The Social Question

Lately, I have been trying to figure out what makes socialism distinguishable from other mainstream political beliefs. I began with a question on how to define socialism, concluded that the distinctive definition is that no decisions are reserved exclusively for private individuals, and now I have moved on to the study of European politicians. Please consider the following passages from a socialist politician:

After the turn of the century, [it] was, socially speaking, one of the most backward cities in Europe.

Dazzling riches and loathsome poverty alternated sharply. In the center and in the inner districts you could really feel the pulse of this realm of fifty-two millions, with all the dubious magic of the national melting pot. [...]

Yet not only in the political and intellectual sense was [it] the center of the old [...] monarchy, but economically as well. The host of high of officers, government officials, artists, and scholars was confronted by an even greater army of workers, and side by side with aristocratic and commercial wealth dwelt dire poverty. Outside the palaces [...] loitered thousands of unemployed, and beneath this [...] dwelt the homeless in the gloom and mud of the canals.

In hardly any [...] city could the social question have been studied better than [here]. But make no mistake. This 'studying' cannot be done from lofty heights. No one who has not been seized in the jaws of this murderous viper can know its poison fangs. Otherwise nothing results but superficial chatter and false sentimentality. Both are harmful. The former because it can never penetrate to the core of the problem, the latter because it passes it by. I do not know which is more terrible: inattention to social misery such as we see every day among the majority of those who have been favored by fortune or who have risen by their own efforts, or else the snobbish, or at times tactless and obtrusive, condescension of certain women of fashion in skirts or in trousers, who ' feel for the people.' In any event, these gentry sin far more than their minds, devoid of all instinct, are capable of realizing. Consequently, and much to their own amazement, the result of their social 'efforts' is always nil, frequently, in fact, an indignant rebuff, though this, of course, is passed off as a proof of the people's ingratitude.

Such minds are most reluctant to realize that social endeavor has nothing in common with this sort of thing; that above all it can raise no claim to gratitude, since its function is not to distribute favors but to restore rights.

I was preserved from studying the social question in such a way. By drawing me within its sphere of suffering, it did not seem to invite me to 'study,' but to experience it in my own skin. It was none of its doing that the guinea pig came through the operation safe and sound.

Upon first reading that passage and others like it, I noted in the margin something to the effect that this was some of the most interesting prose Molly Ivins had ever written. I was not aware that she had ever been outside of Texas. Perhaps this was Austin? But no, this is Europe, and the author may have been somewhat effeminate, but he wasn't Molly.

The author continues, now sounding somewhat like Upton Sinclair:

Yet among these 'emigrants' [from the farm] we must count, not only those who go to America, but to an equal degree the young farmhand who resolves to leave his native village for the strange city. He, too, is prepared to face an uncertain fate. As a rule he arrives in the big city with a certain amount of money; he has no need to lose heart on the very first day if he has the ill fortune to find no work for any length of time. But it is worse if, after finding a job, he soon loses it. To find a new one, especially in winter, is often difficult if not impossible. Even so, the first weeks are tolerable. He receives an unemployment benefit from his union funds and manages as well as possible. But when his last cent is gone and the union, due to the long duration of his unemployment, discontinues its payments, great hardships begin. Now he walks the streets, hungry; often he pawns and sells his last possessions; his clothing becomes more and more wretched; and thus he sinks into external surroundings which, on top of his physical misfortune, also poison his soul. If he is evicted and if (as is so often the case) this occurs in winter, his misery is very great. At length he finds some sort of job again. But the old story is repeated. The same thing happens a second time, the third time perhaps it is even worse, and little by little he learns to bear the eternal insecurity with greater and greater indifference. At last the repetition becomes a habit.

And so this man, who was formerly so hard-working, grows lax in his whole view of life and gradually becomes the instrument of those who use him only for their own base advantage. He has so often been unemployed through no fault of his own that one time more or less ceases to matter, even when the aim is no longer to fight for economic rights, but to destroy political, social, or cultural values in general. He may not be exactly enthusiastic about strikes, but at any rate he has become indifferent.

With open eyes I was able to follow this process in a thousand examples. The more I witnessed it, the greater grew my revulsion for the big city which first avidly sucked men in and then so cruelly crushed them.

