John Rae

“ Is nature the source of all this suffering, or is it man that is to blame for it? I had before, like so many men of science, looked, while in workshops, only on the forges and the machinery, not on the men—on the products of human industry, and not on the producers, and I was quite a stranger to this great empire of misery that lies at the foundation of our boasted civilization. ”

“ It is universal; it is durable; it constantly eludes all human interference; and all events, as well as all men, contribute to its progress. Would it be wise to imagine that a social movement, the causes of which lie so far back, can be checked by the efforts of one generation? Can it be believed that the democracy which has overthrown the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists? Will it stop now that it has grown so strong, and its adversaries so weak?" If, then, the natural tendency of democracy is to socialism, to socialism we must eventually go. ”

“ From want of such a system of right—from want even of seeing the necessity for it, Liberalism has defeated its own purpose. It sought to abolish monopoly; it has only substituted for the old monopoly of birth the more grievous monopoly of wealth. It sought to establish freedom; it has only established plutocratic tyranny. It has erred because it took for freedom an abstraction of its own and tried to realize that, just as Communism erred by taking for equality an abstraction of its own and trying to realize that. ”

“ We are content to lay down the foundation of the revolution. We shall have deserved well of it if we stir hatred and contempt against all existing institutions. We make war against all prevailing ideas, of religion, of the State, of country, of patriotism. The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind." All this work of annihilation could neither be done by reform, nor by conspiracy, but only by revolution, and "a revolution is never made ”

“ Instead of making work, they would have unmade half the work there used to be, and have brought their whole class to comparative poverty by contracting the ultimate sources from which wages come. The true way to make work for to-morrow is to do as much as one can to-day. For the produce of one man's labour is the demand for the produce of another man's. There is nothing more difficult for any class than to reach an enlightened perception of its own general interest. ”

“ Society has granted to the labouring classes the rights of freedom and equality, and has, therefore, come bound to give them, as far as it legitimately can, the amplest facilities for practically enjoying these rights. To give a man an estate mortgaged above its rental is only to mock him; to confer the status of freedom upon working men merely to leave them overwhelmed in an unequal struggle with capital is to make their freedom a dead letter. ”

“ Among people like these, passing their days in frugal comfort and fruitful industry, and looking with quiet hope and confidence to the future, socialism finds, of course, no open door. On the contrary, every man of them feels he has something to lose and nothing to gain by social revolution; the fear of socialism is, indeed, one of the chief influences guiding their political action; and as they are as numerous as all the other classes in the community put together, their worldly contentment is a bulwark of enormous value to the existing order of things. ”

“ In a good year the same labour will produce twice as much wheat as in a bad; its productive power is greater; the time socially necessary to produce wheat is less, and the price of the bushel falls. The value of a commodity is therefore influenced by its comparative abundance, whether that be due to nature, or to machinery, or to personal skill.
But, in the next place, if value is simply so much labour, it would seem to follow, on the one hand, that nothing could have value which cost no labour, and, on the other, that nothing could be devoid of value which cost labour. ”

“ There is no socialism in declaring that the rich, by reason of their riches, have responsibilities towards the poor; or that the poor, by reason of their poverty, have claims upon the rich. Nor is there any socialism in holding that the State has responsibilities towards the poor, and that the law ought, when necessary, to assert the reasonable claims of poverty, or enforce the reasonable duties and obligations of wealth. All that merely says that justice and humanity ought to govern in economic affairs, as they ought to govern in all other affairs of life ”

“ Civilization is itself a social property, a common fund, a people's heritage, accumulating from one generation to another, and opening to the new-comer economic opportunities and careers incomparably better and more numerous than the ancient liberties of fishing in the stream or nutting in the forest. ”

“ Our enemy is the landlord who owns the soil and makes the peasant drudge for his profit. Our enemy is the employer who owns the workshop, and has filled it with wage-serfs. Our enemy is the State, monarchical, oligarchic, democratic, working class, with its functionaries and its services of officers, magistrates, and police. Our enemy is every abstract authority, whether called Devil or Good God, in the name of which priests have so long governed good souls. Our enemy is the law, always made for the oppression of the weak by the strong, and for the justification and consecration of crime. ”

