control, in the distribution of products, and so forth; but the realization of these gains was never projected in any very vivid way—a vague fellowship in peace and plenty under gay red banners was all that was left over when the current efforts to “educate the masses,” “revise the constitution,” or “organize the revolution” were taken for granted.
In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels made a plea for a realistic method of thought, which limited itself to a here and now, as against what he derided as the utopian method, the attempt on the part of a single thinker to give a detailed picture of the society of the future. Yet at the present time it is easy to see that if the utopian socialism of Owen has been ineffective, the realistic socialism of Marx has been equally ineffective; for while Owen’s kind of socialism has been partly fulfilled in the cooperative movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat rests upon very shaky foundations, and such success as it has had is due perhaps as much to Marx’s literary picture of what it would be like as to anything else. I do not doubt that the partisan movements have achieved many specific gains; consumer’s cooperation alone has in England measurably lightened the physical burden of existence for a great many people. Their weakness consists in the fact that they have not altered the contents of the modern social order, even when they have altered the method of distribution; and in addition, a good many of these partisan utopias, for lack of any definite and coherent scheme of values, crumble away as soon as they meet the opposition of such powerful collective utopias as Coketown or the Country House. In America, particularly, the labor movement is paralyzed by this perpetual movement into the bourgeoisie—concretely speaking, into Suburbia and the Country House—and in Great Britain much the same sort of dereliction can be observed within the narrower group from which the leaders of the trades unions and the Labor Party are drawn.
Hence also the less interesting problem of the Tired Radical, which Mr. Walter Weyl suggestively outlined. There is indeed a pertinent criticism of the paper environment of Megalopolis, in the tenacious way in which people continue to cling to abstract programs and to movements which never approach perceptibly nearer their fulfillment. The marvel is that the concrete utopia of the Country House has not exercised a more potent influence than it actually does. When one compares the vast amount of agitation during the last century—the Chartist Movement, the Socialist Movement, the International Peace Movement—with the actual results in the reconstruction of work, place, and people, or with the actual effects any reconstruction has had upon our polity, our culture, our art—it is surprising that these movements have had any effective claim upon our allegiance. Men will indeed work for an idea—the notion that they will not is a superstition—but sooner or later the spirit must be made manifest in the flesh, and if it never comes to birth, or at best is an abortion, the idea is bound to wither away.
How long would the parliamentary clatter of socialism have mechanically kept on—had it not been for the dislocation of war? How long could its abstract programs have remained in the air, before coming down to specifications? I obviously cannot answer these questions; but it seems plain enough that our radical programs have had simply a sentimental interest: they moved people without giving them a specific task, they stirred them emotionally without giving them an outlet, and so, at best, they are but partial utopias of escape, using the powers of organization, collective meetings, and pronunciamentos to take the place of the emotional stimuli which the avowed utopia of escape, like News from Nowhere, supplies by introducing a beautiful girl. In this aspect, the Socialist Party, with its revolutionary demands, did not differ in its psychological performance from the Republican Party, which specialized in the rhetorical device of the full dinner pail; nor did it differ in any fundamental way from the defunct Progressive Party, which for a time believed in a new heaven and earth to follow the initiative, referendum, and recall with an intensity of moral conviction beside which the social revolutionist was positively tame.
Who doubts the honesty and sincerity of most of the members of these parties? Who doubts their devotion to revolution or “uplift”? It is all beside the point. A machine which doesn’t work because it is badly constructed is just as useless as one that doesn’t work because its maker is a deliberate fraud; and all the sincerity and good will and honesty doesn’t make anyone a smile the happier. It is about time that we faced the facts and realized that in all our sundry mechanisms of reform “there is a screw loose somewhere.” This pregnant metaphor of the industrial age is usually applied to neurotic disorder; and I am using it in the present context with fell intentions. I mean that the utopia of the partisan is, psychologically speaking, a fetish; that is to say, it is an attempt to substitute the part for the whole, and to pour into the part all the emotional content that belongs to the whole. When a man gets hold of a lady’s handkerchief or garter, and behaves towards that object with as much intensity and interest as he would towards its flesh and blood owner, the handkerchief or garter is said to be a fetish. I hazard the judgment that Socialism, Prohibition, Proportional Representation, and the various other abstract “isms” are the fetishes of the partisan: they are attempts to make some particular instrument or function of the community stand for the whole. It is doubtless much easier to filch a handkerchief than to win a girl. By the same token, it is easier to concentrate on the use of liquor or the ownership of machinery and land than upon the totality of a community’s activities. It is easier indeed; but it is fatal; for the result of this fetishism is perhaps that the girl remains unmated, and the society fails to undergo any fundamental change. Moreover, the reforming elements in society become incapacitated by their practice of fetishism to take a normal part in the community’s activities; and remain so much waste material—at best, they wander between two worlds, “one dead, the other powerless to be born.”
We know these disoriented reformers, these disillusioned revolutionaries, these tired radicals; we could mention names if it were not so needless and so cruel. Apart from anything else, their original mistake was to keep their problem within the compartment of politics and economics, instead of venting it to the wide world. They forgot that the adjustment of some single activity or institution, without respect to the rest, begged the very difficulty they were trying to overcome. If they were anti-militarists, they saw the world simply as an armed camp; if they were socialists, they saw it as a gigantic mechanism of exploitation; and alas! they saw only so much of the world as would conveniently fit within these diagrams. The world is perhaps an armed camp and a mechanism of exploitation; it is all that and much more; but any attempt to deal with it on a wholesale plan by eliminating all the qualifying elements in the problem is bound to encounter the brute nature of things; and if the nature of things is essentially antagonistic, the reform itself will fail.
To say all this is to emphasize the obvious. If any further emphasis were needed it would be necessary only to compare the doctrines of Marx, as expounded by Lenin at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, and the doctrines of Lenin, as tempered by experience and circumstance a few years later.