(b) The Economic Capacities of Co-operative Associations

The question of the capabilities of associations has hitherto been treated very curiously in the Marxist literature. If one leaves out of the question the literature of the ’sixties, one will find in it, with the exception of very general, mostly negative, observations, very little about the co-operative movement. The reasons for this negligence are not far to seek.

First, the Marxist practice is predominantly political, and is directed towards the conquest of political power and attributes, and gives importance almost solely to the trade union movement, as a direct form of the class struggle of the workers. But with respect to the co-operative societies, the conviction was forced on Marx that on a small scale it was fruitless, and would, moreover, have at the most only a very limited experimental value. Only through the community could something be begun. Marx expresses himself in this sense on the associations of workmen in the 18 Brumaire.

Later he somewhat modifies his judgment of co-operative societies to which the resolutions on the system of co-operation moved by the General Council of the International at the Congress at Geneva and Lausanne bear witness, as well as the passage apparently originating from Marx, at all events approved by him in G. Eccarius’ A Workman’s Refutation of John Stuart Mill, where the same significance is applied to the associations as forerunners of the future, as the guilds had held in Rome and the early middle ages, and, further, the passage already alluded to in the third volume of Capital, which, written at the same time as those resolutions and Eccarius’ work, brings into prominence the importance of industrial associations of the workers as a transition form to socialist production. But the letter on the draft scheme of the Gotha Programme (1875) again sounds much more sceptical as regards these associations, and this scepticism reigns from the middle of the ’seventies over the whole Marxist literature.

This may partly be the result of the reaction which set in after the Paris Commune, and which gave the whole working-class movement another character almost exclusively directed towards politics. But it is also the result of the sad experiences which had been undergone everywhere with co-operative societies. The high-flown expectations to which the advance of the English co-operative movement had given occasion were not fulfilled. For all socialists of the ’sixties, societies for production had been the chief consideration, the co-operative stores were minor. The opinion prevailed ’ to which even Engels in his essays on the housing question gave expression ’ that as soon as co-operative stores everywhere included the mass of the workers they would certainly have as a consequence a reduction of wages. The resolution drawn up by Marx for the Geneva Congress runs:

“We recommend workmen to embark on co-operative production rather than on cooperative stores. The latter touch only the surface of the economic system of to-day, the first strikes at its foundations ... To stop the co-operative societies from degenerating into ordinary bourgeois companies all workers employed by them, whether shareholders or not, should receive the same share. As a merely temporary expedient it may be agreed that the shareholders should besides receive a moderate interest.”

But it was just the productive societies formed in the ‘sixties which failed nearly everywhere. They had either been obliged to dissolve altogether or had dwindled into small company businesses, which, if they did not employ men for wages quite in the same way as other businesses, were weakly dying away. On the other side the societies of consumers were, or appeared to be, really turned into mere “philistine” retail shops. No wonder that people in socialist circles turned their backs more and more on the whole co-operative movement.

Two circumstances are answerable for the fact that a comprehensive criticism on cooperation is wanting in Marx. First, at the time he wrote sufficient experience of the different forms of co-operation was wanting to formulate a judgment on that basis. The exchange bazaars which belonged to an earlier period had proved absolute failures. But, secondly, Marx did not meet the co-operative societies with that freedom from preconception which would have allowed his faculty for keen observation to penetrate further than the average socialist’s. Here the already formed doctrine – or, if I may be allowed the expression, the formula – of expropriation stood in the way of his great power of analysis. The co-operative society was acceptable to him in that form in which it represented the most direct contrast to the capitalist undertaking. Hence the recommendation to workmen to take up cooperative societies for production because these attacked the existing economic system “at its foundation.” That is quite in the spirit of dialectics and corresponds formally throughout with the theory of society which starts from production as, in the last instance, the decisive factor of the form of society. It corresponds also, apparently, with the conception which perceives in the antagonism between already socialised labour and private appropriation the fundamental contradiction in the modern mode of production which is pressing for a solution. Productive co-operation appears as the practical solution of this antagonism. In this sense Marx thinks of it – that is, that kind of society where the “workers as an association are their own capitalist” , so that, if it necessarily reproduced all the faults of the present system, yet it did away in fact with the antagonism between capital and labour and thus proved the superfluousness of the capitalist employer. Yet experience has since taught that industrial co-operation constituted in just that kind of way was not, and is not, in a position to produce this proof; that it is the most unfortunate form of associated labour; and that Proudhon was actually in the right when, in regard to it, he maintained against Louis Blanc that the associations were “no economic force.”