“ Communism, he says, is the government of all by all; democracy, the government of all by each; and anarchy, the government of each by each. Anarchy is, in his opinion, the only real form of self-government. People would manage their own public affairs together like partners in a business, and no one would be subject to the authority of another. Government is considered a mere detail of industrial management; and the industrial management is considered to be in the hands of all who co-operate in the industry. ”

“ In fact, the common sense of men everywhere would unhesitatingly pronounce it unjust to requite the manager who contrives, organizes, directs, with only the same salary as the labourer who executes under his direction, because, while both may spend the same time of labour, the service rendered by the one is much more valuable than the service rendered by the other. Let every man have according to his work, if you will; but then, in measuring work, the true standard of its value is not its duration but its social utility, the social importance of the service it is calculated to render. ”

“ He laughs at those who cannot hear the word revolution without a shudder. "Revolution," he says, "means merely transformation, and is accomplished when an entirely new principle is—either with force or without it—put in the place of an existing state of things. Reform, on the other hand, is when the principle of the existing state of things is continued, and only developed to more logical or just consequences. ”

“ Do they believe, as all socialists believe, that it is unjust for one man to be paid five thousand pounds a year, while his neighbours, with far harder and more drudging work, cannot make forty pounds? or do they believe it wrong for a man to live on interest, or rents, or profits? or would they have the law lay its hands on property and manufactures, in order to correct this wrong and give every man the income to which he would be entitled on socialist principles? It is good, no doubt, to have more equality and simplicity and security of living ”

“ The same reason which justified the State at first in protecting person and property against violence, justified it yesterday in abolishing slavery, justifies it to-day in abolishing ignorance, and will justify it to-morrow in abolishing other degrading conditions of life. The public sense of human dignity may grow from age to age and be offended to-morrow by what it tolerates to-day, but the principle of sound intervention is all through the same—that the proposed measure is necessary to enable men to live the true life of a man and fulfil the proper ends of rational being. ”

“ There is therefore no ground for Lassalle's representation that the law of necessary wages condemns ninety-six persons in every hundred to an existence of hopeless misery to enable the other four to ride in luxury. The principles that govern the rate of wages are much more flexible than he supposed, and the experience of trade unions has sufficiently demonstrated that it is within the power of the wage-labourers themselves to effect by combination a material increase in the price of their labour. Trade unions have taken away the shadow of despondency that lay over the hired labourer's lot. ”

“ George indeed regards confiscation as an article of faith. It is of the essence of the message he keeps on preaching with so much conviction and courage and fervour. Private property in land, he tells us, is robbery, and rent is theft, and the reason he offers for these strong assertions is that nothing can rightly be private property which is not the fruit of human labour, and that land is not the fruit of human labour, but the gift of God. As the gift of God, it was, he believes, intended for all men alike, and therefore its private appropriation seems to him unjust. ”

“ Chamberlain is certainly wrong in thinking over-government an extinct danger under democratic institutions, a mere survival from times of oppression which haunts the people still, though they are their own masters, with foolish fears of over-governing themselves. In reality, the danger has much more probably increased, as John Stuart Mill believed, for if we cannot over-govern ourselves, we can very easily and cheerfully over-govern one another, and a majority may impose its brute will with even less scruple than a monarch ”

“ The proximate demand for labour is, of course, capital, but the amount of capital which a community tends to possess—in other words, the amount of wealth it tends to detach for industrial investment—bears a constant relation to the amount of its general production. There is a disposition among economists to speak of the quantity of a nation's savings, as if it was something given and complete that springs up independently of industrial conditions, and as irrespectively of the purpose to which it is to be applied as the number of eggs a fowl lays or the amount of fruit a tree bears. ”

“ In Marx's remarkable survey of English industrial history almost every conquest of modern civilization is viewed with regret; but it is manifestly idle to think of forcing society back now to a state in which there should be no producing for profit, but only for private use, no subdivision of labour, no machinery, no steam, for these are the very means without which it would be impossible for our vastly increased population to exist at all. ”

“ The idea of equality has been a great factor in human progress, but it requires no such outcome as this. Equality is but the respect we owe to human dignity, and that very respect for human dignity demands security for the fruits of industry to the successful, and security against the loss of the spirit of personal independence in the mass of the people. ”

