The Socialist policy requires so complete a reversal of the policy of collectivist capitalism, that no government has taken any steps whatever in that direction. No governments and no political parties, except the Socialists, have any such steps under discussion, and finally, no governments or capitalist parties are sufficiently alarmed or confused by the menace of Socialism to be hurried or driven into a policy which would carry them a stage nearer to the very thing they are most anxious to avoid.

If we are moving towards Socialism it is due to entirely different causes: to the numerical increase, and the improved education and organization of the non-capitalist classes, to their training in the Socialist parties and labor unions for the definite purpose of turning the capitalists (as such) out of industry and government, to the experience they have gained in political and economic struggles against overwhelmingly superior forces, to the fact that the enemy, though he can prevent them at present from gaining even a partial control over industry or government, or from seizing any strategic point of the first importance, is utterly unable to crush them, notwithstanding his greater and greater efforts to do so, and cannot prevent them from gaining on him constantly in numbers and superiority of organization.

If we are advancing towards Socialism, it is not because the non-capitalist classes, when compared with the capitalists, are gradually gaining a greater share of wealth or more power in society. It is because they are gradually gaining that capacity for organized political and economic action which, though useless except for defensive purposes to-day, will enable them to take possession of industry and government when their organization has become stronger than that of the capitalists.

The overwhelming majority of Socialists and labor unionists are occupied either with purely defensive measures or with preparations for aggressive action in the future. This does not mean that no economic or political reforms of benefit or importance can be expected until the Socialists have conquered capitalism or forced it to recognize their power; I have shown that, on the contrary, a colossal program of such reforms is either impending or in actual process of execution. It means only that for every advance allotted to labor, a greater advance will be gained by the capitalist class which is promoting these reforms, that their most important effect is to increase the relative power of the capitalists.

The first governmental step towards Socialism will have been taken when the Socialist organizations are able to say: During this administration the position of the non-capitalist classes has improved faster than that of the capitalists. But even such a governmental step towards Socialism does not mean that Socialism is being installed. It may be followed by a step in the opposite direction. No advance can be permanently held until the organizations of non-capitalists have become superior to or at least as powerful as those of the capitalists. An actual step in Socialism, moreover, as distinct from such an insecure political step towards Socialism, depends in no degree upon the action of non-Socialist governments (and still less on local Socialist administrations subject to higher non-Socialist control) unless such governments are already practically vanquished, and so forced to obey Socialist orders. An actual installment of Socialism awaits, first, a certain development of Socialist parties and labor unions, and second, on these organizations securing control of a sovereign and independent government (if there be any such), or of a group of industries that dominates it. And if the governments of the various capitalistic countries are as interdependent as they seem, a number of them will have to be captured before the possession of any is secure.

The essential problem before the Socialists under State capitalism, with every reform now under serious discussion already in force, will be fundamentally the same as it is under the private capitalism of to-day. The capitalists will be even more powerful than they are, the relative position of the non-capitalists in government and industry still more inferior than it now is. However, with better health, more means, greater leisure, superior education, with a better organized and more easily comprehended social system, with the enemy more united and more clearly defined, Socialists believe that the conditions for the successful solution of this problem will be far more favorable.

The evolution of industry and government under capitalism sets the problems and furnishes the conditions necessary for the solution, but the solution, if it comes at all, must come from the Socialists themselves. I have shown what the Socialists are doing to-day to gain supreme control over governments. What do they expect to do when they have obtained that power? I have given little attention to the steps they will probably take at that time because the question belongs to the future, and has not yet been practically confronted. It is impossible to tell how any body of men will answer any question until it is before them and they know their answer must be at once translated into acts. Yet a few concrete statements as to what Socialists expect and intend for the future—especially in those matters where there is practical unanimity among them, may be justified, and may help to define their present aims. There are certain matters where Socialists have as yet had no opportunity to show their position in acts, and yet where their present activities, supported by their statements, indicate what their course will be.

First, how do Socialists expect to proceed during the transitional period, when they have won supreme power, but have not yet had time to put any of their more far-reaching principles into execution? The first of these transitional problems is: What shall be done with those particular forms of private property or privilege which stand in the way of an economic democracy? How far shall existing vested rights be compensated?

"And as for taking such property from the owners," asks Mr. H. G. Wells, "why shouldn't we? The world has not only in the past taken slaves from their owners, with no compensation or with meager compensation; but in the history of mankind, dark as it is, there are innumerable cases of slave owners resigning their inhuman rights.... 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 into its own.... 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."[292]

Socialists are, of course, quite determined that either the vested interests of all persons dependent on small unearned incomes and unable otherwise to earn their living shall be protected, or that they shall be equally well provided for by other means. No practical Socialist has ever proposed, during this transitional period, to interfere in any way either with savings bank accounts or with life insurance policies on a reasonable scale, or with widows and orphans who are using incomes from very small pieces of property for identical purposes.

