2. What is Socialism ?

The means of redress held out to him by the oratory, poetry, journalism, and organizing power of a very active propaganda, is a plan called “Socialism.” It is one of those inconvenient names that mean different things to different people. Socialism carried to an extreme, involves a transfer, sudden and probably violent, of all capital to the State, and that apparently without compensation to the sufferers by the change. There is nothing to prevent a good Catholic, or any reasonable man, if he sees his way to it, advocating that the State should pacifically and with due consideration of vested rights, take up now this form of capital, now that, and make it a government or communal monopoly ; and it is difficult to see where the absorption should stop ; only let it be done gradually and justly. But there must be some limit. I am about to argue that Socialism in its extremest form, implying the extinction of private capital and private commercial enterprise altogether, would be a huge and intolerable evil, abhorrent alike to the pious Catholic and to every other rational human being.

Whenever I speak of Socialism, I mean Socialism full-blown, unmitigated and extreme. It may take many forms. But as it is impossible here to discuss infinite possible amendments, I must beg leave to confine my remarks to one original proposal. That proposal at least is thoroughly Socialistic ; and we want to inquire what thorough-going Socialism would involve.

Socialism thus carried out means a posture of affairs in which a government of sheer democracy, just such as was proposed by Jean Jacques Rousseau, keeps in its own hands the whole of the capital, or producer’s wealth, of the country. The government is purely democratic. The people, having manhood suffrage, make their own laws by their own direct vote, without Parliament or Senate, and hold the sovereign power in their own hands in such a way that all government officials are their nominees and bailiffs, removable at their will any day they choose. The people collectively is sole proprietor, not of all the wealth of the country, but of all the wealth that may lawfully be employed for producing other wealth by means of buying and selling, or other contracts. A man thus may own the house he lives in, the coat upon his back, the wine in his cellar, even the garden that grows cabbages for his table; but he may not hire hands to cultivate the garden, and then sell the produce; he may not build houses and rent them ; he may not import wine for the market. The State will be sole landlord, sole manufacturer, sole owner of shipping and railroads and all branches of the carrying trade, sole exploiter of mines, sole practitioner of medicine (taking fees), sole educator, sole keeper of wine and spirit vaults, sole merchant, and sole retail dealer—in a word, sole capitalist. The only way to wealth for the individual will be his own personal labour ; he will get nothing but the wages of his work. The utmost vigilance will be exerted to prevent his capitalizing his wages ; they are given him to consume, not to produce with. He may produce for himself if he can, but not for the market. It will be seen that there is no compulsion put on any man to work ; but he must either work himself, or have worked, or beg, borrow, or steal from some one who has worked, if he means to live.

Under this system mental labour will be rewarded as well as bodily. The work that feeds the imagination and ministers to the æsthetic taste will command a price no less than the labour which supplies the necessaries of life. Every one will receive pay who does work useful to the community, and no one else will receive anything. Skilled labour will be paid better than unskilled, not in proportion to the excellence of the work, but in proportion to the time that the workman, manual or intellectual, may be supposed to have taken in acquiring his skill ; the apprenticeship will be counted into the value of the labour. Thus the value of labour will always be reckoned by time, the unit of value being the day of a labourer of average skill and diligence.

It is difficult to formulate proposals which crumble away in the act of putting them into definite shape and detail ; proposals the authors of which prefer to leave them vague and general ; or if any one has come forward with a scheme more detailed than the rest, the others are sure to protest that they are not answerable for the absurd details of his addition. No working-drawing, so to speak, of Socialism has yet been made by its architects. And yet some of them are bold enough to cry out for the demolition, sudden, violent, and total, of the present edifice of civilization. Before a man consents to have his house tumbled about his ears, he may well insist upon inspecting precise and accurate plans of the new palace into which he is invited to migrate.

There are two kinds of labour, storable and unstorable, or productive and ministrative. The former is such labour as making a coat, or writing a book ; book and coat can be stored up till there is a demand for them.

Ministrative labour is illustrated by a surgeon lancing an abscess, or an usher teaching a class. Whatever the labour be, some Socialists propose that the doers of it form a gild, and that gild have the monopoly in its own sphere—thus a joiners’ gild, a tailors’ gild, a shoemakers’, a masons’, a physicians’, a schoolmasters’. The maker of a coat, then, will take his article to the gild stores, and receive his pay thence, if he be one of the fraternity ; otherwise he will not be authorized to make coats, except, if he chooses, for his own back. The gild will sell the coat. The writer of a book will take it to his literary gild, and they will pay him according to the number of days which they think it would have taken an ordinary man amongst their number to have written that work. But the surgeon and the schoolmaster have no work to take to their gild : who then shall remunerate them ? If they pocket their fee according to approved modern practice, they will not be members of the Co-operative Commonwealth, they will be working on their own account. It appears, therefore, that the patient or the pupil must carry his fee to the gild of physicians or the gild of preceptors, and the gild will pay their man for doing so many days’ work.

Every gild will manage its own affairs, subject to the central control of the State—that is, of the whole people in meeting assembled. The State will fix, from time to time, a prescribed limit of production for the productive gilds ; how many tons of coal shall be raised, how much wheat grown, how much cloth woven, and the rest. This the State will be able to do by employing a school of statisticians, whose forecast will be received with deference by the people. Sometimes it will be necessary to order a large transference of workers from one gild to another. In this system it will be observed that whoever buys anything, buys it of the State, that is, of some gild over which the State has plenary dominion and control. The State, in like manner, buys all the marketable labour of the individual. The State, having full power over the individual, will always have an escape from bankruptcy by demanding his labour at a lower figure.

For the whole people to form one sovereign legislative assembly, the State cannot be very large. Nations will be resolved into myriads of sovereign cities or communes. These cities may federate together for mutual protection. Some Socialists, however, are opposed to the idea of federation, as infringing the liberty of the several component States. Some indeed go so far as to wish to get rid of the State itself, as barring the free action of the individual. But these are madmen.

Socialism, to be successful, would need to embrace the civilized world. Otherwise the threatened capitalists would hasten to transfer their wealth to countries where private capital was still allowed. It might even be worth while for some State to stand aloof from the Socialist movement, thus to grow rich at her neighbours’ expense.