LIBRARY UNIVERSITY Of CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS A STUDY IN EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOANALYSIS The Intellectuals and the Wage Workers A Study in Educational Psychoanalysis By HERBERT ELLSWORTH CORY New York The Sunwise Turn MDCCCCXIX COPYRIGHT. 1919 THB SUNWISE TURN, INC. PUBLISHED DECEMBER. 1919 To CARLETON H. PARKER CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Equality ...... 1 II. Proletarianism . . . . - . 18 III. Religion . . . . . .29 IV. Criticism 45 V. History and Freedom .... 62 VI. Liberty ...... 97 VII. The Class Struggle and Fraternity . 122 VIII. Education, A Program for the American University ...... 240 I. EQUALITY With the development of the Industrial Revolution, the growth of modern middle-class democracy, the con- summation of the laissez-faire competitive states, the relations between artists, scientists, patron and public have become more and more equivocal. In England Doctor Samuel Johnson's famous letter to the Earl of Chesterfield sounded, over a hundred and fifty years ago, a kind of emancipation proclamation of the artist against the gentile servitude of patronage. Neverthe- less patronage has continued. Artists, educators, and scientists are still too often mere flunkies. But whereas patronage under Renaissance aristocracy was some- times rationally planned, patronage under middle class democracy is almost invariably capricious, utterly di- vorced from a healthy institutionalism. Very rarely does the captain of industry, with a modicum of dis- crimination, assume the artistic noblesse oblige of the lord of earlier days. For him at best esthetic values are the dessert of life or those afterthoughts some little at- tention to which will prove that he is thoroughly re- THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS spectable. The discoveries of science he values only as they lead obviously and instantaneously to further in- dustrial exploitation. So today artist, educator, and scientist stand half-parasite, half-pariah, and their voices are heard scarcely at all in the great tumult of class war and the growing murmurs of social recon- struction. Let us not pity them, however, for until they dare to realize that the dignity of research is intimately bound up with the joy in life, the workmanly pride, the moral autonomy for which society should allow release in the most oppressed "unskilled" laborer today, our artists, educators, and scientists have no insight what- ever, no courage, no integrity. The competitive laissez-faire state is obviously doomed. Everywhere collectivism, some of it sinister, some of it benignant, gains ground. Every day the plutocrat, like the aristocrat before him, loses more and more of his directly operating power. As we look about we cannot but see that geographical boundaries are becoming more and more blurred, that. the peoples of enlightened countries are moving in battle array against the autocratic countries in favor of universal democracy that is to say the privilege of democracy for those who want it and in favor of self-conscious internationalism. But as the geographical sub-divi- sions become more and more confused the economic sub-divisions become more and more clear. For at [2] EQUALITY the base of all lie the biological and economic needs. A materialistic life is not a life but a living death. Yet without bread we cannot contemplate spiritual things. Those economic units, in consequence employers' as- sociations, co-operative consumer's societies, farmers' leagues, industrial, occupational, and craft unions grow ever more and more liberally and firmly defined, autonomous, eager, with a sense of a part to play. Will they accentuate the crudities of contemporary class- wars? Or will they come more and more to act in uni- son, in a spiritual efficiency, to make this the happiest world upon which mankind has yet gazed? One after another artists, educators, and scientists are springing up who are brave enough to assert that they have suggestions to make both to these economic subdivisions and to the great states which enclose them and seek to arbitrate their differences. Therefore it is fitting that such artists, lovers of art, scientists, and teachers, those who aspire to bring the various crafts and professions closer to science and the fine arts for the sake of art and science quite as much as for the sake of the crafts and professions should unite even as these industrial groups have united, or, better yet, should fuse themselves in union with the various ap- propriate industrial groups to form associations not for personal aggrandizement but for a richer and more spontaneous and more rational personal expression. [3] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS By far more critical and energetic, as a whole, than the artists and scientists are the wage-workers, whose only rivals in reconstruction are those who are elaborat- ing and integrating the younger sciences which deal with man and his relations to his fellows, those who de- velop certain biological fields, and the psychologists and ethnologists. British labor has called to the forward- looking intellectuals to unite themselves with the wage- workers in a community of producers, and it is the task of these essays to elaborate their program. But first the intellectual must humble himself and recognize that hitherto progress, when it happens to be made, is as