Progressivism

“ Majorities are not progressive. How, then, can we expect progress to result of majority action? Show me one advance of human progress achieved by the action of a majority, and I will concede the whole case to my political friends. Open history at every epoch of social advance, and you will find that whatsoever has been accomplished has been the work of a revolutionary minority.
The mass mind has ever been a stagnant force of conservative inaction, against which the waves of social progress have beat ”

“ From all the discussions we hear in the halls of legislation, and on the popular platform, on the relations of capital and labor, finance, free trade, land monopoly, taxation, individualism, and socialism, the rights of women, children, criminals, and animals, one would think that an entire change must speedily be effected in our theories of government, religion, and social life, and so there would be if a small minority, even, honestly believed in these specific reforms. But alas! our reading minds are yet to be educated into the first principles of social science ”

“ The fears we expressed, lest the inevitable growth of social equality and of the government of public opinion, should impose on mankind an oppressive yoke of uniformity in opinion and practice, might easily have appeared chimerical to those who looked more at present facts than at tendencies; for the gradual revolution that is taking place in society and institutions has, thus far, been decidedly favourable to the development of new opinions, and has procured for them a much more unprejudiced hearing than they previously met with. ”

“ First in the religious, then in the political, and finally in the social relations of men, new doctrines have thus been broached, which are full of promise to the hopeful, and full of alarm and dismay to the timid and conservative. This distinction marks the broadest division in the ranks of mankind. In church, and state, and social life, the real parties are the Progressionists and the Retrogressionists—those whose most brilliant imaginings are linked with the future, and those whose sweetest remembrances bind them in tender associations to the past. ”

“ Let no one, then, confound with the principles of this social nonconformity the acerbity and the disagreeable self-assertion of those who first display it.
The most plausible objection raised against resistance to conventions, is grounded on its impolicy, considered even from the progressist's point of view. It is urged by many of the more liberal and intelligent—usually those who have themselves shown some independence of behaviour in earlier days—that to rebel in these small matters is to destroy your own power of helping on reform in greater matters. ”

“ Scientific socialism has pointed out that the transforming power decreases as we descend the scale from one process to another, that of revolution being less than that of evolution, and that of rebellion being less than that of revolution, and individual violence having the least of all. And since it is a question of a complete transformation and, consequently, in its juridical, political and ethical organization, the process of transformation is more effective and better adapted to the purpose in proportion as its social character predominates over its individual character. ”

“ It is true that the governmental power will cease to be a class organ, but will it not still be the organ of a majority? Can the intellectual life be made dependent upon the decisions of the majority? Would not every new truth, every new conception and discovery be comprehended and thought out by the insignificant minority? Does not this new order threaten to bring at once the best and keenest of the intellectual thinkers in the various spheres into continuous conflict with the proletarian regime? ”

“ Here, as elsewhere, the unprogressive part of a movement which is essentially progressive is to be eliminated, not by decrying the whole movement but by giving it a wider sweep, making it more progressive, and leading it to demand an even greater change in the structure of society than any that it had contemplated in its inception. ”

“ In the seventeenth century therefore, as in the thirteenth, the forms stood ready to be again clothed with a new life, to supply the means for another revolution, again at once conservative and progressive. ”

“ PAPERS ON LABOR AND CAPITAL. NO. XII. Perhaps there is a no more suggestive or instructive fact in all the realm of society than that the laboring classes are the liberal classes. It is among them that nearly all social reforms begin, and among them that all governmental reforms first find moving power. The wealthy classes are systematically conservative; and by instinct they are opposed to all movements which tend to equalization. They are to social reform just what bigots are to religious liberalization. ”

“ And in this progress of equalisation between class and class in a community, the Muse of history sees only a special illustration of a general law that every aristocracy contending for the maintenance of exclusive privilege against natural right fights a losing battle. But the necessity of the adjustment of the opposing claims of a conservative and a progressive body in the State is a very different thing from the fashion in which the adjustment may be made, and from the consequences that may grow out of the adjustment. ”

“ What attitude shall progressives take toward the existing order, toward those institutions of conservatism, the Constitution, the laws, and the courts?
Are those thoughtful men who fear that we are now about to disturb the ancient foundations of our institutions justified in their fear? If they are, we ought to go very slowly about the processes of change. If it is indeed true that we have grown tired of the institutions which we have so carefully and sedulously built up, then we ought to go very slowly and very carefully about the very dangerous task of altering them. ”

“ Continued progress has only resulted where there has been maintained a happy balance between the conservative and the progressive forces, between the authority of custom and the moral code on the one hand and the free activity of the intellect on the other. ”

“ I wish it therefore to be considered as my humble opinion, that what, in political slang, is termed Radical Reform, is, in reality, proximate revolution:—Universal Suffrage, inextinguishable uproar:—and Annual Parliaments, periodical bloodshed. ”

