KARL MARX: Poverty, hatred shaped life of a great revolutionary.

 Does the spread of Communism menace world security? Is it a sane political doctrine, or a new form of Fascism? This study of Communist No. 1, Karl Marx, helps to answer these questions.

THIS week, Mr. Churchill told the British House of Commons: "It is in the Kremlin, if anywhere, that the seeds of a new World war are being sown."

 What are Russia's plans?

 How is the original doctrine of Communism, as defined by the intellectual father of the Soviet regime, Dr. Karl Marx, likely to affect our future?

 The world would like to know.

 Marx, the most influential political economist of the past century (if not of all time) died in London 63 years ago.

 Today he is a sort of demigod to Communists throughout the world; to them his doctrines, as interpreted by Lenin and currently by Stalin, are an official gospel with the force of a religion.

 To others, including some non-Marxian socialists as well as many believers in individual freedom, Marx is one of history's most wicked men, a brilliant but depraved apostle of hate whose doctrines would destroy most of the values of Western civilisation.

 Some people believe that the Russian Revolution and Soviet international policy are the living embodiments of Marx's doctrines. Others regard them as a complete negation of his doctrines.

 The truth lies somewhere between.

 But, however narrowly limited is the possibility of understanding current Soviet manoeuvres through Marxian texts, a study of Marx helps to illuminate some basic attributes of Soviet thought and behavior that have puzzled Western observers.

 Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, a Rhineland city near the French border, the son of a well-to-do lawyer and a descendant rabbis on both sides.

 Heinrich hoped that his son would follow in his respectable footsteps. He was overjoyed when at 18 Karl became engaged to the 22-year-old girl next door, Jenny von Westphalen, beautiful daughter of a baron.

 Although Heinrich died when his son was only 20, he had already foreseen disappointment.

 After Karl had gone to the university (first at Bonn, where he soon got in trouble for radical activities and "nocturnal drunkenness and riot," then at Berlin), the paternal letters were filled with foreboding and reproach; for the boy's egoism, for his neglect of his parents, for his extravagance and "wild frolics," for the "demon" that seemed possess him, for fear that his heart was not as great as his mind, for the "dangerous and uncertain future" he was preparing for Jenny.

 Despite occasional "frolics," Marx was already displaying a prodigious intellectual energy.

 In one of his infrequent letters to his father, he reported that during the past term, in addition to reading an astonishing variety of books and writing summaries and reflections on them, he had written three volumes of poems to Jenny, translated the "Germania" of Tacitus and the "Elegies" of Ovid, plus two volumes of the "Pandects" (Roman civil law), written a play and an original philosophy of law that he tore up as worthless, and, "while out of sorts," got to know Hegel "from beginning to end." 

Hegel, who had died only a few years before, was to remain a major influence on Marx's thinking.

 The first of Marx's political articles that got him into trouble was written early in 1842. It was a blast at the Prussian censorship.

 Soon the young rebel began writing for Cologne's liberal Rheinische Zeitung. In October he became its editor-in-chief.

 A few months later the paper was suppressed because it had criticised the Russian Czarist regime.

 Marx, after a seven-year engagement, married Jenny and went off to Paris to study socialism.

 In Paris he swiftly developed from rebellious youth to full-fledged revolutionary, resolved to destroy existing society and bring about a "complete rebirth of mankind." 

In Paris, too, began the great friendship and collaboration of Marx's life. Friedrich Engels, two years younger, was also a Rhinelander, the son of a prosperous textile manufacturer with mills in Prussia's Barmen and in England's Manchester.

 Friedrich Engels' revolutionary zeal had been spurred by the degradation of Barmen's industrial workers and by the harsh bigotry of his grimly Calvinistic father. 

Outwardly Marx and Engels were almost complete opposites.

 Marx was short, stocky, powerful-chested, with a swarthy skin and shaggy mane and beard of coal-black hair. Engels was tall, slender, blue-eyed, fair-haired.

 Marx was grim, brooding, academic, awkward, unconventional. Engels was gay, gregarious, a devotee of fencing, fox-hunting, and other sports, a lover of wine and music.

 But when Engels stopped in Paris to pay a call on Marx in 1844, the two found their ideas and sympathies so closely matched and mutually so stimulating that they talked steadily for 10 days. Thereafter, whether they wrote jointly or discussed and encouraged each other's individual efforts, their lives and work were indissolubly joined. 

Marx was no mere armchair revolutionist.

 In Brussels, after being expelled from Paris, he and Engels joined the League of the Just (soon renamed the Communist League and transformed from a hole-and-corner conspiracy into a propaganda society with unconcealed revolutionary aims) and set about fanning, by means of writing and speeches, the fires of revolt that were to sweep Europe in 1848.

 In 1847, in the "Communist Manifesto," they produced one of the most forceful pieces of propaganda ever written. 

The next year, after the beginning of the revolts and Marx's expulsion from Brussels (in the course of which Jenny, jailed over night, was forced to share a cell with a prostitute), they hurried to Cologne to publish a revolutionary newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

 Engels even fired some rifle shots against the Prussian Army when it invaded the Palatinate. The revolution failed.

 Marx brought out the last number of his paper in red ink; it sold 20,000 copies. 

Years later, in 1864, after the Communist League had broken up, the two friends helped found the International Workingmen's Association — the first International. 

One of his sons-in-law compared Marx's mind to a warship with steam up, always ready to move in any direction on the sea of thought.

 He won arguments — but never any large personal following. He was handicapped not only by his metallic voice and general lack of stage magnetism, but more seriously by his passion to dominate, his fierce intolerance of any ideas or leadership except his own.

 Sooner or later he quarrelled with nearly all of his fellow socialists and other radicals. The failure of the 1848 revolution and the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, into which he had poured all that he could raise on his and Jenny's inheritances, left Marx penniless.

 Banished from Germany, he abandoned his Prussian citizenship. Now, for the rest of his life, he was a man without a country.

 After a short time in Paris and one last expulsion, he went to London to stay. There, determined to follow his goal "through thick and thin," he resolutely refused to let "bourgeois society turn me into a money-making machine."

 Marx was not entirely "practical" in his private affairs; there was about him something of the absent-minded scholar (he had once hoped to become a professor). 

Only once during his 33-year exile in England did Marx grow desperate enough to try to get a regular job: then a railway company turned him down because of poor hand writing.

 Always Marx plodded ahead on his masterpiece, "Capital," reading enormously in many languages and piling up mountains of notes. He worked mostly in the British Museum, daily from ten to seven, and then at home far into the night.

 When Marx in 1867 published the book "to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness, and my family," he firmly but quite wrongly hoped that he would soon be a "made man."

 In London, the Marx family's situation shortly grew so desperate that Engels felt compelled to go back to "filthy trade" in his father's Manchester mill in order to support them all. But the sums he was able to send from time to time were not enough to do more than keep the Marxes alive.

 After eviction from their first London home, the Marxes (with a German maid who stayed with them to the end) moved to a two-room tenement in the slums of Soho.

Sometimes Marx lacked money for writing paper or for postage. Sometimes, beset by dunning or distrustful tradesmen, the family lived for days on bread and potatoes. 

The evidence is surprisingly unanimous that under these circumstances Marx remained as devoted to his family as he was truculent in his relations with the bourgeoisie and rival revolutionists. A police agent, for example, regarded him as "the gentlest and mildest of men" in the home circle.

 Marx was plagued by ill-health during most of the last half of his life. He was tortured by chronic insomnia, inflammation of the eyes, racking headaches, rheumatism.

 THE great riddle of Karl Marx's personality will probably always be in dispute: how much was he driven to his extraordinary life and work by love of humanity, how much by hatred of capitalist society and of its more fortunate members?

 Certainly he kept himself personally remote from the proletariat he championed. 

The vivid accounts of English working-class miseries in the mid-19th century that help make "Capital" so heart-searing a document were drawn, not from personal observation, but in the main from Engels' "Condition of the English Working Class," and from reports of parliamentary investigations Marx read in the British Museum. 

"Working for the world" was one of Marx's favorite sayings, and occasionally he mentioned the service or the sufferings of humanity in his writings. But for every word of such explicit humanitarianism there are a thousand of hatred and appeals to hatred.

 He spoke the word "bourgeois" as though spitting out something evil-tasting.

 He asserted that the power of love had failed to better social conditions in the 1800 years since Christ, and that the "iron necessity" that drives the proletariat to destroy capitalism and capitalists "will open the way to socialist reforms by transformation of existing economic relations sooner than all the love that glows in all the feeling hearts of the world."

 He argued that what the proletariat needed was not Christian "self-abasement, resignation, submission and humility," but "courage, confidence, pride, and independence even more than it needs daily bread."

 Marxism is not to be found neatly packaged in "Capital" — and especially not in the first volume alone, which is all that most people read.

 His theories of history, politics, and revolution are scattered through the writings of 40 years.

 Some of the reasoning is difficult to follow, especially for those not steeped in the grandiose and mystical speculations of German philosophy.

 Sometimes the reasoning in one work contradicts in part, that in another. But Marxs' main conclusions, his fundamental principles, are reasonably clear.

 Marx called his theory "historical materialism." It was the application to history of what Engels called "dialectical materialism."

 From Hegel the team borrowed the notion that everything in the world is in constant flux; something new is always developing, something old is dying away. And sooner or later all this change is for the better.

 Progress is achieved by what Hegel called the dialectic: one force (thesis) is opposed by a second (antithesis), which has split from it, and from their conflict emerges a synthesis containing the best elements of both. 

When the unification is completed, then it gradually becomes old and the process is repeated. 

Hegel, a patriotic State-worshipper, believed that human progress had reached its apex in the Prussian State of Friedrich Wilhelm III.

 Marx held out for one more step.

 "Modern bourgeois society, rising from the ruins of feudal society," proclaimed the "Manifesto," "did not make an end of class antagonisms. It merely set up new classes in place of the old; new conditions of oppression, new embodiments of struggle. Our own age, the bourgeois age, is distinguished by this; that it has simplified class antagonisms. More and more society is splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great and directly contraposed classes: Bourgeois and Proletariat."

In "Capital," Marx set out to show how capitalism (thesis) must inevitably, by its own inner laws, become so increasingly intolerable to the proletariat as to produce revolt against the bourgeoisie (antithesis) and a classless society (synthesis).