a fact made largely at present by less rational means, by the trial and error of cultivated and uncultivated mobs and by the lucky stroke of some individual much mis- understood. The truly rational man, naturally, will co-operate with the most legitimately vital of these forces as he studies them and will not be amazed to discover how rapidly they have been growing towards rationality even before he contributed his little intelli- gence to their refashioning. By far the most legiti- mately and sustainedly vital of these forces, he will find, is the labor movement. The rational man needs, then, to become bilingual, to know the language of the acad- emic sciences and the language of the socialisms "revo- lutionary" and "revisionist." Soon even the backward American proletariat will emulate its comrades in Eng- [4] EQUALITY land and invite the American "intellectuals" to join it in magnificent reconstructive achievements. Let the American "intellectuals" be prepared. A truly critical "intellectual" will begin immediately a sweeping re-examination of the concept of "equality." And if he is sufficiently rigorous and comprehensive he will be filled with high hopes. For a moment he will be depressed by the mob-sentiment which cries most loudly that "all men are created free and equal." Be- cause he knows this to be at present not a fact he may too readily, like the unscrupulous politician, pretend to regard it as existential in order to control and exploit the gregarious instinct and discourage reasoning which is so likely to be dangerous to the status quo. Quack- remedy for social diseases! And as the patient often hates his surgeon so the mob is often moved to stone the critic who questions the rapturous faith in the ex- istence of "liberty, equality, fraternity." Moreover let us never forget that the word "mob" refers to a state of mind, not a social stratum; there are mobs of "cul- tured" men as well as mobs of the "uncultivated." But the critic may, without growing too sentimental, cure himself of his irascibility by murmuring to himself a sentence from Charles Lamb: "A mob of men is better than a flock of sheep, and a crowd of happy faces jost- ling into the playhouse at the hour of six is a more beautiful spectacle to man than the shepherd driving [5] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS his silly sheep to fold." And the true critic is bound to discover ultimately that the sincere aspiration towards some intelligible equality is the only dependable pro- moter of human solidarity that endures and widens. This he discovers as he searches history that he may sublimate these equalitarian phrases of the strtet and multiply their vital and logical relations. He sees how, for instance, the dreams of equalitarianism began to assume the proportions of plausibility in the English- speaking world about the time that Doctor Price de- livered the famous democratic sermon which aroused the leonine wrath of Burke; how the vision fired the London Correspondence Society and stirred up the reaction and oppression of the scared conservatives who followed Pitt, how the dream glowed on none the less in the half-disillusioned pages of Godwin, and flamed almost out of sight in the benevolent anarchism of Shelley. Ah, but then came the biological realists prov- ing that all men are not created equal. Well then, ac- cepting the biological fact, let us retrace our steps and scrutinize more carefully these old aspirations. Though Huxley was superbly hard-headed are we sure that his inferences were quite sound? As the critic retraces the more recondite origins of "sentimental equalitarianism" (as Mr. Paul Elmer More, would dub it) the critic sees how subtly established were the eighteenth century faith in equality and the eighteenth century faith in [6] EQUALITY human perfectibility through the life of unfettered rea- son. He sees there implications already buoyant in the epistemology of John Locke with its rejection of the doctrine of innate ideas and its shift of emphasis from a binding prenatal past to a future in which all things are possible except the word "impossible." Let us re- member this shift of emphasis from an overshadowing past to an unknown but alluring future even while we echo the amusement of all the good text-books over Locke's notion of a mind blank at birth, a mind wholly open to receive impressions from the world. The critic will admire Locke even while he watches his empirical theory of knowledge go bankrupt under the dissolving analysis of Berkeley and Hume. With certain Rous- seauists the blank and open mind became plausibly endowed with natural goodness and this turn makes the Lockian epistemology seem today more nai've than it really was. But the critic of today, while deploring all this loose thinking, comforts himself with a recollection of its passing value as a revolt against the Puritan doc- trine of the innate depravity of man, and as a corrective of Hobbes' more realistic but also nai've conception of the individual as moved by a "lust of power after power that ceaseth only with death." And today the critic can reconcile these simpler epistemologies and psychologies in a view which keeps like spring man's hope for equality. We now know that we are all born with [7] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS certain neural dispositions or instincts. William James more than anyone else has taught us both in his psy- chology and