“ Two opposing principles, the conservative and the progressive, had struggled for victory, and the progressive principle had won. To add more and more numbers; to build higher and higher; to push harder and harder ”

“ For in this respect the progressive is the worst sort of conservative. He insists on conserving, in the most obstinate and obscurantist fashion, all the courses that have been marked out for progress in the past. ”

“ Those great social changes that are called revolutions cannot, or rather can no longer, be accomplished by a minority. A revolutionary minority, no matter how intelligent and energetic, is not enough, in modern societies at least, to bring about a revolution. The co-operation and adhesion of a majority, and an immense majority, is needed. ”

“ I believe in the Progressive movement—a movement for the betterment of mankind, a movement for making life a little easier for all our people, a movement to try to take the burdens off the man and especially the woman in this country who is most oppressed. ”

“ The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind. ”

“ Far greater progress is to be expected from the successive rise into power and prosperity of new elements of the middle-class—and of the upper layers of the wage-earners. This is the progressive and the Laborite movement.
By far the greatest progress is to be expected as a direct or indirect result of the revolt of the lower classes. For this is the only force that can be relied upon to put an end to class government and class exploitation of industry, and to establish that social democracy which is the real or professed aim of every progressive movement. ”

“ Revolutions are due to the repression of progress, and are the expression and triumph of a progress which has been achieved. But such convulsions are an undesirable method of progressing; how can they be avoided? Only by organising elastic institutions in which new ideas of amelioration can easily be incorporated, and laws which can be accommodated without struggle or friction to the rise of new opinions. What is needed is a flexible government open to the penetration of ideas, and the key to such a government is universal suffrage. ”

“ I think all thinking men, to whatever community they belong, will accept that. Now, I suggest four tests to judge whether the Government is progressive, and, further, whether it is continuously progressive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is plain that even the most conservative begin to feel this, and [Pg 154] effort constantly takes more practical form; but this is but the beginning of what must be,—the inauguration of a social revolution in ideas, and one to which all civilization must come. ”

“ He appealed for better things—for justice and democracy—for a new system of politics and economics, though he hardly indicated whence would come the motive or the power to effect the change, except in the material factors of civilisation—the inevitable next stage of social evolution. ”

“ Of the more radical programs of the single-taxers, land nationalizationists, socialists, and philosophi- cal anarchists it is hardly necessary to speak, for the point to be emphasized is that even the so-called conservative groups of society which have bestowed any thought upon social-economic problems adopt the theory that moral and intellectual progress depends upon betterments of conditions. ”

“ Wherever divergent action by different groups is possible without anarchy, it ought to be permitted. In such cases it will be found by those who consider past history that, whenever any new fundamental issue arises, the majority are in the wrong, because they are guided by prejudice and habit. Progress comes through the gradual effect of a minority in converting opinion and altering custom. ”

“ We have seen that a social revolution maybe considered to be from the standpoint of the whole because, even if it only occurs in a factory district, it is a protest of men against degraded life, because it proceeds from the standpoint of the real individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual reacts, is the real community of men, the civic community. ”

“ For the Reform League, it is the working class, the class with 'the brightest powers of sympathy and readiest powers of action.' Now culture, with its disinterested pursuit of perfection, culture, simply trying to see things as they are in order to seize on the best and to make it prevail, is surely well fitted to help us to judge rightly, by all the aids of observing, reading, and thinking, the qualifications and titles to our confidence of these three candidates for authority, and can thus render us a practical service of no mean value. ”

“ But the intense desire to be doing something, to translate ideas into facts, to organize the people, to help in shaping the actual progressive movement in England, and above all, perhaps, to weaken and destroy the individualist wing of the Liberal party,—these and other motives acted with cumulative force, especially as members of the society began to find that they had acquired influence over little groups of workmen here and there. ”

“ Even when we explain that we use the word revolution in its etymological sense, and mean by it a change in the basis of society, people are scared at the idea of such a vast change, and beg that you will speak of reform and not revolution. As, however, we Socialists do not at all mean by our word revolution what these worthy people mean by their word reform, I can’t help thinking that it would be a mistake to use it, whatever projects we might conceal beneath its harmless envelope. So we will stick to our word, which means a change of the basis of society ”

“ The process of building up a truly democratic society has two parts: first, the organization and union in a single movement of all classes that stand for the abolition of classes, and class rule; and second, the overthrow of those social elements that stand in the way of this natural evolution, their destruction and dissolution as classes, and the absorption of their members by the new society as individuals. ”

“ The political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the old society, upon which was based the civic society, or the rulership alienated from the people. The political revolution is the revolution of bourgeois society. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word. Feudality. The old civic society had a directly political character, that is, the elements of civic life, as for example property or the family, or the mode and kind of labour, were raised to the level of elements of the community in the form of landlordism, status, and corporation. ”

“ Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize, and make their own so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movements. ”