As to the compensation of the wealthier classes, this becomes entirely a secondary question, a matter of pure expediency. The great British scientist and Socialist, Alfred Russell Wallace, and the moderate Socialist, Professor Anton Menger of Vienna, propose almost identical plans of compromise with the wealthy classes,—compromises which would perhaps result in a saving to a Socialist government and might therefore be advisable, aside from any sentimental question of protecting or abolishing vested "rights." Professor Wallace, objects to "continuing any payments of interests beyond the lives of the present receivers and their direct heirs [now living], who may have been brought up to expect such inheritance." For if we were to compensate any others, Wallace points out that we would be "actually robbing the present generation to the enrichment and supposed advantage of certain unborn individuals, who in most instances, as we now know, are much more likely to be injured than benefited."[293] Professor Menger proposes that, in exchange for property taken by the government from owners of large fortunes, there should be allotted to them, and their descendants now living, a modest annuity "sufficient to satisfy their legitimate needs," as being more reasonable than Wallace's plan of such an income as they were "brought up to expect."[294] But in the long run the difference between the two methods would be immaterial—and the one chosen would doubtless depend on the social or anti-social attitude assumed by the wealthy. In either case there would be no unearned incomes in any generation not yet born. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible that a Socialist Party which had seized the reins of political power might, through motives of caution and self-protection, use greater severity against those of the capitalists whom they thought had played an unfair part in the welfare against the installation of the new government. It is scarcely to be doubted, for instance, that those capitalists who tried to embroil us in foreign wars in order to prevent the establishment of social democracy would probably be exiled and their property confiscated. Certainly these measures would be employed against all such persons as had counseled or participated in the suspension of civil government or other violent measures.

But where will the money come from even for the payment of such limited compensation as the Socialists decide upon? Assuming that the stocks and bonds of the railways and other large businesses were paid for at the cost of reproduction, or, let us say, at 50 per cent their present market value, a vast amount would still be required. The Socialist answer to this question is very brightly given by America's most popular and influential Socialist organ, the Appeal to Reason. It reminds us that the Socialists, once having the reins of political power, will then be the possessors of all the credit of the government.

"How much money," asks the Appeal, "did Morgan need in order to buy up all the independent steel companies for the steel trust?" And it answers: "Not a penny. Rather than needing money, he issued stock in the new concern in payment for the old independent mills, and after all was done proceeded to almost double his stock! In other words, instead of needing money, he acquired a vast sum in the transaction. One who is familiar with the way the railroads have been built and the vast fortunes erected understands that there was almost no investment. It all came through a series of tricks. Those tricks, as honest in the reversal as when the capitalist played them, can be reversed. Hardly a corporation but has forfeited its charter. With the charter cancelled stocks would tumble and the water would speedily go. Socialists are not fools that they should merely fall into the hands of men who think that they can unload on them in such a manner as to saddle a perpetual debt on the people. If the steel trust, after organizing and buying up smaller concerns, could still issue vast series of stocks and bonds, why could not the Socialists issue all the money they needed to accomplish the same things? And would not the money based on lands and mills be as good security as the money we now have based on nothing under the sun but inflated railroad and trust stocks [securities]?"

Undoubtedly some such method will be followed—with those essential industries that will not already have become collective property under capitalism.

In so far as "State Socialism" or collectivist capitalism will have paved the way, by extensive government ownership, the problem of confiscation or compensation becomes much simplified. Kautsky has very ably summarized the prevailing Socialist plan for dealing with it at this point:—

"As soon as all capitalist wealth had taken the form of (government) bonds, it would be possible to raise a progressive income, property and inheritance tax, to a height which until then was impossible.

"It is one of our demands at the present time that such a tax shall be substituted for all others, especially for the indirect tax.

"But even if we had to-day the power to carry through such a measure with the support of the other parties, which is plainly impossible, because no bourgeois party would go so far, we would at once find ourselves in the presence of great difficulties.

"It is a well-known fact that the higher the tax the greater the efforts at tax dodging.

"But when a condition exists where any concealment of income and property is impossible, even then we would not be in a position to force the income and property tax as high as we wish, because the capitalists, if the tax on their income or property pressed them too closely, would simply leave the State.

"Above a certain measure such taxes cannot rise to-day even if we had the political power.

"The situation is completely changed, however, when capitalist property takes the form of public debts.

"The property to-day that is so hard to find then lies in broad day-light.

"It would then only be necessary to declare that all bonds must be public, and it would be known exactly what was the value of every property and every capitalist income.

"The tax would then be raised as high as desired without the possibility of tax frauds.