The social democratic critic has sought hitherto the causes of the economic failure of the purely productive co-operative societies simply in their want of capital, credit, and sale, and has explained the decay of the associations that have not failed economically by the corrupting influence of the capitalistic or individualistic world surrounding them. All that is to the point as far as it goes. But it does not exhaust the question. Of quite a series of productive associations that have failed financially, it is quite certain that they had sufficient capital for their work and no greater difficulties in selling than the average manufacturer. If the productive association of the kind depicted had been a force superior to the capitalistic undertaking or even of the same economic power, then it should at least have continued and risen in the same ratio as the many private enterprises begun with most modest means, and it would not have succumbed so pitiably to the “moral” influence of the capitalist world surrounding it, as it has done continually again and again. The history of the productive co-operative societies that have not failed financially speaks almost more loudly still against this form of “republican factory” than that of the bankrupt ones. For it says that, regarding the first, the further development means exclusiveness and privilege. Far from attacking the foundation of the present economic system they have much more given a proof of its relative strength.

On the other hand, the co-operative stores on which the socialists of the ’sixties looked so disparagingly, in the course of time have really proved to be an economic power-i.e., as an organism fit to perform its work and capable of a high degree of development. Against the pitiable figures which the statistics of the purely productive co-operative societies offer, the figures of workmen’s co-operative stores show up like the budget of a world-embracing empire to that of a little country town. And the workshops erected and conducted on account of such co-operative stores have already produced many times the amount of goods which have been made by purely, or nearly purely, productive co-operative societies.

The deeper reasons for the economic as well as the moral failures of purely productive associations have been excellently presented by Mrs. Beatrice Webb in her work on the British Co-operative Movement, even if here and there, perhaps, a few exaggerations are found. For Mrs. Webb, as for the great majority of English co-operators, the society belonging to the workmen engaged in it is not socialistic or democratic but “individualistic”. One can take offence at the selection of this word, but the line of thought is quite correct. This association is not socialistic, as Robertus [sic], indeed, has already shown. When the workmen employed are the exclusive proprietors, its constitution is a living contradiction in itself. It supposes equality in the workshop, a complete democracy, a republic. But as soon as it has attained a certain size – which may be relatively very modest – equality breaks down because differentiation of functions is necessary, and with it subordination. If equality is given up, the corner-stone of the building is removed, and the other stones follow in the course of time, and decay and conversion into ordinary business concerns step in. But if equality is maintained, then the possibility of extension is cut off and it remains of the small kind. That is the alternative for all purely productive associations. In this conflict they have all broken down or languished. Far from being a suitable form for removing the capitalist from the field of modern large industries they are much more a return to pre-capitalist production. That is so very much the case that the few instances where they have had relative success occurred in artisan trades, the majority of them not in England, where the spirit of large industries dominates the workers, but in strongly “small bourgeois” France. Psychologists of nations like to set England up as the land where the people seek equality in freedom, France as the land where they seek freedom in equality. The history of the French productive associations includes, indeed, many pages where the greatest sacrifices were undergone with touching devotion for the maintenance of formal equality. But it shows not one purely productive association of the modern large industry type, although the latter is nevertheless fairly widely spread in France.

Dr. Franz Oppenheimer, in his book, Die Siedlungsgenossenschaft , has earned the merit of materially extending and making more thorough the investigation of Mrs. Webb. He offers in the first chapters, in a very clearly arranged classification, an analysis of the different forms of association which in certain parts can scarcely be exceeded in critical clearness. Oppenheimer brings into the classification of associations the separation in principle between associations for purchase and sale, the importance of which, in our opinion, he somewhat over-estimates on single points, but which, on the whole, must be noted as very useful and on the basis of which a truly scientific explanation is possible of the financial and moral failure of the purely productive associations – an explanation in which personal faults, want of means, etc., for the first time move into the second place, as accidental factors, which explain the exception but not the rule. Only to the extent to which the association is substantially an association of purchasers do its general aims and its peculiar interests make its extension desirable. But the more the association is one for sellers, and the more it is one for the sale of products manufactured by itself (the matter is somewhat modified in the case of peasant associations), the greater is the internal opposition. Its difficulties grow with its growth. The risk becomes greater, the struggle for sales more difficult; the same is true regarding the procuring of credit, and the fight for the profit rate or the dividends of the individual members in the general mass of profit, becomes more severe. It is therefore forced again into exclusiveness. Its interest in profit is opposed not only to that of the buyers, but also to that of all the other sellers. The association of purchasers, on the other hand, gains with growth; its interest as regards profit, if opposed to that of the sellers, is in agreement with that of all the other buyers; it strives after the keeping down of the profit rate, after cheapening of products-a pursuit of all purchasers as such, as well as of the community as a whole.

