EVOLUTION OF MODERN SOCIALISM.-No. 3.

 (BY FRANK STONEMAN).

BRITISH SOCIALISM:— THE UTOPIANS; THE FABIANS: THE LABOR PARTY.

(1) UTOPIAN SOCIALISM.

Before Marx there was Socialism in Great Britain. The disposition of mutual aid is as deeply rooted in human nature as the tendency towards competition, and more than once in British history it asserted itself. Both Guild and Church in the Middle Ages encouraged fraternalism and discouraged anarchic individualism. The rough voice of John Ball preached Communism in 1381, and "the common people heard him gladly." Throughout the Middle Ages the condition of the agricultural laborer continued to improve, and a society of free farmers exchanging their goods with free craftsmen seemed a possibility. When the enclosure of the common lands led to the ascendancy of a new exploiting aristocracy. Sir Thomas More was moved to mighty protest. He called his God to witness that the old ideal of a Commonwealth was dead while groups of rich men used the national power as a means for increasing their commodities. He wrote "Utopia" to demonstrate how fair a thing the common life might be if men had but the large charity which seeks the common good.
The Industrial Revolution succeeded in shackling the workers because the habit of mutual aid had gradually weakened, while the habit of subordination to the propertied classes had strengthened. The nineteenth century found the landed and commercial classes in possession of the means of production and the machinery of government. The working class, descendants of dispossessed peasants and craftsmen who could not afford the new expensive machinery, were impotent. Consequently a new commercial oligarchy arose, and there was no voice lifted against them save the ineffectual voice of the dreamer who contrasted actual society with the visionary city that poets, prophets, and philosophers had imagined.
Early Victorian England saw three groups of Utopian reformers who thought that the walls of the new jerry built Jericho would fall, when the trumpet of Idealism had sounded and the forces of Righteousness had encircled the city. The followers of Robert Owen aimed at the establishment of voluntary co-operative groups of producers, who would share the fruits of their toil. They eschewed politics and abhorred force. Owen was a practical business man, and he was beaten finally because the classes which possessed economic power were able to defeat idealism by a judicious use of the weapons of Idealism. They denounced Owen as an atheist, and "the great army of the unthinking good" rallied to their support.
The Chartists, though intent mainly on winning political power for the working class voiced a crude Socialism. Bronterre O'Brien, one of their ablest leaders, was an early advocate of Land Nationalisation. Their failure in '48 was due, in the main, to the lack of effective organisation among the workers. They appealed not to a class which had developed a civic sense by organising Unions and Friendly Societies, but to a man which knew neither the principles nor the practice of united action. The Christian Socialists, inspired by the gifted broad churchman, F. D. Maurice, and his hardy galloper, Charles Kingsley, did much to awaken the conscience of thinking people, but were devoid of political capacity.
The kingdom of Mammon was founded on force, and the appeal to the conscience of Mammon worshippers was fruitless. The Utopian reformers, however, left a legacy which is one of the most precious possessions of modern British Socialism. When Mr. Smillie, before the Sankey Commission, appealed to a conception of justice which is older than written law and higher than the rights of property, he was maintaining the tradition of the Utopians. The Scotch and Welsh miners are moved by the ingrained notion that they ought to control the conditions under which they work more than by the Marxian doctrine that they inevitably will control them.

(2) THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRADE UNIONISM.

The failure of the early idealists was followed by a forty years' sojourn in the wilderness. Labor unhitched its waggon from the star and began slowly to plod along the high road which capitalism had provided. Idealism was dead. The cheap bread which the repeal of the Corn Laws brought made life bearably for a large part of the working class. They accepted the capitalistic basis of society and set to work to make life as pleasant as possible. The earlier unions had been weak because their members had been too poor to provide the financial basis of a fighting association. Free Trade, by making living cheaper, enabled the skilled workers to accumulate funds. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers started with a subscription of 1/- per week, and their principle of large contributions was followed by others of the skilled crafts. By 1880 Trade Unionism had become a force which was a match for the employer in the game of collective bargaining. Though Socialists raged at the selfishness of the skilled artisans who left the unskilled to flounder in the Slough of Despond and sneered at their petty aims and lack of large purpose, the Trade Unions were doing the work of Socialism. They had replaced competition among workmen by mutual aid, and they had built up an organisation which would one day enter the city of capitalism and take possession. What Brougham Villiers calls "organic Socialism" had grown up when no man suspected its presence. It needed but the inspiration of ideas to make it the chief phalanx of the army of Socialism.