"It would then also be impossible to escape taxation by emigration, for the tax could simply be taken from the interest before it was paid out. [A similar tax exists in France to-day.]

"If necessary it might be put so high as to be equivalent, or nearly so, to a confiscation of the great properties.

"It might be well to ask what is the advantage of this round-about way of confiscation over that of taking the direct road?

"The difference between the two methods is not so trifling as at first appears.

"Direct confiscation of all capitalists would strike all, the small and the great, those utterly useless to labor, in the same manner.

"It is difficult, often impossible, in this method to separate the large possession from the small, when these are united in the form of money capital in the same undertaking.

"Direct confiscation would complete this quickly, often at one stroke, while confiscation through taxation permits the disappearance of capitalists' property through a long-drawn-out process, proceeding in the exact degree in which the new order is established and its benevolent influence made perceptible.

"Confiscation in this way loses its harshness and becomes more acceptable and less painful.

"The more peaceable the conquest of political power by the proletariat, and the more firmly organized and enlightened it is, the more we can expect that the primitive forms of confiscation will be softened." (My italics.)[295]

Nor are any of the more influential Socialists anxious to make a clean sweep of private enterprise in industry. It is only the more important and fundamental industries, those which underlie all the processes of manufacturing, or furnish the sheer necessities of the people, that must necessarily be directly controlled by a Socialist society. "It may be granted," says Kautsky, "that small establishments will have a definite position in the future in many branches of industry that produce directly for human consumption, for machines manufacture essentially only products in bulk, while many purchasers desire that their personal taste shall be considered. It is easily possible that under a proletarian rÉgime the number of small businesses may increase as the well-being of the masses increases." Of such industries Kautsky says that they can produce for private customers or even for the open market. As to-day, he insists, so also in the future, it will be open to the working people to employ themselves either in public or private industry.

"A seamstress, for example," he says, "can occupy herself for a time in a national factory, and at another time make dresses for private customers at home, then again she can sew for another customer in her own house, and finally she may, with a few comrades, unite in a coÖperative for the manufacture of clothing for sale.

"The most manifold forms of property in the means of production—national, municipal, coÖperatives of consumption and production and private industry can exist beside each other in a Socialist society—the most diverse forms of industrial organization, bureaucratic, trades union, coÖperative and individual; the most diverse forms of remunerative labor, fixed wages, time wages, piece wages, profit sharing in the economies in raw material, machinery, etc., profit sharing in the results of intensive labor; the most diverse forms of distribution of products, like contract by purchase from the warehouses of the State, from municipalities, from coÖperatives of production, from producers themselves, etc., etc. The same manifold character of economic mechanism that exists to-day is possible in a Socialistic society. Only the hunting and the hunted, the struggling and the resisting, the annihilating and being annihilated of the present competitive struggle are excluded, and therewith the contrast between exploiter and exploited." (Italics mine.)[296]

Equally important, or more important, than private coÖperative industries in the Socialist State, it is expected, will be the increase of private organizations of other kinds, especially in the fields of publications, education, etc., by what Kautsky calls free associations, which will serve art and science and public life and advance production in these spheres in the most diverse ways, or undertake it directly, as the associations which to-day bring out plays, publish newspapers, purchase artistic works, publish writings, fit out scientific expeditions. He expects such private organizations to play an even more important rÔle than the government, for "it is their destiny to enter into the place now occupied by capital and individual production and to organize and to lead mankind as a social being."[297] (Italics mine.)

"The utmost restriction of private property under Socialism," Mrs. Gilman says, "leaves us still every article of personal use and pleasure. One may still 'own' land by paying the government for it as now; with such taxation, however, as would make it very expensive to own too much! One may own one's house and all that is in it: one's clothes and tools and decorations; one's horses, carriages and automobiles; one's flying machines—presently. All 'personal property' remains in our personal hands.

"But no man or group of men could own the country's coal and decide how much the public can have, and what we must pay for it. Private holding of public property would be abolished."[298]

It can never be too often repeated or too strongly emphasized that, with some unfortunate exceptions, from the time of Marx to the present, Socialists have opposed not private property, but capitalism. It is the domination of society by the capitalists, i.e. "capitalism" or the capitalist system, that is to be done away with.

"The distinguishing feature of Communism," wrote Marx, using this word instead of Socialism, "is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of capitalist property. But modern capitalist property is the final and most complete expression of that system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonism, on the expropriation of the many by the few."[299]

In seeking the better organization of industry and leaving the most perfect freedom to individuals and to private organizations, what the Socialists are really aiming at is really to restrict the government to a government of things rather than to a government of men; and this phrase is in common use among them. It is sought not to increase the power of higher officials over government employees and citizens, but, on the contrary, to limit their powers to the necessities of industry itself, and to leave the most perfect and complete freedom to the individual in every other sphere, as well as in industry, so far as the physical conditions themselves allow. There is no doubt, for instance, that whole departments of restrictive legislation directed against individual liberty would at once be repealed by any Socialist government (though not by a government of so-called "State Socialists").

