(b) The Starting-Point of Socialization

We have seen that socialization will have to begin with definite branches of industry. Each country has a special economic structure, corresponding to the peculiarities of its soil and its history. Thus the starting-point of socialization will not be the same in every country. In Switzerland, for example, one could not commence with the coal-mines, because none exists there.

In all capitalist countries alike there is one great branch of industry, which represents a great social monopoly, is essential to the whole life of the community, and does not offer any special difficulties in its management: the railways.

In many States they are already nationalized. In such cases socialization would not make any change in the ownership, but only in the organization. State railways are everywhere managed by the State bureaucracy. In socializing the railways, the object will be to make their management independent of the State bureaucracy, to invest them with the self-governing attributes of an industrial democracy, which would administer the State property at the behest and according to the ordinances of the State.

In countries where the railways are not yet nationalized, the task of their reorganization will of course be bound up with their transformation from private into State property.

Where coal-mines exist, they will form the second starting-point of socialization. As the number of State mines is small, the socialization of the coal-mines involves in most cases the question of property as well as the question of organization.

Coal and railways will certainly form the starting-point of socialization in the two States where the rule of Labour is nearest at hand – England and Germany. The most stubborn and decisive struggles will be fought out over these questions. A. State power which controls these two strategic positions would possess the key to the domination of the whole process of production.

The State is not the appointed instrument of socialization in all branches of industry, although it has to create, by means of legislation, the foundation and the opportunities for socialization in all its manifestations. The constant aim of socialization is to replace production for profit by production for social requirements. In other words, those for whose needs production is carried on are to become the owners of the means of production. But the latter will not always be co-extensive with the inhabitants of the State. Many branches of production or of communications serve narrow local ends. Their consumers form a much narrower circle than that of the State. In this case it would be quite purposeless to nationalize the means of production or of communication. Municipal ownership and management is the proper solution of the problem.

Generally speaking, much greater progress has been made in the transfer of local monopolies to municipal management than in the nationalization of the great monopolies which dominate the whole country. The supply of water, gas, and electricity, and the roads have mostly been rnunicipalized. In this connection our duty will be to replace bureaucratic autocracy by a type of management which would accord a wide measure of self-government to the workers without losing sight of the consumers’ interest or creating a Labour aristocracy of the municipal workers.

Those municipalities which have Socialist majorities would of course endeavour to extend the range of municipal businesses which operate for urban consumption. In this connection they should not confine their efforts to businesses that are monopolies.

The bakers, for example, enjoy no such position: they maintain a strong competition against each other, and the private initiative of the entrepreneur still plays a great part in their circulation process.

Only, however, on account of this competition, which would cease of itself, if the municipality undertook the baking of bread. In the absence of competition the selling of bread would not require any special initiative. Bread is not subject to changing fashions, or individual selection and adaptation, and its market is steadier than that for other commodities. Considerable cost is involved by sending the bread from each bakery throughout a large town which contains a number of bakeries. If all the bakeries were under one control, each one would have allotted to it a special district, that which lay nearest it. This would considerably reduce the expenses of distribution, and enable the price of the loaf to be reduced and the wages of the bakers and their working conditions to be improved.

After the bread question, the question of housing would occupy a large share of the attention of socialist municipalities, which would have to take in hand immediately the improvement of the housing conditions of the whole of the poorer population. This would necessitate drastic alterations in legislation, but the chief part of the work would devolve upon municipalities, which would construct dwellings either by direct labour or through building co-operative societies. This would involve the nationalization or municipalization of building materials.

Yet a third type of production for needs is possible. The consumers of one or several articles could co-operate in order to acquire their own workshops, where production would be carried on for the needs of the association. Such establishments as these would only bear a socialist character if they were founded by wage-earners.

This brings us to the question of the workers’ co-operative societies. At the outset, their sole object is to remove the disadvantages of the parasitic middle-man so far as the working-class consumer is concerned, by purchasing direct from the producers and selling at net costs, adding something, of course, for administration and risks. But when the association becomes large enough, and especially when the local societies of a country are combined in a wholesale co-operative society, the latter may itself proceed to manufacture some of the commodities it handles.

It may be said that the co-operative society represents a Socialistic system of production, inasmuch as it does not produce for the market, but for the needs of its members, while, instead of aiming at profit, it offers its workers the best conditions that are compatible with the vitality of the undertaking under existing conditions.

The production earned on by the Co-operative Movement may become very extensive even before the workers have captured political power, as the case of England shows.

It will, however, be confined to a few branches of industry which directly produce for the personal consumption of the masses. Only a very few commodities which are destined for the personal consumption of the masses, and of these commodities mostly their finishing stages, fall within the scope of co-operative production. The production of the means of production remains practically impossible for it to attempt, and yet this type of production, with the progressive division of labour, tends to comprise the greatest part of social production and forms the proper province of large-scale industry, and thus the principal driving force of Socialism. The production of the Cooperative Movement will always appear very modest in comparison with the socialization to be enforced by the State and municipality.