 Marx, who scorned other socialists' neat blueprinted Utopias, said little about what the classless society would be like.

 He did not even find it necessary to assume that the revolution would wash away all human vice.

 For him it was enough that:

 ⬤ Most of the world's troubles have sprung from the exploitation of class by class. ⬤ The ascendancy of the working class would abolish classes by making every man a producer.

 ⬤ Abolition of private property in the means of production would mean that no one would have anything to exploit anyone with.

 To be sure, he predicted that after the revolution, while Communism was emerging from the womb of capitalism in a "long and painful travail," there would be a "political transition period" requiring a "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" and considerable inequality of living conditions.

 But after sufficient education and organisation, the no-longer-needed State would "wither away," and everyone would live in peace and plenty in a society devoted to "the full and free development of every individual," under the slogan, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!"

 This vision, the end result of the continuous progress assured by the dialectic, is to almost all Marxists not a hope but a "certainty," for to them, as to Marx, dialectic materialism is not a philosophy but a science, a science of society comparable in exactness with the science of biology.

 Indeed, Marx fancied himself as the Darwin of the social sciences.

 In explaining why capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, Marx begins with the theory, inconclusively advanced by Adam Smith and developed by David Ricardo that labor is the source of all value.

 He went on to develop his theory of surplus value, the keystone of his economic philosophy. According to this view, each worker spent only a fraction of his working hours earning his wages. The rest of the day he works for nothing.

 From this unpaid labor come all profits, providing those needed to pay interest and rent.

 Thus Marx arrived at his picture of society; a host of useless capitalists and landlords robbing the workers of the fruits of their labor.

 Every capitalist, he argued, necessarily likes to wring from his workers as much surplus value as he can; even if he is humane, his competitors force him to exploit. At first he may simply make his employees work longer hours. When the law forbids that, or the capitalist finds that it lessens efficiency, he may shorten the hours, but introduce the speed-up and stretch-out to make his workers work faster and harder. 

What do these things mean for the worker?

 Marx's summation: "They mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."

 Machinery produces technological unemployment. The capitalist accumulates more and more of the profits of his unpaid labor, he buys more and more machinery, machines do more and more of the work, fewer and fewer human hands are needed to tend them.

 Besides, capitalism needs a large unemployed "industrial reserve army" for the times when it suddenly wants to hurl large amounts of its overflowing wealth into new industries, or into old ones whose markets have suddenly expanded.

 Finally comes the worst of capitalism's evils, the periodic recurrence of ruinous depressions.

Marx, although asserting that capitalism tends to give the working class less and less money to buy its products, flatly rejected the belief of labor leaders and other reformers that everything would be all right if employers would only pay their workers high enough wages to maintain a balance between production and consumption.

 Marx held that the prime cause of depression is overproduction, resulting from expanding capital's insatiable urge to find a profit and the compulsion upon invested capital to keep producing, regardless of demand, in a desperate effort to maintain itself.

 Marx predicted capitalism's trend toward concentration and monopoly. "One capitalist," he observed, "always kills many."

 He predicted the virtual disappearance of the middle class, as one ruined capitalist after another dropped into the proletariat.

 He believed that the end would come when a handful of great capitalists at last con-fronted a proletarian multitude, disciplined and united by enforced association in great industries, driven to despair by prolonged depression.

 By that time, too, capitalism would have reached its highest development, as Marx believed it must; its centralisation and productivity would be at a peak of ripeness for handy plucking by the proletariat.

 To Marx it made no difference whether Capitalists are good or bad: they are driven by forces they neither control nor understand.

 No matter how much the worker's lot may be improved, there can be no final compromise; the class war must be fought to the end. The end must be "a revolutionary change in the whole structure of society," or else "the common ruin of the contending classes." 

Marx taught his followers to harness for their ends the energy of class hatred wherever it existed.

 But he was aware that the conditions for revolution had not arrived. The only hope of a proletarian victory, as he saw it, was through a temporary alliance with the bourgeois democrats then revolting against monarchy and aristocracy.

 In 1850, Marx gave the Communist League significant strategic instructions in handling the bourgeoisie: "In the event of a struggle against a common foe . . the interests of both parties coincide for the moment . . .

 "During the struggle and after the struggle . . the workers must at every opportunity put forth their own demands alongside those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers the moment the democratic citizens set about taking over the government . . . 

"From the first moment of victory our distrust must no longer be directed against the vanquished reactionary party, but against our previous allies, against the party which seeks to exploit the common victory for itself alone " 

The "Manifesto" laid out the goal: "The Communists . . . openly declare that their purpose can be achieved only by the forcible overthrow of the whole existing social order . . . Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all lands, unite!"

 What Marx meant by some of his strategic and tactical statements has been a subject of bitter dispute among his disciples.

 Interestingly enough, Marx did not mention a party in his 1850 address. In the "Manifesto" he wrote that "Communists do not form a separate party conflicting with other working class parties."

 He never spoke of a dictatorship of the party. Of course, just as he believed in the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat as instruments of struggle toward his goal of the classless and stateless society, he believed in a party as an educational agency. 

But he had never seen nor could he have envisioned the kind of monolithic and omnipotent party that rules Russia today. 

As for the "dictatorship" idea, there has long been controversy as to the meaning he attached to this concept.

 But this much is clear: Marx defined freedom as a condition in which the state is subordinate to society, and Engels equated the dictatorship of the proletariat with "the democratic republic."

 What was meant by this seeming semantic outrage?

 Some followers have believed that it meant a political democracy in which the proletariat, grown to immense proportions, could by ballot dictate economic measures, furthering its interests against those of the capitalists. Then the task of the party would be not to rule, but to educate and lead the proletariat.

 Perhaps this sounds like nothing more than New Dealism, rather than violent revolution.

 THE fact is that Marx observed the failure of his frequent prophecies of early revolution and he shifted from the hot intransigency of youth to the involved economic and metaphysical abstractions that make "Capital" such hard going in spots.

 Without ceasing to be a revolutionist, he became more reconciled to waiting and even eschewed the dogma of the universal indispensability of violence, declaring that socialism had a good chance of a peaceful birth where indigenous democratic traditions were as tenaciously rooted as in the Netherlands, England, and the U.S. 

Eventually, struggles inside the First International put before Marx and Engels the unpleasant alternatives of concentrating on its affairs to the neglect of study and writing or of letting dominance pass to the Russian anarchist, Bakunin, an advocate of direct and violent action without reference to political conditions.

 Thereupon Marx and Engels sent the International to the U.S. to die, which it did.

 In 1889, with Engels' blessing and under the leadership of some of Marx's disciples, the Second International was founded. 

The Second International placed its faith in slow accretions of power by the proletariat, which would build a new socialist society inside the shell of the old. 

The socialist task, therefore, was to teach and preach the inevitable coming of a classless society by almost automatic evolution.

 World War I laid the Second International low.

 Another interpretation of Marx was made by V. I. Lenin for use in the country Marx had regarded as the least hopeful prospect for socialist revolution.

 By its use Lenin organised the Bolshevik Party, captured power, and founded the Soviet state, which he called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and, when he was being more accurate, the dictatorship of the Communist Party.

There is no record that he ever disputed a statement of Marx's. But to square all of Lenin with all of Marx is extremely difficult.

 Lenin regarded the party as an elite of hardened professional revolutionaries capable of knowing the relatively backward workers' interests better than the workers themselves. It must therefore be justified in using and means to make its will prevail. 

In contrast to Marx's contempt for concealment was Lenin's advice to members of the Communist Party that to capture strategic posts of power "it is necessary . . . to go the whole length of any sacrifice, if needed, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence, and subterfuge — to anything in order to penetrate ... at any cost, to carry on Communistic work. ..."

 When the saving revolutions that Lenin looked for in Germany and the industrially advanced west failed to develop, even with the sparkling of the Third International set-up in Moscow, he did not drop the power he got under such special conditions. He decided to dig in, build industry, await new tumults. 

War, he felt, must come — "the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for any length of time is inconceivable."

 Lenin was succeeded, after a struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by the latter, whose removal from the party secretaryship had been the outstanding point in Lenin's political testament.

 After a series of purges, political trials, and executions of most of their surviving old comrades, Stalin and a small group around him consolidated their dictatorship of the Communist Party and through it of the Soviet state.

 From proclaiming the goal of building "socialism in one country"— a revision of Lenin as well as of Marx — the Bolsheviks went on to a nationalism so strong that they claimed, with much justice, the mantles of ancient Russian national heroes, such as Peter the Great and even Ivan the Terrible.

 Thus was Marx reinterpreted again.

 During the last years of Lenin's life, Russian writers began referring to their gospel as "Marxism-Leninism" rather than simply as Marxism.

 After Lenin's death, Trotsky, in his attacks on Stalin, began referring invidiously to the current gospel as "Stalinism."

 For a time the use of this word was regarded by the regime as a sign of opposition and disloyalty. Then Soviet writers began referring to official doctrine as "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism," and later as simply "Stalinism."

 This is now an official Soviet term.

 Leninism has been called "the Marxism of the imperialist epoch"; Stalinism may be called the Leninism of the epoch of the party dictatorship.

 Last February, Stalin made a speech about capitalism's doom and socialist revolution.

 Until then he had not talked like a Marxist in any important public speech since 1939, when he said that Russians can expect to achieve a stateless society only when socialism is victorious in all or most countries and "there is no more danger of attack."

 Then Marxism went into a wartime eclipse. Neither during the pact with Nazi Germany nor during the "great patriotic war" did Marx make a happy Soviet symbol. 

No longer were huge posters showing Marx's head a dominant feature of Moscow parades and meetings. Throughout the war his name was taboo in the chief Army publication, Red Star.

 True, Marx's writings continue to be analysed, worked over, dissected, and classified by Soviet authorities.

 But basic Soviet policy is largely independent of Marx.

 For example, he declared that "we Communists do not deign to conceal our aims." But Moscow-controlled Communist parties conceal and disguise themselves, e.g., in Cuba where the Communists call themselves Popular Socialists.