epistemology that these neural disposi- tions are facts which simply are, that they are neither depraved nor good until they turn to good ways or bad ways, that the pugnacious impulse, for in- stance, may not be suppressed but may some time be redirected towards a "moral equivalent of war." Freud has shown that in all of us there stirs constant struggle between "censor wishes" and rebel wishes which are to be integrated not by suppression but by reconcilia- tion. Mr. Walter Lippmann has made a brilliant ap- plication of Freudian psychology to current political reform. And while modern psychology teaches a pos- sible equality of dispositions within an individual who has mastered the harmony of healthy self-control, mod- ern ethnology resurrects our hopes of an equality of individuals within the world, by engendering a growing distaste for the glib phrase "backward races." Even the psychiatrists with their necessary recognition of the hideous inequalities in morons and imbeciles have come nearer to the equalitarian hope of late. Once, in a panic, they talked of nothing but segregation. Now they have abandoned this purely negative doctrine for plans to give to this human flotsam and jetsam opportunities for the fullest life attainable in safe isolation from healthier human beings. So the critic comes to realize that [8] EQUALITY though the doctrine of equality as a deduction from Locke's empirical theory of knowledge was prema- ture, and though it presupposed conditions within the individual and within primitive societal arrangements that never existed, and though the deduction of "nat- ural rights" has ended in something very close to de- spair, nevertheless the hope springs eternal where we least look for it from the very sciences which threatened it. We can now believe that youths, as passionate as ever but endowed with a wisdom not incompatible with passion, will create children born under increas- ingly better conditions by biological intervention, that men may reconcile their inner conflicts through self- discipline which means the redirection of their in- stincts, that nations are capable of appreciating their mutual worth and of realizing the infinite promise of racial variability for organized progress, whenever they will to approach "aliens" in the spirit of modern ethnology, with minds as ready to learn as to teach. The critical intellectual does not blink the fact that the Industrial Revolution in England, with its concom- itant laissez-faire, still dominates today, or that the mad prodigality of Jacksonian and later American periods has made equalitarian hopes in the United States seem almost as primitively remote as the days of the sabre- toothed tiger. He diagnoses the contemporary situa- tion and he sees few sincere attempts towards equality. [9] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS He sees dangerous tendencies towards imperialism in the utterances of some senators, in the chaos of petty loyalties, of what Hegel calls "the self-estranged social mind," a state of mind in which (as Hegel warns us) communities invite convulsion and ruin. And the critic sees some of those who have the floor (reactionary esthetes, business-men, moralists, and politicians) cry out that the remedy is more imperialism, nee-aristoc- racy, bureaucracy, or "state-socialism." The critic sees this element of truth in the reactionary point of view: that the stability of aristocracy gave the leisure neces- sary for development of that kind which makes at least a few of the economic necessities beauti- ful. He sees that if the middle-class regime were not unstable it would have great art, science, and religion. Our factories would rise like temples of a miraculously new style in architecture. Our laborers would not be the slaves of machines and we should need no H. G. Wells to dream of an evolutionary conquest of men by machines endowed by man's own blind cunning with some hideous, impassive intelligence. Machines would be our slaves the only slaves in human society. The critic finds that Ruskin and Morris were partly right and partly wrong in their diagnosis of the Industrial Revolution and Victorian laissez-faire. They did see that short-sighted buccaneers of the market-place were wantonly befouling our lives. They did see, what was [10] EQUALITY far more important, that we must organize in guilds and educate ourselves to share more rationally our so- cial duties with the State, and they thus played their part in the inspiration of the most coherent economic and political program in the world today, that of the British guild socialists. Ruskin and Morris were wrong, however, in thinking that it was because ma- chinery was invented and factories planted beside the sweetly garrulous and hitherto unsullied streams, be- cause the air was made grim with canopies of smoke, and because the new powers of steam dragged men and children from their homes that art and morality and religion fell. Today the critical intellectual as- serts that these things, though evil, will, if treated with defiance and mastery, prove convertible into incalcula- ble good. To destroy machinery and factories would be to destroy a valuable current that might be turned towards progress. Morris's News from Nowhere is thus in many respects on the same intellectual plane with the earlier outbursts of the Luddite rioters of Eng- land and the weavers of Germany. We needed the subtle experimentation