IS SOCIALISM POSSIBLE?

I will not pretend to be impartial in this matter, and to discuss as though I had an undecided mind, whether the world would be better if we could abolish private property in land and in many things of general utility; because I have no doubt left in the matter. I believe that private property in these things is no more necessary and unavoidable than private property in our fellow-creatures, or private property in bridges and roads. The idea that anything and everything may be claimed as private property belongs to the dark ages of the world; and it is not only a monstrous injustice, but a still more monstrous inconvenience. Suppose we still admitted private property in high roads, and let every man who had a scrap of high road haggle a bargain with us before we could drive by in a cab! You say life would be unendurable. But indeed it amounts to something a little like that if we use a railway now; and it is quite like that if one wants a spot of ground somewhere upon which one may live. I see no more difficulty in managing land, factories, and the like, publicly for the general good, than there is in managing roads and bridges, and the post office and the police. So far I see no impossibility whatever in Socialism. To abolish private property in these things would be to abolish all that swarm of parasites, whose greed for profit and dividend hampers and makes a thousand useful and delightful enterprises costly or hopeless. It would abolish them; but is that any objection whatever?

And as for taking such property from the owners; why shouldn’t we? The world has not only in the past taken slaves from their owners, with no compensation or with a meagre compensation; but in the history of mankind, dark as it is, there are innumerable cases of slave-owners resigning their inhuman rights. You may say that to take away property from people is unjust and robbery; but is that really so? Suppose you found a number of children in a nursery all very dull and unhappy because one of them, who had been badly spoilt, had got all the toys together and claimed them all, and refused to let the others have any. Would you not dispossess the child, however honest its illusion that it was right to be greedy? That is practically the position of the property-owner to-day. You may say, if you choose, that property-owners, land-owners for example, must be bought out and not robbed; but since getting the money to buy them out involves taxing the property of some one else, who may possibly have a better claim to it than the land-owner to his, I don’t quite see where the honesty of that course comes in. You can only give property for property in buying and selling; and if private property is not robbery, then not only Socialism but ordinary taxation must be. But if taxation is a justifiable proceeding, if you can tax me (as I am taxed) for public services, a shilling and more out of every twenty shillings I earn, then I do not see why you should not put a tax upon the land-owner if you want to do so, of a half or two thirds or all his land, or upon the railway share-holder of 41ten or fifteen or twenty shillings in the pound on his shares. In every change some one has to bear the brunt; every improvement in machinery and industrial organisation deprives some poor people of an income; and I do not see why we should be so extraordinarily tender to the rich, to those who have been unproductive all their lives, when they stand in the way of the general happiness. And though I deny the right to compensation I do not deny its probable advisability. So far as the question of method goes it is quite conceivable that we may partially compensate the property owners and make all sorts of mitigating arrangements to avoid cruelty to them in our attempt to end the wider cruelties of to-day.

But, apart from the justice of the case, many people seem to regard Socialism as a hopeless dream, because, as they put it, “it is against human nature.” Every one with any scrap of property in land, or shares, or what not, they tell us, will be bitterly opposed to the coming of Socialism; and, as such people have all the leisure and influence in the world, and as all able and energetic people tend naturally to join that class, there never can be any effectual force to bring Socialism about. But that seems to me to confess a very base estimate of human nature. There are, no doubt, a number of dull, base, rich people who hate and dread Socialism for purely selfish reasons; but it is quite possible to be a property owner and yet be anxious to see Socialism come to its own.

For example, the man whose private affairs I know best in the world, the second friend I named, the owner of all those comfortable boots, gives time and energy and money to further this hope of Socialism, although he pays income tax on twelve hundred a year, and has shares and property to the value of some thousands of pounds. And that he does out of no instinct of sacrifice. He believes he would be happier and more comfortable in a Socialistic state of affairs, when it would not be necessary for him to hold on to that life-belt of invested property. He finds it—and quite a lot of well-off people are quite of his way of thinking—a constant flaw upon a life of comfort and pleasant interests to see so many people, who might be his agreeable friends and associates, detestably under-educated, detestably housed, in the most detestable clothes and boots, and so detestably broken in spirit that they will not treat him as an equal. It makes him feel he is like that spoilt child in the nursery; he feels ashamed and contemptible; and, since individual charity only seems in the long run to make matters worse, he is ready to give a great deal of his life, and lose his entire little heap of possessions if need be, very gladly lose it, to change the present order of things in a comprehensive manner.

I am quite convinced that there are numbers of much richer and more influential people who are of his way of thinking. Much more likely to obstruct the way to Socialism is the ignorance, the want of courage, the stupid want of imagination of the very poor, too shy and timid and clumsy to face any change they can evade! But, even with them, popular education is doing its work; and I do not fear but that in the next generation we shall find Socialists even in the slums. The unimaginative person who owns some little bit of property, an acre or so of freehold land, or a hundred pounds in the savings bank, will no doubt be the most tenacious passive resister to Socialistic ideas; and such, I fear, we must reckon, together with the insensitive rich, as our irreconcilable enemies, as irremovable pillars of the present order. The mean and timid elements in “human nature” are, and will be, I admit, against Socialism; but they are not all “human nature,” not half human nature. And when, in the whole history of the world, have meanness and timidity won a struggle? It is passion, it is enthusiasm, and indignation that mould the world to their will—and I cannot see how any one can go into the back streets of London, or any large British town, and not be filled up with shame, and passionate resolve to end so grubby and mean a state of affairs as is displayed there.

I don’t think the “human nature” argument against the possibility of Socialism will hold water.