 On the other hand, whereas Marx opposed all reformers, the Communist Party cannot be counted on to do so, as Australian Labor leaders learned when it so embarrassingly endorsed them at the last election.

 Such subterfuges and compromises are mightily modified forms of Marxism. 

Nevertheless, to Russians, Marxism, as interpreted by their leaders, has given some-thing important in addition to the wide variety of propaganda masks suitable for all eventualities of the changing world scene.

 It has given them reason, as the world's sole great "proletarian nation," to be suspicious of nations that are not only foreign, but capitalistic, and has given certainty that they are full sail in the main stream of history, while capitalistic outlanders stupidly row against the current.

 Has Marxism bound Russia to turn on her late allies and organise, agitate, and, if necessary, fight until the revolution has triumphed in all or at least some of the dominant countries of the world?

 Although Russian spokesmen may quote Marx on this point now and then, to try to find the answer to the question in Marx is futile. For Soviet policy is neither world revolution nor simple nationalism; the two aspects exist simultaneously.

 To Russia's revolutionary policy, the nationalist aspect lends a dynamism derived from propaganda about a holy socialist fatherland flowing with liberty and security; to the nationalist policy the revolutionary aspect brings the services of disciples in every foreign land, organised to do Moscow's bidding.

 None of this is simple Marxism.

 All of it ignores Marx's warning that the outcome of human struggle may be progress under socialism, but that it may also be — a striking phrase today— "the common ruin of the contending classes."

 Karl Marx has had an influence so great as to be difficult to explain in terms of his own theory of history.

 Somehow his personality and intellectual achievement seem to loom larger than they should according to his theory, with its stress on broad social forces.

 Few careers pose the problem of the relation of the individual personality to history so sharply as does that of this son of the bourgeoisie who sacrificed comfort and family to the intellectual goal of building a classless society.

 Marx's money worries lasted until 1869, when Engels sold out his interest in Ermen and Engels, moved to London, and gave his friend a settled income.

 Jenny died in 1881, Marx in 1883 at his dusty scholar's desk, Engels in 1895, after publishing the second and third volumes of "Capital."

 Marx's daughter Eleanor committed suicide in 1898 at the age of 43 because of a disappointment in love.

 Another daughter, Laura, and her husband, Dr. Paul Lafargue, committed suicide at the age of 70, feeling that their useful years were over and not wishing to be a burden in old age and illness.

 The third daughter, Jenny Longuet, alone left progeny; her son Jean was a leading French Socialist; her grandson, Robert-Jean Longuet, is a French Socialist writer.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article248500951

THE ANTI-SOCIAL FORCES OF TO-DAY.

 [By the Bishop of Melbourne.]

Lawless force is now again taking form, and it is too ominously like that awful symbol of St. John. As before, it shows itself as a wild beast of human idleness, lust, and cruelty. But now, instead of seven, it has ten myriad head. It is the mass of the demoralised proletariate of Europe. This wild beast of our own time is like its apostolic prototype, idle, lustful, cruel, and unbelieving ; knowing nothing but that it has five senses, seeking nothing but the means of their enjoyment. There is nothing on earth that it hates so much as to see another with richer sense-food than it possesses itself. Rather than suffer that, it will pull down all institutions, burn down all buildings, ravage all lands, and wipe out a civilisation which is the inheritance of ages. Envy longing to get tries to pass itself off as the love which longs to give. These, too, as opposite in nature and aim as heaven and hell, are everywhere confused. The beast apes the God, and is worshipped.
Do not suppose that I am here referring to socialism as such. With the aims of the higher socialism I have the heartiest sympathy. I believe with it that the present condition of the poor is intolerable, and that the alleviation of the misery of the poor is the one question of the day. I agree with the author of "Gesta Christi" that a "condition of society in which an enormous pass of human beings are born to an almost inevitable lot of squalor, penury, and ignorance, and still other multitudes to incessant labor with few alleviations or enjoyments ; a society which presents on one side enormous fortunes and endless accumulations of wealth, while on the other it offers classes ground down by poverty and pinched with want, is certainly not the Christian ideal of society, or any approach to 'the kingdom of God' on earth." It is not only Mario, the communist, who calls "the granting the few enjoyment at the expense of many" a " heathenish principle ;" such a state of things is called "a new heathenism, and that of the most flagrant kind," by a bishop no less venerated than the profound Martensen. It is certain that the task of the statesmen of the future is to devise such a system of distributing wealth that a greater share of the products of industry shall fall to the lot of the producers. So far I am heartily in accord with the socialists. Nay, I go further. I freely own that the methods of thoughtful modern socialists like Lassalle, Marx, and Treischke, have been widely misunderstood. They do not advocate confiscation, nor even in the strict sense, community of goods. It is Lassalle, who says, "The artisan must and ought never to forget that all property once acquired is unassailable and legitimate." And the socialists give the true ground of this position. " Its accumulation was justified by the laws which allowed it." It is those laws which they would alter, so as to dispose differently of the wealth of the future. Again, it is unjust to accuse philosophic German communists of holding the doctrine of free love. They emphatically repudiate it. "We recognise and prize," says says Herr Treischke, " the moral right of marriage more than you do, and it is on this ground that we are such implacable foes to the modern constitution of society," with its inevitable fruits of prostitution and concubinage. Very many of the socialists again appeal to the moral authority of the Christian religion, recognising with M. Laveleye that in such a state of society as the present, Christianity must create socialistic aspirations. Nay, the old canon law even is on the side of the socialists. The canons lay it down that no man might sell goods for more than what they cost him. All profit in merchandise was robbery. Again, if a man borrowed money of another it was enough if he paid the capital ; for interest was robbery. I think these principles of the canonists and communists as little justified by Christianity as by reason, and that such a life as they recommend would not only diminish production and injure character, but also make life intolerably monotonous and commonplace. I have said so much that you may not suppose that the charge I am about to bring is levelled at socialism generally.
I say, then, in spite of all my admissions, that a power is growing and gathering its forces in the depths of European society which is an exact counterpart of the wild beast of the Apocalypse. It is as blasphemous and sensual wherever it be found, whether in France, Spain, Germany, Russia, or Ireland. At an immense meeting of women in Berlin in 1878 the president cried, amidst stormy applause, "I want no Bible, no pastor, and no law. If you want a belief, invent one for yourselves." The notorious Most exclaimed at the same meeting, with the same kind of tumultuous approval, " We will have our heaven upon earth, for that which is future we believe not in. Here on earth will we enjoy ourselves. Here we will revel and not rot." "No God, no church, no master," is the common cry at the anarchist meetings in Paris ; and we are told by the anonymous author of "Underground Russia," who traces the belligerent phase of Nihilism to the influence of the Paris Commune, that the Russian Nihilist " has no longer any religious feeling in his disposition," and he describes one of the leaders of that movement as "full of that cold fanaticism which stops before no human consideration," and as ready "to hold out his hand to the devil himself, if the devil could have been of any use to him." Of the foul blasphemies of Foote and his fellows — men with whom the Melbourne Secularist Society has just been condoling— we have heard from Rev. S. Hansard, one of the most large-minded and earnest friends of the poor who ever worked in the east of London. He says he will not foul his pen by retailing the worst parts of the "Comic History of Christ," published by those men ; but he does tell us of caricatures of the most Sacred Figure in all human history " pulling Peter out of the water by his big nose ;" and of God— one almost hesitates to repeat the horror — "as a fat ugly man, with spectacles on, sitting on a cloud cross-legged, sewing a pair of trousers." Covered with names of blasphemy, filled, oh heaven, with hate of the eternal love, with scorn of the tender fatherly pity which is pleading with all hearts ; what can save men who are in such a state as that? Who can wonder that the souls which have made themselves so hard against God should sink into the foulnesses of a beastly lust and a merciless ferocity; that we should read of Irish assassins trying their victim in a brothel, and writing the order for his murder on the curl-paper of a courtesan ; that we should near the Russian terrorist boasting that he made himself the demon he was " by nourishing sanguinary projects in his mind," and by constantly reminding himself "that bullets were better than words;" or that as M. Laveleye tells us, " working men of London, Pesth, Vienna, and Berlin, applauded the struggles and excused all the crimes of the Commune in Paris?" The "Mano Nera" organisation in Spain openly declare that " the rich are to participate no longer in the rights of man, and that to combat them all means are good and necessary, not excepting steel, fire, and even slander." That last infernal touch is even more devilish than the programme of Bakounine himself, requiring, as this does, absolute and universal anarchy, the destruction of everything that has come down to us from the past till " not one stone shall be left upon another, in all Europe first, and afterwards in the entire world."
Let no one comfort himself with the idea that these are the mere ravings of madmen. The wild beast of savage godless force has broken loose. It has committed its cowardly murders in Ireland by scores. In Russia it has murdered one Emperor, and imprisoned another for months in a fortress in spite of the hosts of mailed warriors who protect him. It is combating to-day in Spain, straining savagely at its chains in France and Russia, and threatening every moment scenes of horror such as history has never witnessed. It may be very true that all these sanguinary dreams are as stupid as they are criminal, and that if ever the dreamers tried to realise them, they would only drive society to seek shelter beneath the shield of some despotic ruler from that vilest and cruellest tyranny— the tyranny of a godless mob. But meanwhile the danger threatens, and it is the duty of every man among us to consider how best we may preserve the people from the consequences of their own madness. Not by callous agnosticism, not by sentimental culture, not by a heedless headlong plunging into the mad riot of sensual pleasure ; but, as of old, by the patience, the purity, and the heroism of a true faith in the Son of God, is the wild beast to be overcome and cast into perdition.

South Australian Weekly Chronicle (Adelaide, SA : 1881 - 1889), Saturday 1 September 1883, page 16

SOCIALISM AND THE STATE.

 (By J. R. MACDONALD, M.P., in the "Labor Leader.")

Before the war the British Socialist had no memory or experience of the State as anything but the political organisation of a tolerably free people working democratic institutions. The institutions had their defects, but not to such an extent as to destroy their general character. If they failed, the fault was not in them, but in the people who worked, or ought to have worked, them. It was therefore difficult for us to comprehend the deeper meaning of the controversy which went on in some Continental countries between State Socialism and Social Democracy. We know it now.

