James Ramsay MacDonald

“ In other words, the spirit of constructive Socialism arises from political democracy. With the approach of the sun to the earth in spring, the breeze warms and the wayside bursts out into colour. Life is the companion of the hours of spring. So is Socialism the companion of democracy. The people become accustomed to Socialist axioms. Even when they imagine they are shunning Socialism they are following it. It is said of a certain Indian state that it has a make-believe parliament. ”

“ First of all I shall deal with the relation of Socialism as a system of political and economic thought to other systems with which it is often confused—particularly with Communism and Anarchism.
Communism presupposes a common store of wealth which is to be drawn upon by the individual consumer, not in accordance with services rendered, but in response to "a human right to sustenance." It may be in accordance with Communist principles to make this right to consume depend upon the duty of helping to produce, and to exile from the economic community every one who declines to fulfil that duty. ”

“ The present system fails to do the very thing which it proposes to do, because its lack of design means that it defeats itself in its own working. It is like a man so disorganised in his nerve centres that every time he lifts his hand to strike some one else he injures himself.
This is particularly true of private property in natural monopolies, like land. The experience of every people in the world, whether it be a barbaric tribe or a civilised nation, is that, when land becomes subject to private proprietorship, poverty inevitably follows. ”

“ THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
Socialism is a tendency, not a revealed dogma, and therefore it is modified in its forms of expression from generation to generation. The goal remains the same, but the path twists and twines like every other human path. Its wayside aspects also change, and the people who walk upon it do not remain the same. At one time an expanding industry draws men in one direction, as a gold discovery in new lands draws men from old fields of labours and casts a new glamour over men's vision. ”

“ If Socialism were a divinely ordered society the critical newspaper—especially the daily one—might be suppressed altogether in the intellectual and moral interest of the public, for there is no more melancholy spectacle to-day than the party press, with its misrepresentations, its suppressions, and its tongue in its cheek—unless it be the spectacle of those who read it and believe it.
The supposition of our critics is that the "powers that be" under Socialism will be all powerful and that, whilst remaining quite sane, they will be oppressively tyrannical. ”

“ One must grant this extraordinary revolution in the art and science of government, this unthinkable loss of capacity on the part of governors, before one can even conceive the objection with which I am dealing. And be it noted in the passing, when one has granted that, one has destroyed the political conditions of freedom under which alone Socialism can not only exist, but actually come into existence. ”

“ And we must also insist that laws and regulations are not only not antagonistic to liberty, but are the very conditions of liberty. They are the expressions of the social life; they are the signs of warning, the directing finger posts which the experience of the past has set up for the guidance of the future; they are the wisdom which men have picked up onthe way. They are, so to speak, the hard bony structure of conduct which supports—and which alone can support—the mobile activities through which the free will finds play. ”

“ This is the Liberal epoch—the epoch of the government of the man who, having control of the economic forces of his society, finds freedom. Hence, it is the epoch of a political and intellectual individualism of the mechanical and not the organic type. It is marked by an extension of commerce, by vast accumulations of wealth, by the creation of commercial empires, by the rapid march of scientific discovery, by the perfecting of the means of production and by the concentration of industrial capital. But, above all, it is distinguished by the growth of political democracy. ”

“ And to make matters worse on their dramatic side at any rate, all this unemployment takes place when wealth is most heaped up and waiting for consumers. When the shoemaker is shoeless on the street, capital is cheapest, leather is cheapest, and boots are filling the warehouses.
Conditions are all the worse on account of a circumstance upon which, on other grounds, we greatly pride ourselves. We are taught that we are free, that no one controls our goings-out and our comings-in; and when Socialists speak of the present as a system of wage-slavery, we get angry. ”

“ The Socialist assumes that individuality requires private property through which to express itself. Man must control and own something, otherwise he does not control and own himself. And as Socialism is not a cut-and-dried set of dogmas to be pieced into a system like one of those puzzles made by cutting up a picture into many confusing fragments, but an idea which is to be realized by a continuation of experimental change, we may rest assured that none of the incidents which are to be met with on the way will abolish private property. ”

“ There are two possible avenues down which Socialism may come. It may come from the darkness of misery, its way lit by flaming torches; or it may come from the advancing dawn of prosperity, its way lit by the steady broadening of the day. For the past generation or so, it has come by the latter way. We are better clothed than our grandfathers, we are better housed than they, we have a wider choice for consumption than they had. ”

“ Every objection to Socialism based on the contention that no one can foresee all the details of the change which it involves and that, in consequence, there will be chaos the morrow after the first Socialist sun sets; that no one has produced a scheme for securing a supply of bottlewashers, navvies, newspaper editors, poets, and that therefore Socialism will break down for lack of variety in social functionaries—all these objections fail because they do not touch reality. The Socialist method avoids such disasters. The approach to Socialism is by the parliamentary method. ”

“ Science in Great Britain has run after social honours and even its Liberalism soon decayed. We have not, therefore, in this country that circle of the intellectual democracy which has enriched liberal thought on the Continent. Curie and Lombroso were Socialists, and we can claim the most distinguished of all our living scientists, Alfred Russel Wallace. A brilliant, if small, body of scientific men keeps him company. But again a mere catalogue of names is meaningless.
The reason why Socialism and the scientific mind should be congenial to each other is not far to seek. ”

