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Dilemmas of Socialism
BY GEOFFREY BARRACLOUGH THE dilemmas and contradictions of modern Socialism are nothing new. They reach back to the nineteenth-century origins of the move- ment, and are visible already in the lives and works of the pioneers, among whom Marx and Proudhon and—surprisingly—Julian Harney are outstanding.* With Harney, indeed, we are car- ried back to the grass roots of English Socialism, and it is no small achievement on Mr. Schoyen's Part to have restored this neglected figure—so little appreciated that he appears in Mr. Hampden Jackson's book disguised as Harvey—to his place in the history of the English working-class move- ment.
Mr. Schoyen leaves no doubt that Harney, with his brimming energy and shrewd and ruthless Political sense, was a person to be reckoned with in English politics in the period between the Reform Bill of 1832 and the Great Exhibition of 1851; he was intellectually and morally superior to O'Connor, the reputed Chartist leader, and anticipated some of Marx's leading ideas. By bringing out for the first time Harney's role in the movement, Mr. Schoyen's able studyt puts English Chartism, often written off as a rather pathetic outburst of effete frustration, into new and more positive perspectives. By comparison the study of Marx and Proudhon inevitably seems slight, though it covers the ground competently and agreeably. But here also we are brought face to face with the dilemmas of nascent Social- ism, for Proudhon and Marx, as is well known, were antipodes around whose personalities and ideas the conflicting trends within the working- class movement gathered and pulsated.
A Frenchman, a German, an Englishman : as we survey their contrasting philosophies and atti- tudes and methods, we see how each embodied a different reaction to the nineteenth-century chal- lenge. That does not mean, of course, that their conflicting theories represented different national or racial characteristics, but rather that they mir- rored different stages in the all-engulfing advance of modern industrialism. England, where the fac- tory was rapidly replacing the workshop, was -as far ahead of France, where there was no industrial revolution worth the name, as France was ahead of Germany, where urban life at the century's start was still reminiscent of the .Middle. Ages. How natural, then, that Proudhon should react against all forms of large-scale organisation, both industrial and political; that Marx, whose German experience was- remote from the practical prob- lems of industrial society, should theorise in a spirit of 'doctrinaire abstraction'; while Harney was driven in spite of himself to adopt the empiri- cal standards of the British working classes.
It was easy for Marx and Proudhon to argue over fundamental principles; in England, on the contrary, because here the industrial revolution
* MARX, PROUDHON AND EUROPEAN SOCIALISM. By 1. Hampden Jackson. (English Universities Press, 8s. 6d.) t THE CHARTIST CHALLENGE: A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE JULIAN HARNEY. By A. R. Schoyen. (Heine- mann, 25s.)
was in full stride, the pressing questions were problems of method and organisation and tactics. The working-class leaders, faced with a situation not far short of desperate, had little time to formulate theoretical positions. In 1842; for example, in'Sheffield alone out of 30,000 employ- able workers no fewer than 24,000 were entirely destitute or on -half time. The practical question was how to cope with this situation; but in facing it all the contradictions came to light which, ever since, have never been far removed from the sur- face of British working-class politics.
Harney himself started off as an active revolu- tionary, the very antithesis of 'gradualists' like Francis Place. He belonged to the 'physical force' as opposed to the 'moral force' wing of Chartism, and liked to call himself the English Marat. But even the adherents of 'physical force' were not a single group `with an integrated organisation and an agreed policy'; nor was the antithesis between moral force and physical force the only issue. The Chartist leadership was divided on the question of co-operation with middle-class radicalism, and on the question whether to stake the future of the movement on political agitation or to con- centrate on industrial action. But, above all else, it was hesitant and ambivalent in its attitude towards the brash and burgeoning capitalist society whose unprecedented growth had produced the condi- tions Chartism sought to remedy.