This war has revealed to us dangers of State authority which have hitherto appeared to be only fanciful. We have not only become familiar with militarism in power, but we have been brought hard up against the crude idea, contributed mainly by trade union officials, that in order to prove their allegiance to democratic government minorities must allow themselves to be suppressed. Thus we have had the sudden appearance in Great Britain of the tyrannical State and the Jack-in-Office bureaucracy. In future the Socialist doctrine of State authority and of the State itself must be defined with far more care than hitherto, and must be rid completely of the idea of the servile political and military State.

A belief in democracy is not the same as a belief in majority rule, because democracy is not a mathematical conception. Democracy is a spirit and method of government confined in its operations by the end which it serves—liberty. It includes the safeguarding of freedom of thought and speech, as well as of majority authority; it protects the individual responsible to his inner light as well as the individual as part of a crowd; it recognises conscience as well as authority, liberty as well as obedience. When perfect, it is a kind of government which has discovered how to harmonise in co-operative activities the apparent opposites of law and individual rights, order, and individual initiative.

After the war we may nationalise the railways and run them as State capitalist enterprises. We may nationalise essential industries and conduct them in the spirit of the Munitions Act, offering "national necessity" as a justification. In form, Socialism will have triumphed; in fact, it will have receded because capitalism will be the ruling factor; and will be strengthened by becoming representative, impersonal, and political, instead of being individualist and unrepresentative.

Of all the form of State organisation, and of all the motives behind State authority which are most obnoxious to and destructive of Socialism, the military State is the chief. As militarism strengthens its grip upon the life of nations—a thing which its uniform failure to guarantee national security has done in Europe, generation after generation—the acquiescence of Labor becomes more and more important to the military authorities. These authorities are not primarily concerned with commercial profits; they are ignorant of both economics and polities; of all experts in social responsibilities they are the furthest removed from the real life of the nation. But, moved solely by their own needs, they would be willing to give heed to certain Labor claims in order to keep Labor quiet and transform Labor leaders into their own servants and spokesmen. The German State shows that a military authority is willing to be philanthropic if it is allowed to exact obedience; the history of the British aristocracy and the Tories shows that they are willing to be charitable if they are regarded with becoming deference and allowed to control the economic life of the State. There is, therefore, nothing inconsistent between a military State and a Labor philanthropic State. In that State there may be a complete system of wages boards, of standard rates, of trade union recognition, of physical health and training, of apparent protection of Labor against capital.

On the other hand, in order not to upset capital, the military State will give a corresponding protection to it in the shape of tariffs or by the adoption of any other scheme which capital may put forth. But the end which such a State serves is not liberty, but obedience; not democracy, but bureaucracy; and if a majority of trade union officials, using the votes of their societies, were to support this bureaucracy, that would not make it the duty of Socialist Democrats to acquiesce. The economic and social mechanism which is built up within such a State is one which catches up Labor in itself, binds it to itself, and confines it by a baffling network of interrelated interests. That is the servile State in its purest and most deadening manifestation. Its general structure will be Socialist, but its life will be slavery. It will secure a certain decree of animal comfort, but not the comfort which releases the spirit of man.

Some of our Socialist friends have not only supported a war, but the spirit of war, and from that they have come to adopt new and very bad standards by which to value liberty and conscience.

To this Socialism must issue a decisive challenge. The conditions created by the war have made us identify conscience with pacifism. But that is to narrow the issue. Conscience made some men fight and restrained others from fighting. The first must have liberty as well as the second. Those who do agree with them do so, not as to whether they had a right to act as they did, but as to whether they were wise to act as they did, and so the door of Socialism is as open to the soldier as to the conscientious objector, to the recruiter as to him who declined to recruit. But Socialism can have nothing to say to him who limits liberty by military expediency, and who defended a needless oppression and excuses himself by saying that social stability required the sacrifice.

Nor within its four corners is there to be found any justification for those who took official positions and used them to impose the will of Governments upon organised labor, who took decisions of policy from other classes and interests and carried them as mandates to Labor.

Before the war I felt that what was called "the spirit of the rebel" was to a great extent a stagey pose. Karensky, in a speech addressed to soldiers representatives put the idea into these striking words: "Are we a free Russian nation or a band of mutinous slaves?" It is now required to save us, but I must be serious. If, for instance, the wider federation of trade unions, which we ought to support, is to result in more centralised authority and the crushing out of all sectional and local initiative trade unionism will become mass without life and the natural conservatism of officialdom— who has not felt it creep over him?— will sap the vitality and blurr the vision of democracy. The organisation of Labor must, like the State itself provide room for the man of free mind and must allow the swelling buds of minority thought to burst out into foliage.

The war has brought us face to with two great dangers—the first that of trade union authority becoming so centralised that Labor policy can be determined by officials; the second that of government by an inert mass—the block votes' decisions of trade union congresses and Labor party conferences since the war created important minorities show this tendency—inert because only at the official top does real responsibility rest.

Let there be no mistaking of the position. Here again we are facing the ubiquitous difficulty of apparently conflicting truths. It is as easy to show the calamity that would follow an independent local control and a weak, irresponsible Central Executive as to point out the shortcomings of the opposite state of affairs. Socialists must devise an organisation which will assign proper functions and liberties to both, so that they can work in co-operation.

From this point onward we can only summarise Mr. Macdonald's argument. He showed that the methods of trade union government necessary in industrial affairs transplanted from the trade union region without modification into the political region threaten the political Labor movement with great danger. The government of trade unionism shows signs of degenerating into a bureaucracy claiming absolute authority not merely in industrial but in political matters. "This has a direct bearing upon my subject. British Socialism has never agreed that the political State working from a bureaucratic centre by political agents can control the factories and workshops. It has always believed that in industrial control the workmen affected must have special concern. Whilst it opposes the cruder Syndicalism of the Sorel school, it need not oppose National Guilds, especially if they will supplement their industrial programme by recognising that the political State must exist to regulate national industrial interests in a general way."

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld. : 1912 - 1936), Thursday 13 September 1917, page 8

The State and The Worker.

 BY AJAX.

"Whatever the State saith is a lie, whatever it hath is theft, all is counterfeit in it, the gnawing, sanguinary insatiate monster. It even bites with stolen teeth. Its very bowels are counterfeit." — Nietzsche.
Not without good reason did Nietzsche and other thinkers speak scornfully of the State. In this short essay one cannot enter into the history of the State. Sufficient to say the State (so-called) is here, and having since the war interfered to a large extent with the liberties of individuals and associations of workers it is well to understand the significance of this metaphysical entity called the State. In the past we have heard much about State control, church and State, the necessity of a military, political, or industrial State, as the case may be; but the most significant fact is that all those who arrogate to themselves certain powers and functions as servants of the State fail to explain who and what the State really is. In the schools (which are mostly State-controlled) the children are taught to believe that the State is a sort of paternal father who watches over the interests of society and does everything for the best. This false idea is reflected in the political institutions of to-day where such ideas as "obedience and duty to the State," "the necessity of supporting the State, in everything," "the infallibility of statesmen," and similar theories which have for their object the inculcating of slavish subservience to this fetish of authority called the State. Like God, the State defies reason, the more we examine this nonentity the more nebulous and visionary the State appears. Shorn of its glitter and fine phrases, the State stands unmasked as a metaphysical abstraction, a mere jingo swindle, a political bogey whose only justification is that it is in the interests of rulers to keep the people looking up to some higher authority. As the vision of Christ and the saints in Glory, benignly watching over us, loses its force, and is fading from the imagination of the people, a new fetish of authority becomes an economic necessity to the rich. The ignorant who look to political Messiahs to do something for them are obsessed by the idea of the political State which, even if it existed, has had to give way to the industrial State.
The two States, however, differ in aims and expression. The political State aims at perpetuating competition and bourgeois institutions. The new force, the industrial State, seeks to keep pace with machine production and scientific exploitation. While the adherents of the former shriek about trust busting and regulating the economic system by law, the latter, led by the captains of industry, is busy on the job and is out for industrial supremacy. In advanced countries the squabble for power between the two States is practically over in every case; the industrial State being victorious, thus fulfilling Marx's prophecy of industrial consolidation and the growth of the trust. This bickering between sections of the exploiting class does not abate one iota the hostility of rulers to the workers ; these political wrangles are really only the quarrels of thieves over the wealth they have stolen from the proletariat. The State does not represent society, but only tries to administer things in the interests of the ruling minority. This can only be done by oppressing the workers. The economic system or capitalism requires a servile poverty-stricken populace to maintain itself. Unless this state of affairs is maintained, soldiers, prostitutes, child slaves, and others who perforce do the dirty work of capitalism could not be obtained in sufficient quantities to cope with the fearful waste and special emergencies of employers. Statists try hard to blind us to this fact, and point to the long list of laws which were supposed to benefit the worker. Unfortunately, those who have studied history know that most of these laws were passed in the interests of the exploiters and the few laws of any benefit to the workers were made only when the militancy of the mass forced the hands of Statesmen.
The class state, irrespective of its form of expression, takes by force and only gives way before force. The State knows no sentiment, no law or rule for itself. It keeps no promise when inconvenient to do so. It is out for exploitation and oppression of the workers; this is the purpose for which the State exists. The State in all its actions is animated with "the will to oppress," and the end—exploitation — justifies the means.
This attitude explains why the State allows many social evils to exist and takes so serious steps to cope with the evils. Any drastic effort to put down vice or sweating would damage the economic interests of those the State represents. For instance, in some countries the government has taken generations to wake up to the fact that drunkenness is a social evil, it is only when military and industrial efficiency are impaired that legislation supposed to cure the malady is enacted. The State assiduously cultivates idolatry in Bill its forms as a useful adjunct to exploitation. It is for this reason that sacerdotal institutions are patronised and privileged at law. Quackery and charlatanism are for State reasons upheld, for the State is not only concerned to perpetuate class rule, but also to keep back the scientific knowledge from the people. The growth of intellect is the greatest menace to the State, therefore any political nostrum that will keep back the wolves of Socialism, Syndicalism and Anarchism is countenanced.
Some workers denounce the church, others rail at parliament, while another section is up against militarism; but the point we fail to see clearly is that all established institutions are adjuncts to the scheme of exploitation which is centred and functions in and through the medium of the State. All the political changes, religious wrangles, and military differences are incidental; the State harmonises these squabbles as far as possible, and is only interested in exploitation. Under the paternalism of the State we have a state of society implying anarchy at law for the rich and injustice for the poor. Economically, we observe a form of socialism for the favoured few at the expense of the many. Industrially, the capitalists are fast amalgamating into one big union, while the flunkeys of the class state, from platform, press and pulpit, endeavour to educate people in the opposite direction.
The State and all that it stands for is of no use to the worker. The life of the State is not essential to the workers, thought statists try hard to justify its existence because the worker is essential to the State. Labor has but to stop production or refuse to recognise the State's authority to cause the whole machinery of exploitation and domination, built upon the metaphysical idea of the State, to crumple up, and government cannot function. The class state always was and ever will be hostile to the workers, for its economic interests force it to endeavour to keep the masses in that state in which it has pleased plutocracy in its wickedness and greed to ordain. Indeed, of late, the activities of the State threaten us with a worse form of oppression than has been known before. Such catch-cries as "National Service," "Industrial Efficiency," "Military Necessity," and so forth show clearly that the aim of statists is the supremacy of "the servile state," a combination of the worst features of the military, financial and industrial state, a monstrosity that the workers will have to beware of.