Out of this difference in the economic nature of the two kinds arises the difference in their management so clearly laid down by Mrs. Webb: the essentially democratic character of all genuine associations of purchasers, and the tendency towards an oligarchy in the character of all associations purely for sale.

The differentiation of the associations into those of purchasers and those of sellers is of value to the theory of the nature of associations because it is, in turn, connected with socialistic theory. He who objects to the terms “purchase” and “sale” as formed too specially for capitalistic production of commodities and substitutes for them the conceptions “provision” and “exchange,” will then recognise all the more clearly what a much greater importance the former has for the community than has the latter. The provision of goods is the fundamental general interest. With respect to it all the members are associates in principle. All consume but all do not produce. Even the best productive association, as long as it is only an association for sale and exchange, will always stand in latent opposition to the community, will have separate interests as opposed to it. With a productive association which carries on any branch of production or public service on its own account, the community would have the same points of difference as with a capitalist undertaking, and it depends altogether on circumstances whether the arrangement with it is an easier one.

But to return to the starting-point which has led us to this discussion in the domain of the theory of associations, sufficient has been shown to prove that it is quite a mistake to believe that the modern factory produces in itself a considerable disposition for associated work. And likewise the republic in the workshop becomes a more difficult problem as the undertaking becomes greater and more complicated. For exceptional objects it may answer for men themselves to name their immediate leaders and to have the right to remove them. But for the tasks which the management of a great factory brings with it, where day by day and hour by hour prosaic decisions are to be taken which always give an opportunity for friction, it is simply impossible that the manager should be the employee of those he manages, that he should be dependent for his position on their favour and their bad temper. It has always proved impossible to continue this, and in all cases it has led to a change in the forms of the associated factory. The desire of the workers to take in hand new undertakings where they are employed as an associated manufactory and are bearing corresponding responsibilities and risks, stands in an inverse ratio to the size of their undertaking. But the difficulties grow at an increasing rate.

Let any one only for once look at the thing in the concrete and examine any large industrial undertaking, a great establishment for building machines, large electricity works, a great chemical factory, or a modern publishing business. All these and similar large industrial undertakings can certainly be quite well carried on by co-operative associations, to which also all the employees may belong, but they are absolutely unfit for the associated management of the employees themselves. It would then be shown, in the clearest way possible, what Cunow contends – viz., that the feeling of solidarity between groups of workers, different as to degree of education, manner of life, etc., is only very moderate in amount. What one usually understands by associated labour is only a mistaken rendering of the very simple forms of co-operative work as they are practised by groups, gangs, etc of undifferentiated workers, and which, at the bottom, is only piece-work by groups.

What the community itself cannot take in hand, whether by the state, the district, or the municipality, it would do very well, especially in stormy times, to leave alone for the time being. The apparently more radical action would very soon prove to be the most inexpedient. Co-operative associations capable of living do not allow themselves to be produced by magic or to be set up by order; they must grow up. But they grow up where the soil is prepared for them.

The British co-operative societies are in possession to-day of the £15,000,000 which Lassalle considered sufficient as state credit for carrying out his association scheme. In proportion to the British national wealth that is only a small fraction; after one subtracts the capital invested abroad and the twice-reckoned capital, it is not the hundredth part of the national capital. But it does not exhaust by a great deal the British workman’s capital power, and it is also steadily growing. It has nearly doubled itself in the ten years from 1887 to 1897, and has grown faster than the number of members. These rose from 851,211 to 1,468,955, the capital from 11.5 million pounds sterling to 20.4. The production of the societies has increased latterly still more quickly. Its value in 1894 ran only into £4,950,000 altogether, and in 1897 it was already almost double the amount, namely, £9,350,000.