of the labor movement of post- Chartist days that hard-headed period of the labor movement which Sidney and Beatrice Webb love to praise to purge and to elaborate the vision of Ruskin and Morris. Just here, too, the critic will try to in- crease vital and logical relations by winnowing and THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS fusing the best in the irregular prophecies of men like Ruskin and Morris with the larger and more logical, if somewhat too fatalistic analysis and forecast of Karl Marx. The democratic bourgeoisie has so ordered' things, say Marx and his continuator Engels, that life is full of capricious vicissitudes. Petty capitalists are crowded into the proletariat. Bankruptcies abound even among the larger capitalists. Panics and that con- dition absurdly and deceitfully called "prosperity" al- ternate with implacable certainty yet caprice. Inter- national wars follow as larger expressions of the grow- ing socialization of the means of production in trusts, coupled with irreconcilable anarchy of control by a fortuitously elevated minority of uncritical minds, who plunge into foreign investments as soon as domestic in- vestments cease to stir their feverish imaginations. Al- ways the world is full of paupers, tragic failures, and a minority of nouveau riche. Now the latter, as Ruskin and Morris knew, are always vulgar and often cruel. And before they can develop esthetically and ethically, their money evaporates and we have to devise a new tra- vesty of art and science for a new crop of nouveau riche. The critic sees, now, that all men are not created free and equal. Unlike the San Francisco business-men who opposed the investigation of earthquakes by certain scientists, with a cry of "hush," lest business-optimism be injured, the critic insists upon the existence of the [12] EQUALITY facts of evil and is entirely uninterested in trying to transcendentalize them away with mystical raptures, metaphysical dialectic, or the "boosting" of myopic business promoters. He sees clearly that all men are not created free and equal, but find it quite possible to believe that in a world of rising socialists and syndicalists, of eugenists, psychoanalysts and ethnolo- gists, all men can in the future be created more nearly free and be given equal opportunity by the ra- tional scientific control of larger and larger areas of change, and by the autonomy and self-discipline of the advancing proletariat. To many uncritical minds such a scheme will seem Utopian. Self-styled artists often whine for a perpetuation of their parasitism in status quo at the very moment that they are whining at the horrid commercialism of this age. Specialists in he- redity just now incline to be a little fatalistic and neo- aristocratic. "Practical" financial capitalists are still too busy making a reductio ad absurdum of unregu- lated and merely quantitative production. But the art of these "artists" is trivial and abstract. The metho- dology of these hereditarians is as yet avowedly naive, their data meager, and they still ignore the findings of closely allied sciences which have intimate and revolu- tionary messages for them. The critic with a really contemporaneous scientific methodology sees that Marx was saved from his own quasi-Hegelian fa- [13] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS talism by the fact that he was at once economic "theo- rist" and labor agitator, for the pragmatists have re- minded us that "science is the formulation of control" and that by definition "every science longs to be an art." To those who have really read the history of the labor-movement, especially the history of French and Italian syndicalism, of the Russian ferment, and of the "Triple Alliance" of workers in Great Britain, the prophecy of Karl Marx does not seem altogether fossil- ized: as an hypothesis it seems more plausible than most things in this bewildered day that the advancing, self-disciplined proletariat will control more and more of the caprices of change and, in alliance with the more sincere and sacrificial among the intellectuals, will restore many of the really valuable ideals of aris- tocracy and engender a multitude of new ideals in a more unequivocally democratic society than any which has yet existed. With such assurances the critical intellectual can steer a reasonably safe course between "diplomacy" and pedantry. Honesty, whatever its limitations, is the best policy in the life of reason. The critical technique of a Huxley is, in the long run, victorious over the ped- antries and "diplomacies" of bishops. Noble men, who do not wish to be quixotic martyrs, often seek sadly a moral substitute for "diplomacy" which they know cor- rupts ultimately even the most lofty who stoop to use it EQUALITY as a means to realize even a noble ideal. Enlightened and constructive criticism is safer than mad-cap pro- test and infinitely more valuable. Of course it is not ab- solutely safe because life has never been absolutely safe nor would any critic want it so. But it is more pro- foundly safe than "diplomacy" which can so subtly corrode even a sublime spirit. We are learning, too, from the psychoanalysts that the really constructive critic must allow the person criticized to do practically all the work, to purge him- self with a minimum of help from the critic when- ever he drifts into insincerity and prejudice. Some revolutionary people confuse criticism with