Direct Action (Sydney, NSW : 1914 - 1930), Saturday 10 June 1916, page 3

Thunder On The Left

 A DREADFUL DENTIST :: THE DILEMMA OF LIBERALISM :: AMERICA WITHOUT HUSTLE ::THOSE CHARMING PEOPLE

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Economics, was once "that dismal science," and politics, in Saki's day, the plaything of bored young men who sipped polite tea at Edwardian garden parties.
The war, and its bleak aftermath, changed all that. Now, a generation after the armistice, these things are real, immediate, and vital. Young men are no longer bored by politics. They can't afford to be. The world is in flux, and we all want to know where we're going.

YOUTH has found its wings. And because they are mostly left-wings, books on Socialism and Communism, on Lenin and Marx, have become best-sellers. A healthy curiosity informs all this. The young man who reads a book about Communism is not necessarily preparing to hoist a red flag on the local gasworks. This is the sad error into which the myopes of Commonwealth Customs Department often fall.

He is more likely finding a flaw in a plausible bit of propaganda, and so steeling his mind against demagogy from both left and right. He is charting a path through the quicksands of falsehood, upon which one day his liberty, the things he values most, even his life, may depend.
Australia, a lush Arcady for politicians, has produced very little political thought. We have no Laski, no Strachey, no Palme Dutt, no Edmund Wilson. For the most part, our opinions are imported. And sometimes it is as dangerous to get political views by mail as false teeth.
So Mr. Montague Grover's excursion in political prophecy, "The Time is Ripe," will be welcomed even by those who disagree, on historical grounds, with its conclusions. Writing with wit, with clarity, and with feeling, Mr. Grover sounds an amiable trumpet before capitalism's tottering Jericho. The walls are bound to fall, he says. Capitalism is dying of senile decay.

THAT HOARY MYTH

It is not the money which Capitalism takes out of industry which makes it an evil; it is the obstruction to capacity working of the industrial machine.
The pathetic myth about Socialism taking away the rich man's money and whacking it out among everyone is neatly disposed of. What Socialism aims at, Mr. Grover points out, is a planned economy, such as Great Britain had during the Great War and Russia has today, increase of production by the abolition of non-productive jobs, and the use of new technique now kept bottled up, and a gradually increasing standard of living starting with a basic wage of £6 a week.
In Marxian words, unlimited production for use, instead of rationed, production for profit.
So far, Mr. Grover follows orthodox Marxian lines. But now his socialism becomes tailored to fit Australia. We are an amiable people, who don't like trouble. So when The Day comes, our capitalists will all be pensioned off on a basis of their previous earnings, the pension to stop at death. Their personal property and the homes they live in will be left to them, their investment property seized by the State.
The flag, the church, the home will be preserved. Art, science and sport will flourish. "While nine-tenths of the population of Australia will have their material positions improved at least 100 per cent., not one honest person will be one whit worse off."
Where's the money coming from? Mr. Grover rightly points out that money has no meaning, if you have labor, machinery, and organised production.

HONEST INFLATION

In the first stages, the new Australia would be financed as the old Australia is financed today— by inflation. But after a Five-months' Plan or so, money will lose its significance. We will think in terms of goods and services, which will be available to all in ever-increasing quantities.
A pleasant prospect, and economically quite a sound one. But how is it to be realised? Here Mr. Grover shows a sad faith in the power of orthodox parliaments. He harks back to the quaint bedtime stories of German Social Democracy, of British Labor in the days before Mr. Ramsay MacDonald had found his top-hat, Mr. Snowden his title, and Mr. Thomas his important friends in the City.
In other words, he foresees the millennium coming to birth amid cheers from both benches, after a bloodless debate in the House of Representatives, Canberra.
The dreamers of similar dreams in Germany woke up in concentration camps, that is, those who survived the bullets and knives of Hitler's persuasive Brown Shirts.
Their Austrian brothers, who thought they could build a Socialist Vienna out of ballot-boxes, saw their fine structure shattered by a few shells from Fascist howitzers. Their English kinsmen continue to dream, but no one, least of all themselves, takes their pretty fantasies seriously. They are the licensed stooges of Conservatism, the raw material of tomorrow's Fascisti.
Then why will parliamentary socialism succeed in Australia? Because, says Mr. Grover, with the example of a triumphant Russia looming larger and larger before them, with a deepening crisis in Australia, the die-hards of the U.A.P. will suddenly become the champions of a Socialist Australia.
Everyone will know the truth about the U.S.S.R. Everyone will realise that socialism is the only way out for Australia. Political differences will disappear. The Langs will lay down with the Lyons. A Canberra-made Utopia will arrive, neatly wrapped, in an enabling Bill.
Mr. Grover evokes a reassuring vision, and does it courageously and well. His is the dilemma of the Liberal who, pushed to the left by logic and necessity, still thinks it possible to take the middle of the road.

LIBERALS IN DOUBT

It is general dilemma today. Mr. Stephen Spender makes it the thesis of his study, "Forward from Liberalism." Mr. Grover is a veteran Australian newspaperman, Mr. Spender a young English poet. A common crisis unites them. Both are moving falteringly towards a new Liberal ideal.
Mr. Spender, too, believes that in the modern world, the socialist, classless society is Liberalism's final goal. He believes, too — as Marx did, of England—that a bloodless revolution is possible.
But he pins his faith on the pressure of a Popular Front, organised on the French model, rather than on the miraculous overnight conversion of a Tory Cabinet. The conclusion that we must achieve a classless, democratic world-state is inescapable. If everyone who accepts this joins the Popular Front, the means, as well as the ends, are simplified, in democratic countries, for a bloodless revolution is still possible. . .. . It is just possible in England for a Popular Front to gain power, thus putting capitalism on the defensive.
But this Popular Front must be organised quickly, while some measure of political freedom remains. It should aim at parliamentary power, and Mr. Spender thinks it would have a far greater chance of attaining it than the present Labor Party. And when it gets power, it must introduce a sweeping programme.
The two chief aims of the programme would undoubtedly be Collective Security, based, not on the selfish alliances of capitalist powers, but the extension of the International Popular Front in Russia, France, and Spain, as a beginning of International Socialism. The internal policy of the Popular Front would aim at adjusting the present economic system, weighted in favor of capitalism, in favor of socialism, and of internationalism.
It would not be enough to nationalise the banks and begin the task of socialising industry, it would be necessary to see also that the military forces, the police, and the bureaucracy supported the Popular Front wholeheartedly. In short, a complete break with the past must be made; so that if a counter-revolution should be attempted, socialism will defend an established government against a capitalist attack.
The alternative to international socialism, says Mr. Spender, is war, and the collapse of civilisation. We have not long to decide. Our future defends on our willingness to co-operate quickly with all who share our final aims of peace and liberty.
But Mr. Spender has written more than a doctrinnaire essay on what is to be done. As a distinguished poet, and a member of one of England's most famous Liberal families he is concerned first with analysing his own approach to Communism.

ANSWERS QUESTIONS

As a result, he has written a book that will answer many of the self-questionings of youth today.
To light up the road along which he has travelled, Mr. Spender devotes a chapter to answering a series of questions which he has asked himself. This is, perhaps, the most valuable part of the book.
At the end of this chapter we have a unique cross-section of the mind of a poet reacting to political necessities. It is a valuable revelation, and Mr. Spender rounds it off with a clear statement of his position.
"I am a Communist because I am a Liberal. Liberalism seems to me to be the creed of those who, as far as it is possible in human affairs, are disinterested, if by disinterestedness one understands not mere passivity but a regard for objective truth and an active will towards political justice . . . the love of humanity rather than separate nationalities, of justice for all men rather than class privilege, of universal peace rather than imperialist competition and war — these are the features of disinterest.
Mr. John Strachey, like Mr. Spender, comes from a distinguished English family: He is also a Communist, but a much more uncompromising one. In "The Theory and Practice of Socialism," Mr. Strachey expounds the philosophy and metaphysics of Marxism.
Despite its uncritical nature, it is a valuable introduction to Marxist theory.
These three books, so diverse in origin and presentation, are part of a great ferment of political thought that is bubbling up all over the world today.
To ignore them is to plunge an ostrich-head between the sleepers as the express approaches.
THE TIME IS NOW RIPE, by Montague Grover, Melbourne; Robertson and Mullens.
FORWARD FROM LIBERALISM, by Stephen Spender,  London; Victor Gollancz. Ltd.
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SOCIALISM, by John Strachey London: Victor Gollancz. Ltd.

Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW : 1931 - 1954), Saturday 6 March 1937, page 9

Social Anarchy; or, Competition.

 By Lawrence Gronlund.

Author of " 'The Co-operative Commonwealth," 

" Our Destiny," &c.

"Competition gluts our markets, enables the rich to take advantage of the necessities of the poor, makes each man snatch the bread out of his neighbour's mouth, converts a nation of brethren into a mass of hostile, isolated units, and finally involves capitalists and labourers in one common ruin.— Greg.