Why, that sounds exactly like the story of Jurgis, does it not? And the value-laden prose closely echoes Sinclair. He continues, paralleling the story of Jurgis' descent into alcoholism:

The consequence is that once the man obtains work he irresponsibly forgets all ideas of order and discipline, and begins to live luxuriously for the pleasures of the moment. This upsets even the small weekly budget, as even here any intelligent apportionment is lacking; in the beginning it suffices for five days instead of seven, later only for three, finally scarcely for one day, and in the end it is drunk up in the very first night. Often he has a wife and children at home. Sometimes they, too, are infected by this life, especially when the man is good to them on the whole and actually loves them in his own way. Then the weekly wage is used up by the whole family in two or three days; they eat and drink as long as the money holds out and the last days they go hungry. Then the wife drags herself out into the neighborhood, borrows a little, runs up little debts at the food store, and in this way strives to get through the hard last days of the week. At noon they all sit together before their meager and sometimes empty bowls, waiting for the next payday, speaking of it, making plans, and, in their hunger, dreaming of the happiness to come.

And so the little children, in their earliest beginnings, are made familiar with this misery.

It ends badly if the man goes his own way from the very beginning and the woman, for the children's sake, opposes him. Then there is fighting and quarreling, and, as the man grows estranged from his wife, he becomes more intimate with alcohol. He is drunk every Saturday, and, with her instinct of self-preservation for herself and her children, the woman has to fight to get even a few pennies out of him; and, to make matters worse, this usually occurs on his way from the factory to the barroom. When at length he comes home on Sunday or even Monday night, drunk and brutal, but always parted from his last cent, such scenes often occur that God have mercy!

I have seen this in hundreds of instances. At first I was repelled or even outraged, but later I understood the whole tragedy of this misery and its deeper causes. These people are the unfortunate victims of bad conditions! Even more dismal in those days were the housing conditions. The misery in which the [...] day laborer lived was frightful to behold. Even today it fills me with horror when I think of these wretched caverns, the lodging houses and tenements, sordid scenes of garbage, repulsive filth, and worse.

What was - and still is - bound to happen some day, when the stream of unleashed slaves pours forth from these miserable dens to avenge themselves on their thoughtless fellow men?

Clearly, this is the work of a man who understands the dehumanizing effect of poverty and modernity. From there, he notes that these problems are problems of social structure, not moral character, and begins to outline the social program needed to prevent them:

If I did not wish to despair of the men who constituted my environment at that time, I had to learn to distinguish between their external characters and lives and the foundations of their development [emphasis added]. Only then could all this be borne without losing heart. Then, from all the misery and despair, from all the filth and outward degeneration, it was no longer human beings that emerged, but the deplorable results of deplorable laws; and the hardship of my own life, no easier than the others, preserved me from capitulating in tearful sentimentality to the degenerate products of this process of development.

No, this is not the way to understand all these things!

Even then I saw that only a two-fold road could lead to the goal of improving these conditions:

The deepest sense of social responsibility for the creation of better foundations for our development, coupled with brutal determination on breaking down incurable tenors.

Just as Nature does not concentrate her greatest attention in preserving what exists, but in breeding offspring to carry on the species, likewise, in human life, it is less important artificially to alleviate existing evil, which, in view of human nature, is ninety-nine per cent impossible, than to ensure from the start healthier channels for a future development.

During my struggle for existence in [the city], it had become clear to me that social activity must never and on no account be directed toward philanthropic flim-flam, but rather toward the elimination of the basic deficiencies in the organization of our economic and cultural life that must - or at all events can - lead to the degeneration of the individual.

[...]

Since the [...] state had practically no social legislation or jurisprudence, its weakness in combating even malignant tumors was glaring.

So now we have come back from the Sinclairian description of the problem to the Ivins-esque solution. Clearly, the state is the instrument by which social ills should be addressed, and those ills should be attacked at their roots with vigor and sincerity, not "philanthropic flim-flam" or condescension.

But another institution suggests itself, too. The author notes that the working classes struggle for more concrete goals, but are opposed by the middle classes (bourgeoisie) at every step.

Since on innumerable occasions the bourgeoisie has in the clumsiest and most immoral way opposed demands which were justified from the universal human point of view, often without obtaining or even justifiably expecting any profit from such an attitude, even the most self-respecting worker was driven out of the trade-union organization into political activity.

Millions of workers, I am sure, started out as enemies of the Social Democratic Party in their innermost soul, but their resistance was overcome in a way which was sometimes utterly insane; that is, when the bourgeois parties adopted a hostile attitude toward every demand of a social character. Their simple, narrow-minded rejection of all attempts to better working conditions, to introduce safety devices on machines, to prohibit child labor and protect the woman [emphasis added], [...] contributed to drive the masses into the net of Social Democracy which gratefully snatched at every case of such a disgraceful attitude. Never can our political bourgeoisie make good its sins in this direction, for by resisting all attempts to do away with social abuses, they sowed hatred and seemed to justify even the assertions of the mortal enemies of the entire nation, to the effect that only the Social Democratic Party represented the interests of the working people.

