A Critical Examination of Socialism

ITION OF DIR

socialism to various meetings in America, I approached the subject in the manner in which I have approached it here. I began with the process of production pure and simple, and I showed how crude and childish, as applied to production in modern times, was the analy

discuss the principles of socialism as understood and accepted by the intelligent disciples, and not the worn-out and discredited theories of Marx." Another was good enough to tell me that I had "cleverly accomplished the task of exposing the errors of Marx, both of premise and of logic"; but the leaders of socialistic thought "in its later developments" had, he proceeded to say, long ago outgrown these. A third wrote me a letter bristling with all kinds of challenges, and asked me if I thought, for example, that socialists were such fools as not to recognise that the talents of an inventor like Mr. Edison increased the productivity of labour by the new direction which they gave to it. I might multiply simi

d Shaw and Mr. Sidney Webb are prominent, express themselves in even plainer terms with regard to the part which directive ability, as opposed to labour, plays in the modern world. "Ability," says Mr. Shaw, employing the very word, is oft

much minuteness a fallacy which intellectual socialists now all agree in repudiating, and to insist with su

his at the cost of what in logic is a mere digression, it will be d

o criticise them. But what they do not represent is socialism as still preached to the populace, or the doctrine which is still vital for socialists as a popular party. This is still, just as it was originally, the socialism of Marx in an absolutely unamended form. It is the doctrine that the manual efforts of the vast multitude of labourers, directed only by the minds of the individual labourers thems

en addressed to the masses of the population, has not appreciably altered from that day to this, will be made sufficiently clear by the following pertinent fact. Shortly after my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and republished, and claiming renewed attention. The first of these-and it was signalised by an accompanying advertisement as fundamental-bore the impressive title of, "Why the Working Man should be a Socialist," and the answer to this question is given in the writer's opening words. "You know," he says, addressing any labourer and the street-worker, "or you ought

ertion of the formal doctrine itself. One of the members of the Parliamentary Labour party in England celebrated his success at the polls by a letter to the Times, proclaiming that socialism was a moral quite as much as an economic movement, and that an object which to socialists was dearer even than the seizure of the riches of the rich, was the achiev

of every average mind from the guidance of any minds that are in any way superior to itself, or are able to enhance the productivity of an average pair of hands-a proposition so ludicrous that nobody would con

. We shall have abundant opportunities for considering it later on. For the moment, however, I pause to ask them the following question. Recognising, as they do, and eagerly proclaiming as they do, whenever they address themselves to those who are capable of serious dispute with them, that the original theory of socialism, which was the creed of such bodies as the International, is absolutely false in itself, and in many of the expectations which it stimulates, why do not they set themselves, whenever they address the multitude, to expose and repudiate

from it by a long series of irrelevancies; nor does he return to the question of directive ability at all till he is nearing the end of his discourse, when he suddenly takes it up again, declaring that he will meet and refute me on ground which I myself have chosen, and show that wealth-at all events in the commercial sense-is still produced by manual labour alone. He refers to my selection of the case of a printed book, as illustrating, in the manner explained in an earlier chapter, the part which directive ability plays in modern production. The economic value of an edition of a printed book, I said, as the reader will remember, depends in the most obvious way, not on the labour of compositors, but on the quality of the directions which the author imposes on this labour through

g an edition of a book with the commercial value of that edition when produced. The labour in question no doubt determines the price at which the printed paper can be sold at a profit, or without loss; but the number of copies which the public will be willing to buy, or, in other words, the value of the edition commercially, depends on qualities resident in the mind of the author, which render the book attractive to but few readers, or to many. Whether these qualities amount to genius in the higher sense of t

than this-is, let me repeat, incredible. What, then, is the explanation of his indulging in a performance of this degrading kind? The explanation is that he, like so many of his colleagues, though recognising personally that labour among "modern nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sol

since abandoned, is the fact that these principles are still the principles of the multitude; that for practical purposes they are those which most urgently require refutation; and that the intellectual so

ntellect in addition to manual effort as one of the forces essential to the production of modern wealth, cannot be understood and estimated in any pro

one proposition at all events which has been elucidated in this volume-namely, that labour alone, as one of their spokesmen puts it, "is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations," the faculties and the funct

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was to be found in the English papers, as that of one of the representatives sent from America to a recent Socialistic Congress in Europe. Amon

echism on Sundays in the London County Council Schools. The first economic "lesson" in it begins thus: "Who creates all wealth? The working-class.

re active agents, and not mere recipients of interest. But that such is not the meaning which he conveys, or desires to convey, to those to whom his leaflet addresses itself, is plainly shown by his statistics, if by nothing else; for the share of the national income, which goes, as he asserts, to "labour," is avowedly the amount which, according to his estimate, is paid to-day in America, as weekly wages

ular doctrines of socialism with regard to labour, he at once repudiates them, and accuses his opponents of imputing to him and his fellows childish fallacies

kens, for example, made his whole