pedantry and cowardice. As incorrigible adolescents they insist on working out their own ways violently and thus meet an early disillusionment. When such people are over- come they often imitate the more "diplomatic" or pedantic methods and grow cynical as they watch their souls ebb away. Such mistakes of violence may of course but lead to that disillusion which begets a new and finer faith, which purges away superbia and brings about the wedding of true pride and humility. But too often youth has his pegasus shot from under him. The true critic, on the other hand, can quietly defy the "diplomatic" foe as Descartes defied authority in his unobtrusive but courageous way for a lifetime, not without much suffering but with a fulfillment ever [15] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS richer and richer. Criticism has all the discretion of "diplomacy" without its deceit, all the accuracy of pedantry without its paralysis. By multiplying sharp distinctions without losing artistic joyousness, religious harmony, by multiplying logical relations and keeping them vital, by searching cunningly among our desires and dreams, it can hopefully resist the ignorant or unscrupulous enemy, and if it is slain it is slain to good purpose for its slogans are soon caught up by a hundred new and more resonant voices. And it can base itself firmly on the new hope towards equality that has been purified out of the sentimental but im- mortal eighteenth century faith in equality. Phrased in psychoanalytical terms this aspiration to- wards equality alike with the sentimentalists of the eighteenth century, with the romanticists of the nine- teenth century, and with the realists of the twentieth century is an intimation of what Dr. Trigant Burrow more clearly envisages as "the preconscious or the nest instinct." The critical intellectual, seeking richer harmonies within himself and in society at large, will listen to its murmurings within himself and find it more clearly in the accents of militant proletarians as the symphony writer finds his purest themes among the folks. The aspiration toward equality means our reali- zation that we are all biologically of the same stuff. It means, as the most consistent and dynamic psycho- [id] EQUALITY analysis recognizes, that our primal "\\ish" or "libido," already perfected in our tranquil life in the womb be- fore birth brings the first cry of pain, reality and what we call consciousness (conflicts inner and outer), our primal wish is the wish to love, to share, to identify ourselves with all men and women and children, to rejoice that we are all alike made of the same marvelous germ-plasm upon which "nature" has been patiently at work for millions of years. Let us not yield to our "resistances," those fevers of lust and hate, those chills of ignorance and fear. The self-conscious psycho- analyst and the inspired radical proletarians can teach us how not to be afraid to love our fellow-men and thus to know wisdom and quiet, fullest joy. II PROLETARIANISM .... . Our definition of the proletariat will not be based on a detailed acceptance of Marxian prophecies, though clearly, in spite of attacks on Marx by men like Professor Simkhovitch, for instance, these proph- ecies are still in many essentials more plausible and com- prehensive than any other historical formula yet pre- sented. To put it more accurately, Marx has done more to organize the sciences of man (even after we have noted the recent rapid growth of psychology and ethnology far beyond his ken) and he has done more to make the oceanic labor movement self-conscious, that is to say rationally experimental (for all his own quasi-Hegelian dogmatizing) than any other genius before or since. Neither Marx nor Engels desired the following generations to use their principles in a dogmatically deductive and abstractionistic spirit. It is, of course, a simple fact, made clear by none more than by self-styled "orthodox" Marxists, that "ortho- dox" Marxism is as impossible to define with any hope of general agreement as "orthodox" Christianity. [18] PROLETARIANISM Great men always inspire independent followers and intolerant sectarians. But while recognizing the es- sential plausibility of Marxism we must not gloss over its complications of detail and we must be prepared to restore some of the fine programs of those "Utopians" against whom Marx and Engels girded. Suffice it to note here that in the Marxian description of the pro- letariat the emphasis on the complete lack of property and the emphasis on the lack of skill are not to be con- strued now as essential criteria, though they may be regarded as characteristic of a large and growing sec- tion of any industrial populace. Nor should we con- sider "wages" as opposed to salary or even income to be regarded as a final test of the status proletarian today, though we may, with guild socialists, dis- tinguish between "wages" and "pay" for the purpose of outlining a society of the future. Again it is rather too simple now to speak of a laborer as though he were merely a commodity, though this is ninety-nine one hundredths fact and it is still the naive presup- position on which the older leaders of the American Federation of Labor have built their whole tactic, and we may be sure that laborers will always remain large- ly mere commodities until they declare against the wage-system. But we must never in defining the proletariat forget