These are such astonishing figures that when one reads them one asks oneself involuntarily where are the limits of this growth? Enthusiasts on the system of co-operation have reckoned that if the British societies accumulated their profits instead of distributing them, in the course of about twenty years they would be in a position to buy the whole land of the country with all the houses and factories. That is, of course, a calculation after the manner of the wonderful calculation of compound interest on the celebrated penny invested in the year one. It forgets that there is such a thing as ground rent and assumes an increase of growth which is a physical impossibility. It overlooks the fact that it is almost impossible to win over the poorest classes to a co-operative society or that they can be won over to it only very gradually at best. It overlooks the fact that in the agricultural districts only a very limited sphere is open to a co-operative society and that it can lessen but cannot annihilate the expenses of the retail trade, so that possibilities will always spring up for the private undertakers to fit themselves into the changed conditions, and thus a retardation of its growth from a certain point of time becomes nearly a mathematical necessity. It forgets above all things, or leaves out of consideration, that without a distribution of dividends the co-operative movement would generally be at a standstill, that for large classes of the population it is just the dividend, that cursed apple of sin of the idealists of the co-operative system, which forms the chief attraction of a co-operative society. If what is often maintained to-day is very much exaggerated, namely, that the dividend of a co-operative society is no measure of the greater cheapness of its goods, that the single business sells most goods just as cheaply, on the average, as the co-operative store so that the dividend only represents the sum of small, unnoticed rises in the price of certain articles, still, the exaggeration is not altogether unfounded. The workmen’s co-operative store is just as much a kind of savings bank as a means of fighting the exploitation which the parasitic retail trade means for the working classes.

But as with many persons the impulse to save is by no means very deep seated, they follow the convenience of buying at the nearest shop rather than put themselves to some trouble for the sake of the dividend. Moreover, it would be quite a mistake to say that England was originally a particularly favourable soil for co-operative societies. Quite the contrary. The habits of the working classes, the great extension in area of the towns which the cottage system brings with it, counterbalance in this respect the influence of better wages. What has been attained in England is the fruit of the hard, unflinching work of organisation.

And it is labour which was, and is, worth the trouble. Even if the co-operative store did nothing more than lower the profit rate in the retail trades, it would accomplish a work extremely useful for the national economy. And there can be no doubt that it does work in this direction. Here is a handle by means of which the working class can seize for itself a considerable portion of the social wealth which would otherwise serve to increase the income of the propertied classes and thereby strengthen them, and this, without direct destruction of life, without recourse to force which, as we have seen, is no simple affair.

We can consider it as proved that the co-operative society has shown itself to be an economic factor of importance, and if other countries are behind England in this, it has taken firm root in Germany, France, Belgium, etc., and gains ground more and more. I forebear quoting numbers because the fact is well known, and continual figures are wearisome. Of course legal trickery can hinder the spread of co-operative societies and the full development of their innate possibilities, and their success is again dependent on a certain degree of economic development; but here, we are above all concerned with showing what co-operation can do. And if it is neither necessary nor possible that the associations as we know them to-day can ever take possession of all production and distribution of commodities, and if the widening domain of public service in the state and the municipal and district councils puts limits on the other side, yet on the whole a very wide field is open to co-operation, so that, without lapsing into the co-operative Utopias I have referred to, we are justified in expecting very much from it. If in a little over fifty years out of the movement which began with the £28 of the weavers of Rochdale an organisation has developed which handles a capital of £20,000,000, it would need great courage to be willing to prophesy how near we are to the point of time when the limit of its growth is reached, and what forms of the movement are still slumbering in the unknown years of the future.

To many socialists the co-operative movement is not quite acceptable because it is too “bourgeois”. There are salaried officials and workmen employed for wages; profits are made, interest is paid, and disputes occur about the amount of the dividends. Certainly if one kept to forms, the public elementary school, for example, is a much more socialistic institution than the co-operative society. But the development of public services has its limits and needs time, and meanwhile the co-operative society is the easiest accessible form of association for the working class, just because it is so “bourgeois”. As it is Utopian to imagine that the community could jump into an organisation and manner of living diametrically opposed to those of the present day, so it would also be Utopian to make a beginning with the most difficult form of associated organisation.

Meanwhile co-operative production also will be realised though probably in other forms than the first theorists of the co-operative system imagined. For the present moment it is the most difficult form of the realisation of the co-operative idea. It has already been mentioned that the English co-operators handle more than the £15,000,000 which Lassalle demanded for his scheme of association. And if the matter were only a financial question other pecuniary resources would be at their disposal. The friendly societies, the trade unions hardly know where to invest their accumulated funds. But it is not exactly, or not only, a question of financial resources. Nor is it a question of erecting new factories for a market already supplied. Opportunity is not lacking for buying existing and well provided factories. It is now to a great extent a question of organisation and management, and therein much is still lacking.

