(a) Socialization and Social Reform

SOCIALIZATION will have to proceed gradually, probably too slowly for the patience of the workers. It will not be able to effect a considerable immediate improvement in the wages of even the workers in the socialized undertakings.

The activities of Governments and Parliaments, after the workers have captured political power, will not therefore be confined to socialization. Measures will have to be adopted which will benefit not single groups of workers, but the whole of the poorer population, and visibly change their condition The wealthier the society is the higher the incomes which the capitalist class derives from the productivity of labour, the more drastic these measures will be, and all the heavier will be the burden of taxation which the State and the municipalities will be able to impose upon the possessing classes, in order to extend the scope of the social services.

It will be incumbent on us to create an adequate social health service, both preventive and remedial; to extend the educational system and transfer the cost of feeding and clothing the school children to the community.

The old people as well as the unfit must be properly cared for, and provision must be made for the unemployed which should be productive rather than a drag upon the rest of the community.

Finally, the State must grapple with the housing question, and commence the construction of cheap, healthy, and pleasant dwellings.

Provided they were energetically prosecuted, all these measures would inevitably effect a considerable improvement in the position of the masses, and remove the worst causes of moral degradation and intellectual backwardness. Add to them an ample training of the masses by the Socialist Party, the trade unions, and the works’ councils, and the result will be considerably to elevate the workers, to increase their capabilities for industrial self-government, to heighten their feelings of obligation towards national and municipal institutions, to increase their interest in the socialist regime, and to facilitate socialization. At the same time, these measures would curb the impatience of the masses, and enable socialization to be applied without undue haste.

When we say that socialization will necessarily be a slow process, we do not mean that the socialist regime will be lax, or will only proceed at a snail’s pace

Apart from socialization, it will find to hand an abundance of other important problems – we have here only indicated a few of them – which could be solved on a capitalist basis, without any socialization. Failure to solve such problems is not clue, to the economic conditions, but to the distribution of power in the State, and such problems should prove easy of solution as soon as this distribution of power is fundamentally altered in favour of the workers.

These reforms would have an important social significance. Although they would not abolish the antagonism between Capital and Labour, they would increase the power and intelligence of the workers, who would be more anxious than before to replace capitalist autocracy by industrial democracy.

Not until the socialized type of undertaking has become the dominant type in the process of production will society have found a basis upon which it will be able to develop its life without great class struggles.