psychology. Many servant girls, for all their depend- [19] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS ence, their decreasing skill, and their "wages," are, as Kautsky has implied, more bourgeois today in their irritation against radicals than some masters and mis- tresses, some school-teachers, and even some ministers and lawyers. A few days ago a successful business- man came to me deeply shocked by a speech made to him by a hotel watchman. This watchman, who worked twelve hours a day at a pitiful wage, had re- galed my friend with a most naive eulogy of American democracy and with the most malignant chauvinism. My friend was shocked. Who then was the bourgeois bowing before "the sanctity of private property?" Who was the proletarian championing the dignity of a full personal life? Without dwelling further on the innumerable but not fatal or important complications which arise when we consider Marxian formulae and definitions today, we will venture to define the "proletariat" as that class of workers, "manual" or "mental," which has become self-conscious of a purpose implying nothing less than a fundamental and world-wide reconstructive move- ment which will culminate in a society as different from ours as ours differs from the society of the middle ages, a society purged of morbid "possessive impulses" by the release of the "creative impulses." Many mem- bers of the "proletariat," as conceived by Marx, have, of course, as yet almost as little of this consciousness [20] PROLETARIANISM as they had, by his own admission, in his day. They may even fear the ideals which self-consciousness evokes or, as more often happens, they may not care to contemplate them beyond a moment of vague iras- cibility. The psychoanalyst, as we shall see, can ex- plain this for us and do much to remove the evil. But a rapidly growing number of these wage-working men and women and children do already contemplate sound ideals sustainedly, and with their growing number lies "the hope of the great community." In addition, every day brings from other classes, particularly from the "intellectuals," men and wom- en who are willing to surrender all their ambitions and give their lives to the great reconstructive move- ment. The criteria for these intellectuals are: do they expect to learn as much as they teach when they unite with handworkers? are they willing to renounce all crudely individualistic dreams of attaining fame as picturesque martyrs, as Lord Bountifuls, or as leaders of a triumphal procession? Hitherto these intellectuals have been suspected and often spurned by the more militant workers whose suspicions have been often well-grounded. But a mutual understand- ing is growing daily more widespread, more rich- spirited, more loving, more hopeful. Both with brain- workers and hand-workers, therefore, it would be more accurate to speak of proletarianism rather than of a [21] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS proletariat. For though the economic status of an in- dividual is a tremendous influence in fashioning his state of mind, yet men migrate incessantly today not only geographically, but economically. And a very small, but growing, number of economic frontiersmen keep clear of the boundaries and bonds of all present- day classes and classifications. We could say most properly that all these human beings, migratory work- ers, factory workers, stevedores, engineers, soldiers, school teachers, ministers and the rest are, as individu- als, inspired by varying degrees of proletarianism, are more or less intensely proletarian. Let us remember that the young science of social psychology is emerging from its initial "sterility" largely by giving up the loose talk of men like LeBon about the mob-mind or the collective mind, and by analyzing instead the vari- ous degrees of social-mindedness, of class-mindedness in each individual more as Trotter suggests. We may call proletarians "class-conscious" not in the sense that they believe in the permanent opposition to and op- pression of any classes, but in the sense that they have a common social ideal which looks to the breaking down of the more capriciously traditionalistic, stub- born, and unjust class-distinctions that are brute facts today. In their own proper eagerness to insist that the reform movement of revolution is, as it certainly is, a war and not a love-feast, some socialists have put a [22] PROLETARIANISM too inflexible emphasis on classes, and may too easily degenerate into allegorical simplification of life for- getting that the goal is not the hate of persons, though the way involves the hate of the capitalistic system, the hate of hate or the love of love. We must be careful, on the other hand, not to fall into the vague dreams of a monistic society, classless in every sense, not moved by strong brotherly love, but mazed by literary moonshine. This was the myo- pia of socialism when it was too close to left wing Hegelianism. This book will be politically pluralistic. "Classless society" is a vague mawkish phrase. What then is the kind of class the "class-war" should destroy? When we use the word class as a term of reproach, let us denote by it a social unit of fortuitous origin which tries to maintain an anti-social integrity by tyranny and false reasoning, by what psychoanalysts call "repression" and "rationalization." A "class," in the reproachful sense, is exactly what psychoanalysis calls in the