The wage-system may be said to be of vital interest only to the wage-workers. They are a considerable part of the nation. They include not only the operatives in our factories and mines, but the whole army of railroad employees, all agricultural labourers, all clerks engaged in stores and mercantile establishments ; all, in fact, who help to create values and receive a stated salary. But, though the wage-workers are an important fraction of the population of every country, they, nevertheless, are but a fraction. If Socialism had regard to them only, it were nothing but a class movement.
We claim that there is a something-wrong in society which vitally affects the whole nation and every individual in it. In prosperous years it may not obtrude itself on the attention of thoughtless people ; but let " hard times " come on, and it makes everybody feel uneasy. What is this " something-wrong " ? Socialists say that it is nothing less than the method, the policy which governs all activities of the principal nations of our time. It is spreading itself in Catholic societies and through out the whole world, but it arose in Protestant countries. It is, in fact, simply the exaggerated form of one of the principles of Protestantism — the independence of the individual, which exaggerated individual independence we properly call individualism. We can also call the policy the " let alone " policy ; its admirers give it a more euphonious name. — Private Enterprise.
Let alone whom — what?
In the middle ages the feudal barons erected castles, from which they issued forth their retainers, when they espied merchants and adventurers approaching on the contiguous highways laden with wealth, stopped them, and levied tolls. All that these barons desired was to be "let alone." In our ages it is the successors of these merchants and adventurers who have grown powerful fattened on " fleecings." They, in their turn, demand to be " let alone " ; they demand that society shall be an unrestricted hunting-ground for their " enterprise." They are let alone ; we shall now note with what results to the different classes of society.
Before our present industrial system got into full swing— that is, before the power of steam was utilised—the master workman was an adept in his trade, and owned his tools and the raw materials he used. This is all now changed. The workman is now divorced from his implements and raw materials, which have got under the complete control of the Capitalist class ; he now has nothing left but his naked labour. This it is, again, which enables employers to buy labour in the market, for a price much below the productivity of that labour — that is, at a value much below its worth.
This monopoly has made employers into a class of autocrats, the labourers into a class of dependants — of hirelings. As Jesse Jones has said: "A class is fixed, when nine-tenths of those comprising it can never get out of it. . . . Why mock workingmen by putting rare exceptions for a general rule ? "
The labouring men are dealt with by our managers as mere tools. They are spoken of as tools, as things. This humanitarian age counts steers and sheep by "heads" and the workers by "hands." A pity God did not make them only "hands!"
It is a paltry evasion to say that the workers are free to consent or refuse the terms of an employer. It is, as Dickens says in Hard Times, " an evasion worthy of the man who asked permission of the Virgin to rob her of her necklace — and then did it, taking silence for consent." The labourers have to consent. If they refuse the terms, Capitalists simply stop business ; they can stand it. " Hard times " are really only hard on those whose subsistence depends on having work to do. The wives and daughters of Capitalists do, as a rule, not leave off during " hard times," attending operas in their silks, satins, and diamonds; do not, as a rule, quit their luxurious mansions, or dismiss their liveried servants.
Henry George, in his Progress and Poverty, epitomises the position of our labourers as follows :— " Compelled to more continuous labour than the savage, the labourer — a mere link in an enormous chain of producers and consumers, helpless to separate himself and helpless to move, except as they move — gains the mere necessaries of life, just what the savage gets, and loses the independence of the savage." And, as to security, he is not much better off. The irregularity of his employment, the frequency with which he is out of work, is the most alarming feature of the workman's condition. And that irregularity is often, purposely brought about by the employing Capitalist class. For instance, in order to put up the price of anthracite coal, of the working days of a month nine to twelve are frequently made idle days by the coal companies of Pennsylvania. The mining is interrupted to limit supply, and the miners are left to do the best they can with work for two days out of every three.
This condition has been rendered yet enormously more precarious by the remarkable industrial inventions of the age.
These victories of man, of society, over nature's physical forces ought certainly to have been unqualified blessings to all.
Yet how often have they proven instruments of torture to the working class? How many has the introduction of new machinery thrown out of employment ? How many existences have thereby been destroyed ?
We are familiar with the commonplace, that the outcry of labourers against " new fangled machinery " is a complaint born of ignorance ; that in the end the working classes are as much benefitted as other classes. This outcry is, by no means, nothing but an ignorant childish complaint. Machinery would be an unqualified blessing if the temporary injury which it so often has caused to individuals and whole bodies of men were considered in a spirit of social justice and brotherliness. That has never been done where the working classes are considered, either in this (America) or any other country. In their case our legislators persistently repudiate the duty to take care of the interests of those who are sacrificed for the benefit of their fellow-citizens and of posterity. But whenever other classes have been thus affected there never has been the slightest hesitation to liberally compensate those prejudiciously affected. It is the action of society that has made machinery an evil. This is the real meaning of the outcry against " new-fangled machinery."
And we deny that workpeople hitherto have been essentially benefited by machinery at all. The sewing machine is a pointed illustration. That was thought, at all events, to be a blessing to the overworked, famishing needlewoman. Yet what has followed ? That she is now still more overworked, more poorly paid, and her health still more endangered.   But, to be sure, those inventions were not adopted by Capitalists for the benefit of workpeople, or for the general benefit. No, indeed! For, of course, this machinery and these inventions have also gone into the hands of Capitalists, and are controlled by them for their exclusive benefit, and with admirable results. It has been calculated that two-thirds of all benefit arising from the use of machinery have gone to these "pushing" fellows and the remaining one-third to the consumers. Even our patent laws, with the general advantage for their primary idea, have become a means of enabling those Capitalists, in no sense inventors, to levy heavy tribute upon the community for an indefinite length of time.
" Ah ! but the workers are also consumers, we should think, and from the majority in fact of all consumers."
Hold on, sir ! Has machinery lightened the days's toil of any work ? That is what ought to measure the benefits of machinery to him. Let us see if it has.
Here is one picture: Massachusetts is a model State, we suppose. Well, a statute of that State in 1860 made ten hours a maximum working day for children under twelve years of age. In 1867 her legislators became a little more humane, and enacted that no child under fifteen years of age should work more than sixty hours a week. Go to Pennsylvania and see children ten years old taken down every morning into the mines to work !
Here is another picture : In England, 200 years back, ten hours— aye, in the fifteenth century eight hours — were a normal working day for strong blacksmiths and robust agricultural labourers.
But compare the comforts of our labourers 200 years ago. What a wonderful betterment in that respect !"
What of it? What comfort is that to our labourers ? You might as well compare their condition with that of a savage in Africa, who does not need a coat, does not need soap. Just so ; the labourers of a former age did not need a good many things which now are the necessaries on decencies of life. We say their condition has not improved, because it takes considerably more toil to procure the needful now than it did then, as testified to, among others, by Hallam : " The labourer is much inferior in ability to support a family than were his ancestors four centuries ago." Why, before the beginning of the Capitalistic system, labourers could, in England, live a whole week upon the earnings of four days ; now, in Massachusetts, he cannot live a week upon the earnings of a week of much more continuous toil. No, in many cases he is obliged to disrupt his family, and send his wife and children to the factory.
For that is the greatest curse of machinery — or, rather, of "individualistic " monopoly of machinery — that capital can be, and is, coined out of women, and even out of infancy ; that women and children can be, and are, substituted for men. Thus, not alone are men turned into wares, governed by demand and supply, but men are made to scramble for a precarious living with their wives, sisters, and children. In the cotton and woollen factories of enlightened Massachusetts, women and children now compose two-thirds of the working force. The necessary result is a great reduction in wages. It is notorious that the wages thus earned by a whole family do not, on an average, exceed those of the head of the family in occupations where it has not yet become habitual to employ women and children.
And do not venture to compare the independence of our working classes with the artisans of England of a former age, who partly worked for themselves and, possessed a cottage and a cow and a strip of land to cultivate. Our ox-eyed, docile wage-workers, restrained by arbitrary shop rules prescribed by their lord — rules that forbid them to talk to each other, or even to laugh (!) — will not for a moment bear comparison with the merry families of master and men of the despised middle age. The first result of the "let-alone" system, thus, is that Capitalists monopolise all the instruments of production, all the previous acquisitions of society, all increase in the productivity of Labour, and, therefore, exercise an autocratic control of all industries and over the whole working class.
The great weapon at the command of the Capitalists is competition.
" Competition," like most economic terms, is a very slippery word. At one time it means something which advances the successful, but leaves the unsuccessful on his former level ; that kind of competition muses the energy of the unsuccessful, as well as of the successful, and increases the capacity of both. We shall call that by a much more appropriate term — emulation.
At another time " competition " means the advancing oneself at the cost of others ; the pulling the many down, the elbowing the many aside, in order to advance the one. That " competition " is most cruel to the individual and, in the long run, most injurious to society.
It deserves the name of cut-throat competition, when the wage-workers are forced into a struggle to see who shall live and who shall starve.
But these are by no means the only sufferers. The small employers, the small merchants, are just as much victims of that cruel kind of competition as the wage-workers. For every one of the fleecers lives in a state of nature with all of his brethren ; the hand of the one is against the other, and no foe is more terrible than the one who is running a neck-to-neck race with him every day. The mammoth factory, the mammoth store is a most implacable foe. The fierce competition lessens the profit on each article, and that must be compensated for by a greater number of them being produced and sold — that is, the cheaper the goods, the more capital is required.
Precisely then for the same reason that the mechanic with his own shop and working on his own account nearly has disappeared in the struggle between hand-work and machine-work, the small employers with their little machinery, their small capital, and their little stock of goods are being driven from the field.
Look at those queer princes of ours — vulgar men, far from possessing eminent faculties or high attainments ; men having no more knowledge or mental capacity than is required in any mechanical pursuits — who, by the employment and power of their capital, yearly ruin multitudes of hard working merchants, and boast that they are selling more goods in a day than the whole " crowd " of other stores in a week ! Scores of such small merchants, driven to the wall by the proprietor of a mammoth establishment, have to be glad if the " prince " will make them his servants and graciously allow them to help swell his millions.
In short, the smaller fortunes invested in productive or commercial enterprises are by this cut-throat competition attracted to the great capitals, just as iron filings are to the magnet. The great Capitalist triumphs, the small Capitalist becomes a clerk, wage-labourer, or parasite of some kind or other; the middle class disappears little by little. Our social order may fitly be compared to a ladder of which the middle rounds are being torn away, one by one.
This, then, is another fruit of private " enterprise " — that the small employers are gradually being rooted out by the great Capitalists.
In former periods society was tormented with plagues, caused, as we now know, by ignorance, and consequent violation of the laws of health. Our era is cursed with crises, occurring far more frequently than plagues and causing with each occurrence as much misery.
Economists say that these crises are caused by over-production. "Overproduction ! " — a remarkable word, in truth, as long as one unfed and unclad human being, willing to work, roams the earth. Would not our ancestors of any preceding age have considered anyone who would have talked to them of overproduction a lunatic ? Could they, think you, have conceived of such an abnormity as that any nation could ever suffer from too much industry, too much commerce, too many tools, and too much food ? But we ought, in order to be fair, to take the word in the sense of these economists. They mean, by " overproduction " a too large production, compared with the effective demand. But, then, what is the cause of the too large production ?