Nevertheless, the productive activities of the co-operative societies may become very important, not merely as a pattern, but also through their economic and social effects upon many sections of workers. They will perhaps become even more important in primitive, agrarian districts than in the great industrial States. In the latter, the peasants and wage-earners are usually divided by powerful antagonisms. There the agricultural co-operative. societies are of quite a different character from the proletarian societies. We find a different state of affairs in Russia, in the Balkan States, and in Caucasia; and China and India may develop on the same lines. In these countries. industrial workers and peasants are still close together, and have recently waged great revolutionary struggles in the closest comradeship. It is true that the foolish coercion of Bolshevism has done everything possible to alienate the Russian peasants from the Labour Revolution, but even now the cleavage between the workers and peasants is not unbridgeable.

It is possible that the co-operative societies of the urban workers will secure a footing in the villages, and thus the enormous purchasing power of the whole agricultural population will to a large extent be put at the disposal of these societies. This will afford a much wider and stronger basis for the productive activities of the cooperative societies in these lands than is the case in the old industrial States.

The cooperative societies will become the most important, although not the only consumers’ organizations, which aim at producing for their own consumption. But man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God, in the words of the Bible. He does not merely need bread, fish, soap, boots, and the other commodities supplied by the co-operative societies; he also requires intellectual nourishment, and he will refuse to allow this to be prescribed and prepared by the authorities. Nothing more plainly reveals the cultural sterility of Bolshevism than the fact that it has rendered impossible in the Russian Empire any publishing agencies other than the State Publishing Department. In spite of all its coquetting with modern art and literature, Bolshevism has thereby proved to be the most formidable means for the stupefaction of the masses since the days of the worst fanaticism of the Christian and Mohammedan faith, in which the vestiges of the old Hellenic culture were extinguished.

Under a civilized Labour regime the reading public would resent the idea of any police supervision of its literature.

Any attempt to oust the capitalist publisher in literature could only be successful if he were replaced by the free organization of consumers. There are already organizations which publish periodicals, newspapers, and books, not in order to realize a profit, but in order to satisfy the 1ieeds of their members. The trade unions have their technical journals, as also the associations of doctors, engineers, etc. Nor are the newspapers of the Social Democratic Parties business institutions. Every other organization will have the option of publishing for the needs of its members and friends.

State and municipal publishing departments would be able to publish works which serve State or municipal purposes, national or municipal statistics, legal codes, school-books, or works whose value has been recognized by everybody – the so-called classics.

It is plain that socialization may start from the most various points, and for this reason assume the most various forms. Nothing could be more fallacious than the belief in a process of socialization which can be set in motion from above at one stroke, and would transform the whole of society into a single large barracks, or, as Lenin said, a single great factory. The starting-points and forms of socialization will be as infinitely varied as modern social life, and they will succeed and thrive all the better, the less occasion there is for bureaucratic intervention.

The periods at which socialization will be applied will differ as much as its starting-points and its forms. It is true that its enforcement by consumers’ organizations and municipalities depends upon legislation. But where the State contains a number of democratic institutions, cooperative societies and municipalities have sufficient scope, given the existence of a developed Labour movement, to enforce socialization at least in some provinces before the capture of the State power by the workers.

It is noteworthy that in this respect the capital does not set an example to the other towns. In this we may perceive a further distinction between the Middle Class and the Labour Revolution. In the Middle Class Revolution, the capital seized the initiative and gave the movement its tone. The English Revolution against Charles I would not have triumphed without London. What Paris signified for the Revolution from 1789 onwards is well known. In the year 1848 it was Paris, Vienna, and Berlin which determined the fate of the Revolution. In addition, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, to a large extent middle class in their character, were carried out by St. Petersburg and Moscow.

The case is otherwise with the Labour Revolution, for which the purely industrial districts are far more important than the great capitals, whose industries are to a great extent luxury trades, and in which are concentrated the bureaucracy of the nation. Thus, even in Chartist times, London remained far behind the industrial North of England in respect of Labour unity and resolution. Since 1871 Paris has ceased more and more to be a Socialist citadel. The present weakness of Socialism in France is to some extent due to the fact that the industrial north was destroyed in the war. And Berlin to-day is so far behind the industrial districts of Germany in socialist energy that its Socialist majority cannot make itself felt. Only Vienna constitutes an exception among the capitals in this respect.

In the industrial districts proper we obtain Socialist majorities the soonest, but here their effects are not a little hindered by the majority of their population being very poor. The masses of surplus value which they produce are mostly either accumulated or squandered in the capital.

We must not therefore expect great things from the activity of the co-operative societies and municipalities so long as a decisive Socialist majority does not exist in the State itself. But, however difficult this activity has hitherto been, and however slender its success, its importance lies in its resembling those first steps which are notoriously the most difficult. They achieve significance of the pioneer order by virtue of the experiences they gather, which will have a beneficial influence upon subsequent experiments on a larger scale. Moreover, they exercise an encouraging and propagandist effect by providing an object lesson in the superiority of socialistic management. In this respect, the attitude of the workers in such an undertaking is decisive. The best organization and management are useless unless the workers are capable of self-government.

If the workers engaged in municipal services exhibit such capabilities, these undertakings will give an irresistible impetus to the extension of socialization to other provinces.