“ Because industrial progress has not extinguished poverty, they conclude that it has not even lessened it; that it has no power to lessen it; nay, that its real tendency is to aggravate it, that it increases wealth with the one hand, but increases want with the other, so that civilization has developed into a purely upper-class feast, where the rich are grossly overfilled with good things, and the poor are sent always emptier and emptier away. Invention, they tell us, has followed invention; machinery has multiplied the labourer's productivity at least tenfold ”

“ In some branches of industry many new improvements remain unused because the workpeople are too ignorant to work them properly. Moreover, for the supreme quality of resourcefulness, education is like hands and feet, and if we may judge from the number of useful labour-saving inventions which working men give us even now, we cannot set limits to the number they will give when the whole labouring class will have got the use of their mind by an adequate measure of general education, and when, as we may hope, they will have got leisure to use it in through a shortening of the day of labour. ”

“ The motive to labour, however, is weakened on the communistic system; and if those who work less are to be treated exactly like those who work more, then that would be no abolition of monopoly, but merely the invention of a new monopoly, the monopoly of indolence and incapacity. The skilful and industrious would be exploited by the stupid and lazy. Besides, production would for the same reason, insufficient inducement to labour, be diminished, progress would be stopped, and therefore the average of human happiness would decline. ”

“ Even the more popular parties are content to accept the existing over-government as the normal state of affairs, and always strive to gain the control of it rather than to restrain its action. And so it has come about that, while they sought liberty for themselves, they were afraid to grant it to their opponents, for fear their opponents should be able to get the authority of this too powerful administration into their hands and serve them in the same way. The struggle for freedom has thus been corrupted into a struggle for power. ”

“ Nothing is more political than the social question. Liberals think slight of that question, but it is, says Marlo, the real question of the day, and it is neither more nor less than the question of the existence or abolition of Liberalism, the question of the maintenance or subversion of the principle of industrial freedom, the question of the ascendancy or overthrow of a money aristocracy. The fight of our age is a fight against a plutocracy bred of Liberalism. It is not, as some represent it, a struggle of labourers against employers ”

“ Rumours fly every now and then from hamlet to hamlet like wildfire, no one knows whence or how, that the division is to be made in a month, or a week, or a year; that the Czar has decreed it, and when it does not come, that the Czar's wishes have for the time been thwarted, as they had so often been thwarted before, by the selfish machinations of the nobility. For the peasant has a profound and touching belief in his Czar. There may be agrarian socialism in his creed, but it is not the agrarian socialism of the schools. ”

“ Marx has no sooner reduced value to the single uniform element of time of labour, and excluded from its constitution all considerations of utility and the state of the market, than he reintroduces those considerations under a disguised form. In the first place, if a day's labour of given length always produces the same value, it is obvious to ask whether then an indolent and unskilful tailor who takes a week to make a coat has produced as much value as the more expert hand who turns out six in this time, or, with the help of a machine, perhaps twenty? ”

“ Everything that economizes labour or that adds positively to its productivity, contracts the labourer's own part of the working day and prolongs the master's. Division and subdivision of labour, combination, co-operation, organization, inventions, machinery, are all "on the one hand elements of historical progress and development in the economic civilization of society, but on the other are all means of civilized and refined exploitation of the labourer." They not only increase social wealth at his expense, but in many cases they do him positive injury. ”

“ Free institutions run continual risk of shipwreck when power is the possession of the many, but property—from whatever cause—the enjoyment of the few. With the advance of democracy a diffusion of wealth becomes almost a necessity of State. And the difficulty only begins when the necessity is perceived. For the State cannot accomplish any lasting or effective change in the matter without impairing or imperilling the freedom which its intervention is meant to protect—without, in short, becoming socialist, for fear of socialism ”

“ It cannot degenerate, as the bourgeoisie had done, into a privileged and exclusive caste; because, consisting as it does of the great body of the people, its class interest and the common good are identical, or at least harmonious. "Your affair is the affair of mankind; your personal interest moves and beats with the pulse of history, with the living principle of moral development."
Such then is the idea of the working class, which is, or is destined to be, the ruling principle of society in the present era of the world. ”