[...]

As long as there are employers with little social understanding or a deficient sense of justice and propriety, it is not only the right but the duty of their employees, who certainly constitute a part of our nationality, to protect the interests of the general public against the greed and unreason of the individual [emphasis added]; for the preservation of loyalty and faith in the social group is just as much to the interest of a nation as the preservation of the people's health.

Both of these are seriously menaced by unworthy employers who do not feel themselves to be members of the national community as a whole. From the disastrous effects of their greed or ruthlessness grow profound evils for the future.

To eliminate the causes of such a development is to do a service to the nation and in no sense the opposite.

Let no one say that every individual is free to draw the consequences from an actual or supposed injustice; in other words, to leave his job. No ! This is shadow-boxing and must be regarded as an attempt to divert attention [emphasis added]. Either the elimination of bad, unsocial conditions serves the interest of the nation or it does not. If it does, the struggle against then must be carried on with weapons which offer the hope of success. The individual worker, however, is never in a position to defend himself against the power of the great industrialist, for in such matters it cannot be superior justice that conquers (if that were recognized, the whole struggle would stop from lack of cause)-no, what matters here is superior power. Otherwise the sense of justice alone would bring the struggle to a fair conclusion, or, more accurately speaking, the struggle could never arise.

No, if the unsocial or unworthy treatment of men calls for resistance, this struggle, as long as no legal judicial authorities have been created for the elimination of these evils, can only be decided by superior power. And this makes it obvious that the power of the employer concentrated in a single person can only be countered by the mass of employees banded into a single person, if the possibility of a victory is not to be renounced in advance.

Thus, trade-union organization can lead to a strengthening of the social idea in its practical effects on daily life, and thereby to an elimination of irritants which are constantly giving cause for dissatisfaction and complaints.

This author clearly understands that politics and economics are a struggle between workers and greedy, unreasonable individuals whose attempt to thwart the workers is an effort against society and the nation. The answer to bad working conditions is not the freedom to quit and look for employment elsewhere: the struggle must in fairness be won by the workers, and their only hope is to join together in order to face down the employer. The trade union is therefore among the best institutions for preserving a cohesive society in opposition to what he calls "Manchesterism", a pejorative coined by German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle in reference to the free trade policies promoted in England in the wake of Smith, Ricardo, and the struggle against the Corn Laws.

However, from this point forward, the author begins to differentiate between the Social Democratic Party as a purely political organ and the social ends to which its adherents aim.

[T]he trade-union movement had ceased to serve its former function. From year to year it had entered more and more into the sphere of Social Democratic politics and finally had no use except as a battering-ram in the class struggle. Its purpose was to cause the collapse of the whole arduously constructed economic edifice by persistent blows, thus, the more easily, after removing its economic foundations, to prepare the same lot for the edifice of state. Less and less attention was paid to defending the real needs of the working class, and finally political expediency made it seem undesirable to relieve the social or cultural miseries of the broad masses at all, for otherwise there was a risk that these masses, satisfied in their desires could no longer be used forever as docile shock troops.

The leaders of the class struggle looked on this development with such dark foreboding and dread that in the end they rejected any really beneficial social betterment out of hand, and actually attacked it with the greatest determination.

The author thus grapples with the same problem that had led to a split in the socialist movement in the period between the 19th and 20th centuries. As Kautsky and the supporters of Marx pushed for greater class cohesion and struggle, Eduard Bernstein noted the success of the Fabians and proposed to change the Marxist program from one of overthrow to one of perpetual reform. The response came from a group of radical Marxists who rejected such unscientific socialism, proposing that if the workers could be bought off with incremental and meaningless reforms that an elite vanguard should initiate and maintain a perpetual revolution for them. This of course was Lenin's response in What is to be Done?

We see the author above being largely in the camp of Bernstein, the Fabians, and the less radical reformers. He sees the trade unions and political reform as legitimate means for improving the lives of workers, and opposes the use of the workers as a "battering-ram" to be used to bring down the economic and state edifices. He perceives that the Social Democrats are using the workers as means rather than as end, and this puts him in opposition to them. It's a difficult position to be in because, in the normal understanding of politics as left vs. right, it puts him in opposition to the left, and therefore at danger of being labeled right.

In the next article in this series, I intend to discuss some of the author's socialist political programs.