individual a "complex." In the individual a "complex" is a constellation of ideas and emotions, which has become more or less out of harmony with the rest of the personality and which, as an unconscious influence, drives the rest of the per- sonality to violent acts. Apply this to society and we may say that an anti-social "class" is a "complex." Now, for the individual, psychoanalysis can reconcile [23] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS a "complex" with the rest of the personality by delving into that "unconscious" part of mind which Dr. G. Stan- ley Hall compares to the enormous area of iceburg under water. Psychoanalysis can bring a maddening complex into the focus of consciousness, and so harmon- ize all. Revolutionary socialism strives to do precisely the same thing with the anti-social "class," to bring it from its isolation, [privilege and possessivism or parasi- tism] into joyous co-operation with all, to bring it out of its compromise relation with the rest, a neurasthe- nic or morbid relation which has been preserved by the erection of repressive and rationalizing (sophistical) barriers. Without, then, limiting ourselves to the most in- tense proletarianism, and without forgetting either the psychological fact of the perpetual waxing and waning of its intensity or the economic fact (however our ideals may rebel) of classes which, no matter how blurred in outline and constantly changing, will persist for some time to come, but trying always to balance ourselves by keeping both the psychological and economico-histori- cal views simultaneously in mind, we will round out our definition to specify as the proletariat that class of workers, "manual" or "mental," which has become earnestly self-conscious and sustainedly active in the fulfillment of a purpose which is nothing less than a fundamental and world-wide reconstructive movement. [24] PROLETARIANISM This proletariat will create a society 'without fortuitous classes and, therefore, more rationally sensitive than any preceding society to relative merits, their variations in degree and kind, and society's vital need of their full recognition, a society as different from ours of the mo- ment as ours differs from the society of the middle ages, a society purged of morbid "possessive impulses" by the release of the "creative impulses." What that society will be like we can suggest in considerable detail as we go on, but only suggest. For no one can prophecy it in detail. For if our thought is complete, it must reach a scientific climax. And science does not really prophecy, it forecasts tentatively and then works ex- perimentally with details which it controls in ever- increasing, but cautiously increased, numbers. The proletarian movement is itself becoming, we may hope to prove, more and more scientific, an enormous pano- ramic experiment changing under our very gaze its old trial and error methods for extraordinar- ily comprehensive, epical self-conscious methods. Finally, we .may hope to prove that the proletarian movement is becoming more competent than any other social current to nourish whatever higher values of life will stand the test of air and sunlight and reason, and to beget in addition new and congruous values of unimaginable grandeur. The task of the proletarian movement is still funda- THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS mentally educational. It is emerging more and more as a movement essentially religious, critical, scientific and artistic, claiming to cherish the truly spiritual values, old, new and unborn, with more discrimination, with more open-mindedness, and with a more vivid hope than do any of the social institutions (like the church and the college), which have been so long ac- credited as the custodians of things spiritual. The method of the labor movement is genuinely discipli- nary, as opposed to the pseudo-disciplinary coercion of the "Servile State" which threatens us. The end of proletarianism is to discover the individual value for society of every living man, or, more properly, to create a group of individuals who will make of the State an instrument and not a fetich. This is also the end of an essentially liberal education as opposed to that traditionalistic education which aims to produce a mediocre mass of useful slaves in the vocational schools and business colleges, and to produce a tinsel minority of useless, "cultured" gentlemen trained for "leadership" in the universities. The labor movement is quite properly described as overwhelmingly social- istic in tendency. But it is no longer necessary or in- telligent to point a naive antithesis between "socialism" and "individualism." It is now a truism that the only individualism which enlightened socialists oppose is sentimental or violent anarchy, on the one hand, and, PROLETARIANISM on the other, the mad-cap laissez-faire of the tradi- tional bourgeois State. Socialism recognizes that many individualists, even of these old-fashioned types, have, by their merciless monopolistic competition, done great service to the world in socializing within the nation the means of production, even while they have, through improper methods of appropriation and uncritical laws of tenure, retained a minority anarchy of control. Indeed, socialism freely admits that even the in- ternational activities of these old-fashioned individual- ists had uses in the same direction. But socialism holds that