 (3) THE THEORETICAL SOCIALISTS OF THE EIGHTIES.

These ideas were supplied by groups of thinkers who stood outside the ranks of organised Labor. First came Henry George, whose "Progress and Poverty" (1879) was more widely read than any other economic work of the century. The theory that the whole surplus of production goes to the landlord is not Socialism, but it assails the power of property on one flank. Many of those who were won over to land-nationalisation became in time convinced collectivists and the challenge of Henry George was the first trumpet call which aroused the "expropriated" against the land-lords The Radical wing of the Liberal Party turned from Traditional Liberalism to the "Unauthorised Programme" of Mr Chamberlain, who demanded what "ransom" property was prepared to pay for security.
In 1881 the voice, of the Marxian dogmatist was heard—not loud, but clear and cock-sure. The Democratic Federation which in '83 became the Social Democratic Federation, was formed under the able leadership of Mr. Hyndman. The S.D.F. never commanded much public support, but it was an invaluable factor in the Socialistic education of the Englishman. Even less influential was the Socialist League of William Morris, which included Dr. and Mrs. Aveling, the son-in-law and daughter of Marx. Morris himself, however, is the greatest of English Socialists. He attacked capitalism not so much because it robbed tho poor of bread, but because it vulgarised life and art and destroyed in the work man the creative impulse which is the crowning glory of man. In 1883 was founded the Fabian Society, which was to become the academy where British Social Democracy was put to school. It was a select coterie of choice spirits who foregathered to study economics and to collect, systematise and scatter broadcast information about the condition of England. It owed its success to the extraordinary ability of its few members, and the extraordinary thoroughness of its methods. Instead of aping the continental Socialists it set to work to provide a theoretical basis of action for a nation which hates doctrines and loves compromise. Its essays and tracts became the chief stock-in-trade of the Trade Unionist, who was trying to convert his Liberal fellow worker to Socialism, and the advice of its gifted members was soon accepted by local governing bodies, and Cabinet Ministers. Mrs. Besant was its chief popular speaker in its early days, but the spade-work of research was done by the keener brains of people like Mr. and Mrs. Webb and Graham Wallas. Probably its most distinguished member was Bernard Shaw whose gift of satire, wit and epigram gave point and edge to the coldly scientific conclusions of the indefatigible and encyclopaedic Webb.
Mr. Shaw claims that the Fabians made Socialism a force to be respected for the first time in English History. They took it out of the hands of "romantic amateurs" who wanted barricades, and sentimentalists who wanted utopias. They formulated politics which skilled administrators would not hesitate to adopt, and respectable gentlemen with umbrellas would not hesitate to vote for. They set themselves two main tasks: "First, to provide a parliamentary programme for a Prime Minister converted to Socialism as Peel was converted to Free Trade; and second, to make it as easy and matter of course for the ordinary respectable Englishman to be a Socialist as to be a Liberal or a Conservative." (Preface to Fabian Essays p. viii.) And the result was: "The evolution of Socialism from the Red Spectre on tho barricade, with community of wives (all petroleuses), and compulsory Atheism, to the Fabian Society and the Christian Social Union, constitutional, respectable, even official!"
When we reflect that the respectability of the British middle class baffles a Frenchman's powers of description, while the respectability of a chapel-going English workman simply beggars all description, the value of Fabian propaganda becomes apparent.

(4) THE INDEPENDENT LABOR PARTY.