“ This is Socialism. It is an application of mutual aid to polities and economics. And the Socialist end is liberty, the liberty of which Kant thought when he proclaimed that every man should be regarded as an end in himself and not as a means to another man’s end. The means and the end cannot be separated. Socialism proposes a change in social mechanism, but justifies it as a means of extending human liberty. Social organisation is the condition, not the antithesis, of individual liberty. ”

“ The existence of a class struggle is of no importance to Socialism unless it rouses intellectual and moral antagonism, for it is only that antagonism which leads to progressive change. And this explains best why the Socialist condemns this struggle which has become repulsive because it creates conditions of injustice, because it results in chaos and because it defeats the realisation of the ideal state of peace and comfort which the leading spirits of mankind have always placed before them as a goal. ”

“ If a better distribution of wealth would turn the imperfectly clad millions of backs into a field for the employment of British labour as the prairie-land of Canada is made a field for British capital, what a fruitful soil for British art would be the British home. To-day the patronage of art belongs to a small class; under Socialism it would belong to the whole people. ”

“ Social organisation has now to be carried to a further stage. And what has to be the subject of this organisation? It can be but one thing—economic power. The individualist epoch created that power, organised it, and broke down under its load. Like the fisherman in the Eastern tale who liberated the genii, individualism has been unable to control its own discoveries. The community, the state, the whole of the people—under whatever name it may be the pleasure of different men to designate it—must now take over this power, bridle it and harness it and make it do social work. ”

“ Nine-tenths of the wage-earners of the country work with no thought of accumulating property, but with the sole idea of making ends meet day by day, and week by week; the remainder see no fairer prospect ahead than the saving of enough money to invest in some insurance club or to lay by in preparation for the inevitable time of trade depression and unemployment. If it were true that men will work only to own property there is not the inducement for a single week's hard manual labour in modern society. The significance of working-class savings is constantly exaggerated. ”

“ Long before there was what can be called a Socialist movement, there were men groping after the Socialist plan, examining society with lanterns lit from the lamp of Socialism, making demands which were partial discoveries of Socialism itself, in the same way that many pioneers set foot on America before America itself was explored. ”

“ We are now in a position to summarise the processes of the evolution of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, and to state the law of that evolution.
Capitalist industry begins with competition, and the law of the survival of the fittest comes at once into operation. From this emerges the law of concentration and co-ordination. Competition ends in the domination of the surviving few, and in the widening of the sphere of control of the capitalist unit. Trades which depend upon each other tend to be organised together and to be controlled as one unit. ”

“ First of all, we have to understand that liberty is conditioned; and then we have to understand that it is something which relates to qualities, and not only to quantities.
It is conditioned, for if a man is dependent upon another man's bounty for his very existence, he may live under a state of the most beautiful moral anarchism and yet be a slave. I have shown that owing to the enormous growth of the economic power in modern society, the real effective control on man's outgoings and incomings is becoming more and more economic. To express this, the Socialist uses the term wage-slavery. ”

“ The alternation of overtime and unemployment is supposed to be as natural as that of night and day. The workers have to bear the burdens of the system under which they live, and as they are not responsible for its control, nothing is done by way of a remedy. [6] Thus the chronic underpayment of the workers adds to our chaotic methods of production in intensifying periods of apparent over-production and trade depression.
Nor is it much better with the class above the workers. As unemployment comes inevitably upon the wage-earners, so bankruptcy comes inevitably upon the capitalist. ”

“ It is frankly a reign of wealth, whereas though religion may approve of the authority of a gilded aristocracy—divine right—or of a sober democracy—divine equality—it never can justify to itself a sovereignty of money, an empire of plutoeracy. Above all, religion must resent the attempts made by commercialism to measure virtues by their economic advantages and to appreciate—or depreciate—saints in accordance with whether they are or are not useful in counting-houses. ”

“ An examination of the current notions regarding the Socialist view about property and what is indeed the real view is equally enlightening. The common idea is that Socialism proposes to abolish private property. That is no less mistaken than is the view that Socialism and Anarchism are one and the same thing. Private property in one of its aspects is a limitation of the liberty of the woods, under which he who had the power took what he wanted, and of the struggle for life—although it may be used to revive this ancient form of liberty and this objectionable method of selection. ”

“ That, in a community organised industrially as I have just described, the mind of man must become servile and dull is impossible. Surely, rather, as there is to be ability, leisure and a generally diffused enjoyment of private property and leisure, a great impetus will be given to all intellectual pursuits, to culture, to every activity of the free mind, and the grandeur of public buildings and the richness of public treasures which will then embody the dignity of the communal life, will augment that impetus. ”

“ Whole troops of anti-Socialist horrors dissolve into something less real than shadows when sane adults look at them a second time.
Like all crowds, all tribes, all companionships, the Socialist community will be swayed by two contrary motions, the coercion of discipline (the common life) and the freedom of will (the individual life) ; and each will have an absolute sway in some fields, and in others will have to accept compromises, limitations and modifications. ”