“Is it, in the first place, capital that we need,” we read in an article in the Co-operative News, the central periodical of the British Society; and the writer of the article answers the question with a decided negative. “As it appears, we have at present at our disposal some £10,000,000, which are only waiting to be employed in a co-operative way, and a further £10,000,000 could doubtless be quickly procured if we were fully in a position to apply it usefully in our movement. Do not let us, therefore, conceal the fact – for it is a fact – that even at the present hour in the co-operative world there is a greater need of more intelligence and capacity than of more money. How many among us would buy nothing that was not made and finished under co-operative conditions, if it were possible to live up to this ideal? How many of us have not again and again attempted to use goods made by cooperators without being perfectly satisfied?

In other words, financial means alone will not solve the problem of co-operative work. It needs, leaving other hypotheses out of the question, its own organisation and its own leaders, and neither are improvised. Both must be sought for and tried, and it is, therefore, more than doubtful whether a point of time in which all feelings are heated and all passions excited, as in a revolution, can be in any way conducive to the solution of this problem which has already proved to be so difficult in ordinary times. In human judgment the contrary must be the case.

I have not here to enlarge on other forms of the co-operative system (loan societies, credit societies, raw materials, and warehouse associations, dairy farm associations, etc.), for these are of no importance to the wage-earning class. Nevertheless owing to the importance which the question of small farmers (who also belong to the working classes even if they are not wage earners) has for social democracy, and in view of the fact that handicrafts and small trades play a still noticeable part, at least according to the number of persons employed in them, I must point out the advance which the co-operative system has attained in these directions.

The advantages of the co-operative purchase of seeds, of the co-operative purchase of machines, and the co-operative sale of produce, as well as the possibility of cheap credit, cannot save peasants already ruined, but they are a means of protecting from ruin thousands and tens of thousands of small peasants. There can be no doubt of that. There are unusually abundant opportunities to-day for the acquisition of small holdings. It would be rash to say, as some writers do, that for agriculture, with reference to the advantages of large and small undertakings, exactly the opposite law holds good as for industry. But it is not too much to say that the difference is quite extraordinary, and that the advantages which the large farm, powerful in capital and well equipped, has over the small are not so important that the small holding could not make up for them to a great extent by a fuller use of the system of cooperation. The use of mechanical power, the procuring of credit, the better security of sale co-operation can make all these accessible to the peasant whilst the nature of his farming makes it easier for him to overcome occasional losses than is possible for the larger farmer. For the great masses of peasants are not always simply producers of commodities; they themselves raise a considerable share of their necessary food.

In all countries of advanced civilisation the co-operative system quickly increases in extent and scope. Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland, and lately also Ireland, show herein no different picture from Germany. It is important that social democracy instead of fishing out of statistics proofs for the preconceived theory of the ruin of the class of small farmers should examine searchingly this question of the co-operative movement in the country and its importance. The statistics of forced sales, mortgage incumbrances, etc., are in many respects misleading. Undoubtedly landed property to-day is more mobile than ever; but this mobility does not work only from one side. Until now the openings which the forced sales have made have always been filled again.

As far as the agricultural classes are concerned we are face to face with the fact that however many co-operative arrangements they have made, one thing in co-operation has always hitherto been withheld from them: the cultivation of the land itself, that is the farming of field and meadow and actual cattle rearing. Different kinds of work linked with farming and attached to it are carried on co-operatively, or at least for co-operative societies, but farming itself withdraws here and elsewhere from co-operative work. Is co-operation less advantageous for it than for other industries? Or is it simply the peasant’s landed property that stands in the way?

The fact has already been emphasised often that the division of the land among many owners is a great hindrance to the co-operative cultivation of the soil. But it does not form the only hindrance, or, to express it differently, it increases its real difficulties but is not usually the cause of them. The separation by distance of the workers, as well as the individualist character of a great part of agricultural work, plays likewise a part. It is possible that the peasants’ syndicates which are still so young may get over these hindrances in their further development, or – which seems to me most probable – they will be driven gradually beyond their present limits. Meanwhile they cannot yet be reckoned with.

Even agricultural production for co-operative societies is at the present time an unsolved problem. The English co-operative stores have done no worse business with any undertakings than with their farms. Nowhere do the peasants gain greater profit from the soil than in Scotland. The figures of profit for wheat, oats, etc., per acre are much higher in Scotland than in England. But a farm of Scottish co-operators furnished with good machines representing a capital of £12,500 has proved a great failure. For 1894 it made a profit of six-tenths per cent., for 1895 a loss of 8.1 per cent. But how does it stand with the associations of agricultural labourers? Does the productive co-operation of agricultural labourers offer better prospects than the productive co-operation of industrial workers?