Private enterprise, Socialists say. Private enterprise compels every producer to produce for himself, to sell for himself, to keep all his transactions secret, without any regard whatever for anybody else in the wide world. But the producer and merchant — the small ones, especially — daily find out that their success or failure depends, in the first place, precisely on how much others produce and sell, and, in the second place, on a multitude of causes — or on things that may happen thousand miles away— which determine the power of purchase of their customers. They have got no measure at hand at all by which they can, even approximately, estimate the actual effective demand of consumers, or ascertain the producing capacity of their rivals. In other words: Private " enterprise " is a defiance of Nature's law, which decrees that the interests of society are interdependent; and Nature punishes that defiance in her own crude way by playing ball with those individualists, and, what is worse, by rendering all production, all commerce chaotic. Risk is nature's Revenge.
Just take a bird's-eye view of the way private "enterprise" manages affairs. Observe how every manufacturer, every merchant, strives in every possible way — by glaring advertisements, by underselling others, by giving long credits, by sending out an army of drummers — to beat his rivals. Not one here and there, not a few, do this ; they all do it. We shall suppose the season a favourable one; all of them receive orders in greater number than they expected. These orders stimulate each one of the manufacturers to a more and more enlarged production far ahead of the orders received, in the hope of being able to dispose of all that is being produced. But mark ! this production of all these manufacturers is, and must necessarily be, absolutely planless. It depends altogether on chance and the private guesswork of these "enterprising " individuals, who are all guessing entirely in the dark. That means that all their production, all their commerce, is in the nature of gambling. To a thoughtful observer nothing will seem more inevitable than that this planless production must end in the market being at some time overstocked with commodities of one kind or another — that is, that it must end in " overproduction " as to those goods. In that branch of production prices consequently fall, wages come down, or a great manufacturer fails, and a smaller or greater number of workmen are discharged.
But one branch of industry depends upon another ; one branch suffers when another is depressed. The stoppage of production at one point, therefore, necessarily shows itself at another point in the industrial network. The circle of depression thus grows larger and larger from month to month, failure succeeds failure, the general consumption diminishes, all production and commerce is paralysed. We have got the crisis. To those who were all the time planning and working in the dark everything seemed to be going on as usual ; it has naturally come on them like a thunder bolt from a clear sky.
Vast quantities of stored-up goods now have to be disposed of at great sacrifice, to the ruin not alone of their owners but of many others who thereby are forced, likewise, to sell under cost-price. Then it is we hear from everyone in every calling this the strongest of all condemnations of this Social "Order" of ours: "We have too many competitors ; half of us must perish, before the other half can live." All the result of planless work.
When such a crisis has lasted for years, when such sacrifice of goods and standstill of production has finally overcome the " overproduction," then the inevitable demand at length calls for renewed production ; and society commences to recover slowly, but only to repeat the old story. Producers want to idemnify themselves for what they have lost and hope to " make" sufficient before another crisis comes on. Because all producers act in like manner, each one trying to outflank the other, another catastrophe is invited. It responds to the call and approaches with accelerated strides and with more damaging effects than any of its predecessors.
These crises very much quicken the absorption of the smaller fortunes by the large ones, for the Capitalist with large resources is the only one capable, in the long run, of withstanding this rough treatment of outraged nature. The former Capitalists the crises swallow up like veritable mælstroms.
These mælstroms : the crises, then, are the direct production of private enterprise.
Again, we saw how the workingmen were driven out of their employment as producers, how the small employers were pushed out of their business by this cut-throat competition. In nine cases out of ten they have only one refuge left : that of squeezing themselves in between producers and consumers as shop-keepers, saloon keepers, peddlers, " agents," boarding-and-lodging-house keepers; that is, of becoming parasites.
It may seem hard to speak thus of persons who by no means lead an enviable existence, who honestly try to make some sort of a living, whose life often is a tread-mill of drudgery, and, if different from that of the workingman's, is only different in this, that while the latter struggles for the necessities of to-day, the former struggle for the threatened necessities of to-morrow. They are, nevertheless, parasites, unnecessary workers. Going along our streets you observe one small store, one boarding-house, crowding another, one saloon, and often several, in one block : you will have all kinds of men and women thrust their small stock into your face ; in your house you will be annoyed by all kinds of peddlars and " agents," so-called.
All these people live. Somebody must earn their living for them.
In the first place, they live by enhancing the price of provisions, and all other goods, twice and three times what the producers get. The difference between their prices and wholesale prices makes just the difference between healthful plenty and half-satisfied hunger for the poor. It is a great mistake to suppose that competition always, or necessarily, lowers prices. It often has just the contrary effect. Probably two-thirds of existing small shop-keepers can not make a decent living without extravagant profits. Or, if the prices cannot be enhanced, then—
In the second place, they live by depreciating the quality of their goods and by short weights and measures. Adulteration of provisions and merchandise is notoriously carried on in every branch of trade that will permit of it; has, indeed, become a social institution, against which no law can make any headway. A representative of a leading spice-house lately said : "We sell to the trade more adulterated goods than pure. We cannot help it. We simply sell the retailer what he wants. It would ruin the trade to prohibit adulteration." Competition in drugs is now so hot dealers, in order to live, are compelled to adulterate, to weaken, and to substitute. It has gone so far that manufacturers of " mineral pulp," now boldly importune respectable millers and grocers to mix rock-dust with their flour and sugar.
The labouring class, more than any other, is the natural prey of these parasites. Remember that the labourers' ware, his labour, is never paid for till it has been used ; that he must give his employer credit always for a week, often for two weeks or a month ; that he will have to wait for his compensation, even while the values he has created have been long since converted into cash in his employer's hands. It is a necessary consequence that he, on his part, must ask credit from his shopkeeper. He becomes the prey, bound hand and foot, of that shopkeeper. He dare not murmur at the price charged, dare not be over particular as to weight or quality. He is pretty much in the same fix as the fly in the spider's web.
Thus the portion of the industrial cake allotted to Labour is further considerably curtailed, and all on account of private " enterprise" ; for it, also, is exclusively responsible for these parasites.
Let us pass over to our farmers. They, as yet the majority of the working population of the United States, are still the great conservative force — the brake, so to speak, on the wheel of progress. Is it likely that they will continue to be ? We shall see.
Its farmers were, half a generation ago, considered, and are still considered, the most independent and prosperous class of the community.
True; the prosperity of the western farmer, especially, was and is not of a character to excite the envy of anybody. His whole life, and more particularly that of his wife, was one of toil. He had to break the lands and clear the forests. His family had to subject themselves to all kinds of privations for a lifetime of dreary years. The social life of the farmers' wives was a mockery of our civilisation ; their sisters struggling in the cities had, at least, the comfort of suffering in company. To the family of the farmer sugar, tea, and coffee were, for a series of years, luxuries, especially when droughts and grasshoppers destroyed the fruits of his toil, generally as severe as that of his horse. And his reward ? That of vegetating and " raising " a family, as we so expressively term it ; yes — and of being the owner of his farm.
But his ownership is, even now, frequently one in name only. The Capitalist has got hold of him also. Very many of the Western farms are covered with mortgages, which their nominal owners have no hope of ever raising. The fact is so well known that the N. Y. TIMES some time ago advised the farmers to prepare themselves for their fate. What fate ? That of becoming tenant-farmers like their brethren of Great Britain.
It is especially since the commencement of the last decade that they are falling victims to " Private Enterprise."
There is in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY for January, 1880, a most instructive article* entitled "Bonanza Farms," containing many facts which, in the near future, cannot but have an important bearing on the condition of our farmers. These "Bonanza farms " are vast cultivated tracts of land in Minnesota, Dakota, Texas, Kansas, and California, each containing thousands of acres of land owned by presidents and directors of railways, by bankers in St. Paul and New York, London, and Frankfort-on-the-Main. They are conducted on purely " business " — that is, Capitalist — principles. On these farms there are no families, no women, no children, no homes. There is no need for them. But there is plenty of " Labour " in the neighbourhood. There is such an abundance of unemployed men that the managers of the farms can hire all the labour they want for £3 4s. a month, during the busy season, with thirteen hours of daily labour, and for £1 12s. a month during the balance of the year.
This fact alone would render it absolutely out of the question for the surrounding small farmers to compete with the bonanzas. For the former have to support a family, and to feed, clothe, and shelter, and altogether provide for, the same number of persons throughout the whole year, while the latter only need to hire about one-fourth the number of persons, in proportion to the work to be done, and that for less than one-fourth of the year. But the small farmer has other and greater odds still to contend with — the discrimination practised by other large corporations. Thus, the bonanzas obtain special rates from the railroad companies : f. i. they are charged for the transportation of their produce, rates 50 per cent. below those which the other farmers are obliged to pay; they buy their machinery and farming implements of the manufacturers and dealers at a discount of 33 1-3 per cent. from the published rates. We ought, therefore, not to wonder when we are told that the surrounding small farmers are hopelessly in debt, while the owners of these bonanza farms — the aforesaid bankers and railroad-presidents — are amassing colossal fortunes; that they, even, with wheat at less than 3s. a bushel, realise 20 per cent. the first year on their capital, and the second year — 55 per cent.
The article concludes with the remark : " We are taking immense strides in placing our country in the position of Great Britain, and even worse." So it seems. For here the forms are practically homesteads, while the bonanza farms have nothing suggesting homes except a building for the bachelor superintendent, and the boarding-house for the " hands."
There is no doubt that these bonanzas will, in the near future, increase greatly in number. Thus our public lands, which were intended for happy homes, are in a fair way of becoming no better that penal colonies, and of being robbed of their rich soil for the benefit of Capitalist pockets. What will then become of our farmer "proprietors " but farmer tenants ? If they are already running behindhand now, how much time will it take for the bonanza farmers to put an end to their proprietor ship by means of private " Enterprise " — especially if the export to Europe on account of good harvest there, should happen to cease ? Bear in mind that the United States already now produces far more food than its population could possibly consume, and yet thousands of acres are yearly added to the area under civilisation.
Yes, the time will come when the farmers will learn that Socialism is the only refuge alike for them and the other working classes, and their eyes may be opened to the advantage of the Co-operative Commonwealth. The great dairy farms in New York State and elsewhere may also contribute their quota to this lesson.
Thus even the farmers of the United States, as yet the most splendid yeomanry the world has ever seen, are becoming the victims of private enterprise to fully the same extent as the workingman and small employer.
But our big Capitalists have a still more powerful sledge-hammer than that of Competition ready at hand— to wit, Combination.
These gentlemen know practical dialectics. They know that, though Competition and Combination are opposites, they yet may come to mean the same thing— to them. They have already found that, while Competition is a very excellent weapon to use against their weaker rivals, Combination pays far better in relation to their peers. It is evident that it is combination they mainly rely upon for their future aggrandisement.
Combination consists in one or several capitalists, or corporations, helping along a third on the condition of participating in the fleecings. We have already mentioned one such instance. We saw how railroad officers united with bonanza farmers to crush out the small farmers. We read of another instructive instance in an article published in the Atlantic Monthly for March, 1881, and headed : " The Story of a Great Monopoly."
It tells how the Erie and Pennsylvania Railroads and Vanderbilt "pooled" their interests with the "Standard Oil Company," how they agreed to carry, and did carry its oil at much lower rates than the oils of other companies, and in many cases absolutely refused to carry the oils of the latter. It tells how, by such discrimination, the fleecings of the "Standard " swelled to such an extent that, starting with a capital stock of £200,000, it paid to its stockholders a dividend of £200,000 a month, and had then piled up in undivided profits and other forms a capital of £6,000,000. Truly a "Great Monopoly," a very dangerous monopoly one should think, for Pennsylvania and the public at large.