On all these questiOns Harney's ideas were forthright. He had no use for moralists who preached that 'capital has duties as well as rights,' or sought a solution in a nebulous identity of interests between 'masters' and 'men.' Long before Marx and Engels, he adumbrated the theory of the class-struggle. Alliance with the bour- geoisie, for him, was to sell out to the `Malthusian sham-Radicals,' who would co-operate so long as working-class support was needed against the landed interest and then turn against the prole- tariat, as they did in 1832. Mere industrial action without political power was not good enough; to oppose the New. Poor Law or agitate for shorter hotirs might mitigate but could not remedy the situation. On the other. hand, Harney saw more clearly than other workers' leaders that a purely political programme such as the People's Charter, and devices such as universal suffrage, could never guarantee success. 'The classes commanding the wealth of the country can always by force and fraud ensure the slavery of the millions.' Hence Harney came out point-blank for revolutionary measures: nationalisation of the land, the coal mines, transport and utilities and public resources.
These were Harney's principles throughout his life; but experience taught him that, under English conditions, to realise them would not be easy. After the failure of 1839-40 the erstwhile revolu- tionary condemned futile plotting; after 1851 he realised (quarrelling with Marx and Engels in the process) that, if anything were to be saved, co- operation with reformist circles was indispensable. Unlike Feargus O'Connor, whose stated object— the very reverse of Socialism—was to turn the workers into a 'large • class of small and well- reniunerated capitalists,' he remained distrustful of middle-class Radicals, but experience taught him how half-hearted, and .how divided among therriselves, the, workers were. The bulk were Corn Law Repeaters rather than Chartists. The working- class elite, Harney found,' those with a vested interest in the status quo, sided with the propertied classes against revolutionary action. As soon as the 'soporific effects of fuller stomachs' were felt, they turned to trade-Unionism, factory reform and the co-operative movement, satisfied if they could extract a bigger rake-Off from capitalist society.
At.this point the limitations and weaknesses not only of Harney's own position (like many others, he found an outlet in emigration to America) but of British working-class empiricism as a whole became manifest. Harney's beliefs were 'always vague from a doctrinal view point.' Socialism, for him, was a nebulous `Babeuvian egalitarianism based on natural rights': in his criticism 'protest against the capitalistic ethic and the exclusion of the working class front political power' took the place of 'specific economic proposals.' In this, he was nearer to Proudhon than to Marx; and as the English working class turned away towards Glad- sionian Liberalism, and he himself was overtaken by disillusion about the 'people,' and the dangers of demagogy, he might • almost have echoed Proudhon's statement : 'Universal suffrage is the surest means for making the people lie.'
Here, indeed, is the greatest difference between Proudhon and Harney, on the one side, and Marx on the other. Marx also was fully aware of the problem of the Lunt penproletariat—the 'good' masses,' as Proudhon called them, who queued for the theatres, content and joyful, while 'the pavements of the boulevards were still red with blood'—but he knew what he wanted, and untrammelled (unlike Harney) by the preoccupa- tions of an active politician, set out to get it by creating a disciplined Communist elite to organ- ise the 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' It was a solution which temperamentally .Harney could never have invoked and against which Proudhon fought and. rotested; but it was at least a solution, where Harney admitted defeat and Proudhon was content to enunciate moral principles.
Yet here we arrive at the ultimate paradox. Marx's results-were only possible at a cost which Western workers were not prepared to pay. As Proudhon was quick to perceive, Marx's dento- cracy had 'the appearance of being founded on the dictatorship of the masses,' but in fact the masses have no more power' in it 'than is neces- sary to ensure a general serfdom.' The nearer continental industrialism drew to English condi- tions, the more ,revisionism' gathered force among the workers; by 1904, as Mr. Hampden Jackson points out, all the so-called Socialist parties were 'working in an un-Marxist way for liberal reforms in the conditions of the working class.' There is no doubt that in this. they reflected the wishes of their constituents. But it still remains a question whether Socialism is really subsumed in this sort of parliamentary-democratic game and in a pro- gramme of piecemeal reforms. 'The English working-class,' Mr. Schoyen writes, 'would be- come •more bourgeois before it became less so'; but however true the first half of this proposition may be, we are left wondering not whether the latter has occurred, but how and when it ever will occur. Meanwhile, if the inherent conditions of a Marxist solution are unacceptable to the working classes of the West, the problems of a non-Marxist solution still remain—the tensions and contradictions and divergencies of aim which baffled Harney an crippled Chartism, and arc still visible at every critical turn of Labour policy.
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