Its effect on working class thought was seen in 1893, when the Independent Labor Party was formed. It required the sting of hard fact to rouse the British working man from his acquiescence in the industrial system that his father knew. A strike at Manningham Mills, new Bradford, had revealed the class solidarity of Conservative and Liberal employers. The simple logic of events did what the abstruse logic of Marx was incapable of doing. The operatives of Bradford met in the mood of men who have at last seen a great light. If one Conservative plus one Liberal employer made two capitalists, then one Conservative workman plus one Liberal workman might make two Socialists. They formed the Independent Labor Party, of which Mr. Keir Hardie became the head and front. Their attempt to secure Parliamentary seats in 1895 was unsuccessful, but between that year and 1900 they won many seats on Borough Councils and other local governing bodies.
The "Clarion," edited by Robert Blatchford, carried on a propaganda which had a more popular appeal than the reasoned arguments of the Fabians. Blatchford was a master of vigorous English prose with a good downright Saxon thrust in it. He appealed to the sentiment of brotherhood as John Ball had done five centuries earlier. He avoided the continental terms "Proletariat" and "Bourgeoisie," which were likely to befog the mind of a Yorkshire artisan. He hit the taste of the thoughtful but uncultured workers of Northern England "between wind and water." Thus the Trade Unionists were gradually prepared for political action. If the Fabian Society was the Academy of British Socialism, the I.L.P. was its elementary school.

(5) THE LABOR PARTY.

Socialistic theory and the practice of mutual aid by the working classes are the two converging streams which met to form the British Labor Party. It required the brutal shock of another event to bring them together. The long security of the Trade Union movement was suddenly threatened. Hitherto the Courts had held that a Trade Union was not a corporation which could sue or be sued. Consequently the unions were not responsible for any damage done by their members during a strike. The Taff Vale decision awarded damages to a railway company against a trade union for damages done by a Union member. An eminent Conservative lawer is said to have remarked, "Well, it's a good decision; but it's damned bad law, and it's worse politics." ("The Socialist Movement in England," Brougham Villiers, p. 131.) It was. The unions determined to fight for their threatened privileges in the political field.
The Trade Union Congress of 1899 appointed a Labor Representation Committee, with power to form an association of such Trade Unions, Cooperative Societies, and Socialist Organisations as were willing to affiliate. The Co-operative Societies hung back; the S.O.S. joined and withdrew because it could not secure the adoption of a definitely Marxian programme; but the majority of Trade Unions, the I.L.P., and the Fabian Society united on a platform which was implicitly, though not avowedly Socialistic. The "Khaki" election of 1900 saw the notable victories of Keir Hardie at Merthyr Tydvil and Richard Bell at Derby. The election of 1906, when Britain, sober, repented of the South African debauch of Britain, drunk, saw a solid phalanx of Labor members returned.
The Labor Party carried out its first task of securing the legal Status of Trade Unions. It then dropped into the position of Left Wing of the Liberals. It did not repeat its electoral success of 1906 during Mr. Lloyd George's hurricane Budget elections, and from 1912 onwards it seemed as if the vital forces of organised Labor were sweeping onwards and leaving it high and dry. Syndicalism became a popular doctrine, and Direct Action more and more engrossed the attention of Militant Unionists. The war split the party as it split the German Social Democrat Party. But the war also awakened the working class to a sense of its need for solidarity, and gave to such Labor leaders as Clynes and Henderson a training in administrative work.
The question to-day is whether Labor will rely on Constitutional means or on Force. The answer seems to be that it will rely on both. A Labor Party with a constructive programme for National and International affairs will fight for command of the Commons; strong, blackleg-proof unions, organised on an industrial basis, will front the united employers in industry. The workers of Britain are becoming increasingly aware that Capital when challenged, is prepared to shoot. If they are wise they will keep the powerful weapon of the Strike in reserve. They will capture political power, and if there is to be shooting will take Bernard Shaw's advice and get hold of the "State end of the gun."

Truth (Perth, WA ),  28 May 1921, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article210048577