Perhaps the idea is best expressed by the Belgian Socialist, Vandervelde:—

"The capitalist State has as an end the government of men; it needs centralized power, ministers ready to employ force, functionaries blindly obeying the least sign. Enlarge its domain [i.e. institute 'State Socialism.'—W.] and you will create a vast barracks, you will institute a republic of scoundrels.

"The Socialist State, on the contrary, will have for its end an administration of things; it will need a decentralized organization, practical men of science, industrial forces over which spontaneity and initiative will be required above every other quality."[300]

Surely such a State does not resemble in any way the paternalistic, bureaucratic capitalism or "State Socialism" towards which we are at present tending.

"It is quite as possible," says Mr. Spargo, "for a government to exploit the workers in the interests of a privileged class as it is for private individuals, or quasi-private corporations, to do so. Germany with her State-owned railroads, or Austria-Hungary and Russia with their great government monopolies, are not more Socialistic, but less so than the United States, where these things are owned by individuals or corporations. The United States is nearer Socialism for the reason that its political institutions have developed farther towards pure democracy than those of the other countries named.... The real motif of Socialism is not merely to change the form of industrial organization and ownership, but to eliminate exploitation.... Every abuse of capitalism calls forth a fresh installment of legislation restrictive of personal liberty, with an army of prying officials. Legislators keep busy making laws, judges keep busy interpreting and enforcing them, and a swarm of petty officials are kept busy attending to this intricate machine of popular government. In sober truth, it must be said that capitalism has created, and could not exist without, the very bureaucracy it charges Socialism with attempting to foist upon the nation."[301]

The Socialists are as far from proposing anything resembling a system of mechanical and absolute equality as they are from attacking personal or industrial liberty. Ninety-nine and one half per cent of the product of the men of the different social classes, says Edward Bellamy, "is due in every case to advantages afforded by modern civilization."[302] So that if one man is twice as capable as another, it merely raises the proportion of the product due to his personal efforts from one half of one per cent to one per cent. International Socialism realizes with Bellamy that the product is social in far greater proportion than is at present recognized, but it does not deny that there are cases in which the contribution of the individual is more important even than everything that can be attributed to his social advantages. It does not propose, therefore, to level incomes. It is true that this communist principle of Bellamy's has a wide practical application both in the Socialist scheme of things and in present-day society, as, for example, in free schools and parks, and in the "State Socialist" program. But the extension of such communism, the distribution of services to the general public without charge, is due to-day, not to any acceptance of the general principle, but to the fact that it is inconvenient or impossible to attempt to distribute the cost of many services among individuals in proportion as they take advantage of them.

Kautsky expresses the prevailing Socialist view when he says that the principle of equality, if distinguished from mere artificial leveling, will play a certain rÔle in a Socialist society. Without any definite legislation in that direction the natural economic forces of such a society will tend to raise low wages, and at the same time, by the increase of competition for higher positions, to lower somewhat the highest salaries. For if Socialists are opposed to any kind of artificial equality or leveling, they are still more opposed to artificial inequality, and all the initial advantages that arise out of the possession of wealth or privileges in education will be done away with.[303]

On the supposition that Socialism proposes a communistic leveling of income, it has been stated very often by Socialists that it would be necessary to abolish wages, but there is no authority for this either from Karl Marx or from any of his most prominent successors. It is "wage slavery" or "the wage system" that is to be abolished. In his letter on the Gotha Program written in 1875 Marx said that there will be applied to wages "the principle which at present governs the exchange or merchandise to that degree in which identical values are being exchanged"; that is to say, supply and demand, when it operates freely, will give us a standard also in a Socialist system. There will be no starvation wages, no inflated salaries, no "rent" of educational advantages, no unearned income and no monopoly prices, but automatically adjustable prices and wages will continue. In 1896 Jules Guesde, perhaps the best known disciple of Marx in France, expressed nearly the same idea in the Chamber of Deputies—"The play of supply and demand," he said, "will have sufficed to determine without any arbitrary or violent act, that problem of distribution which had seemed insoluble to you before."

Here again we see that Socialism, in its aversion to all artificial systems and every restriction of personal liberty is far more akin to the individualism of Herbert Spencer than it is to the "State Socialism" of Plato. Socialists expect their children to be far wiser and more fortunate than themselves, and do not intend to attempt to decide anything for them that can well be left undecided. They intend only that these children shall have the freedom and power necessary to direct society as they think best. The few principles I have mentioned are perhaps the most important of those they believe to be the irreducible minimum needed to insure this result.