"By the same tactics," says the writer, "the Railroads can give other combinations of Capitalists the control of the lumber, cotton, iron, and coal of the United States." In Europe such alliances between Rail roads and corporations would be impossible. But in the United States, where Private "Enterprise" runs rampant, where the "Let-alone " abomination is carried to its highest logical pitch, such alliances are certain to be a prominent feature of its future.
But the evils which flow from the something-wrong in society are not confined to wage-workers, farmers, and small employers. The at present existing relations of men constitute the comfortless mutual slavery of us all, as we shall find, wherever we turn. Professional men of every kind can, also, be divided into those who have and those who have not ; and those among them who have not, are fully as bad off as the wage-workers, indeed worse off, for their culture becomes an additional curse to them. We will suppose such a man has talents, that he has qualified himself by hard study for a responsible function in Society, yet this anarchic Society has no opening for him. He perhaps becomes a clerk, just as much dependent on his employer, just as much a hireling, as the wage-worker is ; he likewise must hold his tongue, and constantly be on the lookout to preserve the favour of his august autocrat, while he all the while is doing the work of others who really receive the pay.
John S. Mill was fully aware of this; these are his words :
" What a spectacle, for instance, does the medical profession present ! One successful practitioner we find burdened with more work than mortal man can perform — in the surrounding streets twenty unhappy men, each of whom as laborously trained, wasting their capabilities, starving, perhaps, for want. Under better arrangements these twenty would form a corps of subalterns under the really ablest physician — and not merely the most successful imposter— physicing people for headaches, while the latter treated only more difficult cases."
But now, even in all professions, the watchword is, "Everyone look out for himself, and the devil take the hindmost" — all due to unrestrained private " Enterprise."
Our era may be called the Jewish Age. The Jews have, indeed, had a remarkable influence on our civilisation. Long ago they infused into our race the idea of one God, and now they have made our whole race worship a new true God : The Golden Calf ; but, again, it is Jews who have sounded the alarm for the most determined battle against this very Jewism : it is to that noble Jew, Karl Marx, that we owe the scientific basis of Socialism ; it is to another noble Jew, Lasselle, that we are indebted for its popularisation. " Jewism," to our mind, best expresses that special curse of our age ; Speculation — the transfer of wealth from others to themselves by chicanery without giving an equivalent.
If there is one species of gambling more despicable than another it is gambling in grain. The sales of grain on our produce exchanges are merely gambling transactions. Cliques of the wealthiest men in Chicago, Milwaukee, and New York, having behind them banks and other moneyed corporations, make enormous combinations of capital to " corner " the market, locking up millions of bushels of wheat, and maintain famine prices in the midst of plenty. Their profits are enormous. So are those of another clique, who owns all pork. And where do those profits come from ? From the workers, of course; from the bread-winners, who thus earn the support and the wealth, not only of their employers, their so-called "bread-givers," but of those Vampires who use their backs as the green table on which to plan their games.
The Vampires are quite different creatures from the parasites of whom we already have treated. The latter are workers though superfluous workers; the former are not workers at all. But, then, they do not call themselves workers either, but "business men." There is quite a difference between work and business, as the word is now commonly used. " Work" is effort to satisfy wants, and may be either useful or useless ; but "business" is effort to benefit by the work of others, and if that is to be called " work," it is at any rate mischievous work ; in that sense our criminals also work and generally pretty hard. " Work " is being busy in benefit ; "business," being busy in mischief. Our parasites are useless workers ; our Vampires are not better than thieves and swindlers.
On a par with Speculation is much of our " Traffic." The " enterprise " of our mercantile " kings " and our " princes " is very often but another name for chicanery and swindling. " Suppose," John Ruskin says, " a community of three men on an island, Two, the one a farmer and the other a mechanic, are so far apart that they are wholly at the mercy of the third who travels between them and effects their exchanges. He is constantly watching his opportunities, and retains the products of the one with which he has been intrusted and which are needed by the other, until there comes a period of extreme need for them and he can exact enormous gains from their necessities. It is easy to see that, while he may in that way draw the whole wealth of the community to himself and make his principals his servants, he also in fact diminishes the amount of wealth by cramping the operations of his two customers and diminishing the effective results of their labours. That is Wealth acquired on the strict principle of Political Economy."
And the millions which go into the pockets of these mercantile men of ours as "profit" are by them called "reward for enterprise," "compensation for risks." Do we call the gains of the swindler or the robber " compensation for risks ? " No, commerce, which is the interchange of commodities, is a most beneficial social activity ; traffic, trade, which, as Herbert Spencer says, is " essentially corrupt," which partakes of the nature either of gambling or overreaching, is not.
These Vampires are the offspring of the " let-alone " policy. " Laissez-faire," " let alone " — leave the honest at the mercy of the cunning ; leave the innocent to suffer for "their innocence ; leave everyone who profits by a corrupt system to make the most for himself ; let Labour remain something wholesale out of which fortunes are made and which during that process yields such a percentage of misery and sin — what a grand " principle !" By adopting it for its guiding star our Society has achieved— Anarchy.
Our comfortable classes talk much of " Social Order." In ancient Greece and Rome there was Social " Order," such as was ; during the Middle Age there was Social " Order," such as it was. But in our age there is, as we have seen, throughout our whole economic sphere, no social order at all. There is absolute Social Anarchy. It is against this Social Anarchy that Socialism, chiefly, is a protest.
All instruments of production are monopolised. The evil of this monopoly does not so much consists in the plutocrat having a right of property in that which he has acquired. Though formed out of fleecings, and in no other manner whatsoever, he can perhaps, claim these acquisitions as his property, because he has got hold of them by the express consent of Society. The evil lies in this, that he is able and permitted to use this property of his to further fleece his fellow-men out of the proceeds of their toil.
This unrestricted private enterprise is responsible for our crises, the inevitable consequences of defying the natural law of interdependence between all the members Society.
It has produced our parasites and vampires.
It has given us Competition with all its baneful consequences.
Not emulation, which no Society can afford to do without, the loss of which would check all advance and deaden all energy.
But cannibalism, that poisonous tooth the extraction of which would immensely relieve society.
It has put into the hands of our Plutocrats a deadlier club than competition for them to use whenever it serves their purpose : Combination among themselves.
It has destroyed all the patriarchal, idylic relations which formerly existed among men and left only the one relation : Cash-payment. It has drowned the chivalrous enthusiasm, the pious idealism which existed in previous ages in a chilly shower of realistic egotism. It has put exchange-value in place of human dignity, and licence in place of freedom. It has made the physician, the jurist, the poet, the scientist, retainers of the Plutocracy. It has made marriage a commercial relation and prostitution one of the established institutions of Society.
But let us be fair.
So far we have discussed only the evil workings of unrestricted "private enterprise." We heartily admit that, on the other hand, it has performed wonders. It has built monuments greater than the pyramids. Its Universal Expositions have moved greater masses of men than the Crusades ever did. It has done mankind an immense service in proving, by hard facts, that wholesale manufacture is the most sensible form of Labour.
But we contend that it now has done nearly all the good that it can, that the evils which now flow from individualism far outweigh the benefits it confers.
That is why we condemn it. We condemn it just as we condemn an old, decaying building, however useful it may have been in its time ; or as nature condemns the cocoon of a chrysalis when a butterfly is ready to be born.
But we know full well that "individualism " will for some time yet go on working mischief. We know it must become a good deal worse than it is, before it can become better.
But we also know that in the fullness of time the Logic of Events will imperatively demand a change from this Social Anarchy to true Social Order.

*Embodied in a book called Land and Labour, published by Scribner and Sons. Mr. Moody, of Boston, is the author.

Australian Workman (Sydney, NSW : 1890 - 1897), Saturday 29 August 1891, page 1