The question is all the more difficult to answer because sufficient practical examples are wanting. The classical example of such a co-operative society, the celebrated association of Ralahine, lasted too short a time (1831-1833), and whilst it lasted was too much under the influence of its founder Vandeleur and his agent Craig for it to be able to serve as a valid proof of the living power of independent associations of workers on the land. It only shows the great advantages of association under certain circumstances and assumptions.

The experiences of the communistic colonies are the same. These latter succeed in actual or practical isolation for a long time under circumstances one would consider most unfavourable. But as soon as they attained a greater degree of prosperity and entered into more intimate intercourse with the outer world they decayed quickly. Only a strong religious or other bond, a sectarian wall raised between them and the surrounding world, apparently, will keep these colonies together when they have attained wealth. But the fact that it is necessary for men to be limited in their development in some way, in order that such colonies should flourish, proves that they can never be the general type of associated labour. They stand for Socialism at a stage of pure industrial productive association. But they have acted as a glowing proof of the advantages of cooperation.

On the basis of all these facts and of the experiments which intelligent landlords have made with co-operative leases, sharing profits with agricultural labourers, etc., Dr. F. Oppenheimer has developed in the already mentioned volume the idea of an agricultural association which he calls “Siedlungsgenossenschaft” (Colonising Co-operative Association). It is to be an association of agricultural labourers, or, is to begin as such, and is to combine individual with co-operative management – that is, small farming with associated work on a large scale, as is the case to-day on large estates where plots on the outskirts are let off in allotments at a more or less high rent, and which are often managed in a more exemplary manner. Oppenheimer conceived of a corresponding division in his Siedlungsgenossenschaft Association, only, that here the intention naturally is not to lower the price of labour for the central farming round which those small holdings are grouped, but really that opportunity shall be given to every single member to enjoy on a sufficiently large piece of land all the material and other charms of a farm of his own and to employ in its culture all the labour power not needed for the central farm of the association, which promises him the best returns or otherwise best suits his individuality. But for the rest the association is to utilise all the advantages of the modern large enterprise and all co-operative and mutual arrangements are to be adopted for the business needs, etc., of the members.

This is not the place to examine more closely the Oppenheimer proposal and the theory on which it is based. But I think I must just observe that they do not seem to me to deserve the contempt which has been their portion in some of the social democratic publications. One can doubt whether the thing can or will be worked out quite exactly in the form developed by Oppenheimer. But the fundamental thoughts which he develops depend greatly on the scientific analysis of the forms of management and agree moreover with all the experiences of co-operative practice, so that one can indeed say that if the co-operative method of farming is ever brought to pass, it can scarcely happen in any form materially different from the one worked out by Oppenheimer.

The expropriation on a larger scale which is mostly thought of in the criticism of such proposals cannot in any case produce organic creations in a night by magic, and therefore the most powerful revolutionary government would be compelled to face the task of looking for a practical theory of co-operative work in agriculture. For such a work Oppenheimer has brought together most abundant materials and has submitted them to a sharp systematic analysis, which by itself made the “Siedlungsgenossenschaft” worth studying.

There is still one more remark to make with regard to agricultural co-operation. As far as the Socialist is a party politician he can only greet with satisfaction the present immigration from the country into the towns. It concentrates the masses of workers, revolutionises their minds, and at any rate furthers emancipation. But as a theorist who thinks beyond the present day the Socialist must also say that this migration in the course of time may become too much of a good thing. It is well known to be infinitely easier to draw country people into the towns than to draw dwellers in towns into the country and accustom them to agricultural work. Thus the stream of immigration into the towns and industrial centres does not only increase the problems of the present rulers. Let us take, for example, the case of a victory of the working class democracy which brings the Socialist Party to the helm. According to all experience hitherto its immediate result would presumably be first of all to increase markedly the stream into the great towns, and it is in some measure doubtful whether the “industrial armies for agriculture” would allow themselves to be sent more willingly into the country than in France in 1848. But apart from that, the creation of co-operative associations capable of life and guidance will be under all circumstances a heavy task the further the depopulation of the country has advanced. The advantage of the existence of models of such associations would not be bought so very dearly at the price of a somewhat slower rising of the monstrous towns.

Chapter 3 (cont’d)