the trial and error methods of this older individ- ualism tend, with pathetic senility, to remain the same old childish, tragic, laissez-faire applied now with far- cical inappropriateness to the interdependent races of all continents. It is obvious that a more scientific, a more rational method of internationalizing the means of production is desirable if we still have any reverence for human life and if man still has any really creative vision. Orthodox statesmen have done nothing more original than to transfer the ideals of the Manchester School of economics for execution to the mighty am- phitheatre of the orbis terrarum. The American bour- geoisie has had such a larger field for international predation that it has come very slowly to an under- standing of the philosophy of international laissez- jaire, coupled with intranational paternalism. Some [27] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS of our reactionaries are eager enough now to adopt this sinister philosophy. But we have reason to hope that American farmers of the Middle West, American liberal journalists, and the rank and file of organized American labor will influence the no longer apathetic, but still provincial, public profoundly and intimately enough to exercise its superstitions and save it from exploitation by reactionaries. The small minorities of big financial capitalists might be forced out of their equivocations but for the fact that their small-salaried clerical slaves in local government offices, in business offices, in newspaper offices, in many churches and schools, and the small capitalists and shop-keepers are subject to mob-contagions because they have a deadly fear of what we have described as the point of view of the critical intellectual. Similar conditions prevail in large areas of the laboring classes. But here there emerges more and more youthfulness of outlook and a hope both honest and spacious. It is the task of prole- tarianism to inspire to self-discipline and liberality of view a larger and larger number of people wherever they are gathered together by economic impulsions, to help them to see through the lingering primitive taboos in modern civilization and to develop an austere, ra- tional immunity from mob-contagion. The task of proletarianism is, therefore, fundamentally educa- tional. [28] Ill RELIGION To call any proletarian revolutionary movement religious may seem perverse to the respectable, and crass to some of the revolutionists themselves, although M. Georges Sorel (in the brave days when he wrote as a stimulating prophet of radicalism) has already em- phasized some religious tendencies in syndicalism. We must endeavor to meet all charges by describing first the so-called "materialism" of the militant proletariat, and by then describing and comparing what seems to be essential and common in all religions. The use of the word "materialism" by the revolu- tionary laborers is simple, simple in an admirable sense of the word. It is silly to quarrel with the word; for, though it is as vague as the word "spiritual" which is fashionable in the "upper" classes, it is not half as de- ceptive to the proletariat as is the word "spiritual" to the bourgeoisie. It has been of genuine value for prole- tarian purposes, and it is really very expressive. Some new "materialism" is forever rising to purge some shal- low "idealism" and to be itself in turn destroyed. Its [29] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS frequent reincarnations are certainly due to the fact that it is, after all, the most straightforward, if not the most profound of metaphysical views. Materialism, as a rough and ready metaphysics, fills some scientific savants and some proletarian agitators with an invigor- ating sense of freedom from all considerations that interfere with their own cherished faiths and aspira- tions, whether these be in relation to chemistry, biology or the conflict of labor and capital. Clear the field ab- solutely of gods, clear the field of those haunting be- liefs rephrased in dialectic which are but the crystal maze with which the philosopher hypnotizes his prac- tical faculties, clear the field of all these phantas- magoria, thinks the materialist, and you can get down to business. Now, if you are a professor of physical chemistry your business may be all locked up in some dim laboratory bristling with wires, belts and batteries most alarming to the visitor who entrusts himself into your hands as he might commend himself to God. Or you may be a radical laborer who would arouse your comrades against your rapacious employers. In either case you think at first that you don't want to be bothered with God. Yet in such a point of view one may find, after all, a social faith and a religious ardor of concen- tration which is far more inspiriting than that middle- class positivism which prevails in the respectable strata of society. Materialism is simple because it is [30] RELIGION earnest and because it is far less equivocal than bour- geois positivism, whic'h, on the basis of an utterly un- sound division of labor, sends its wives and children to church, but itself deserts the counting-house only for the billiard table and the golf links, a positivism which professes Christianity and trusts that its wives and children may bargain sufficiently with that remote Unknowable to insure salvation, while it makes sure of the bread and butter and the French pastry. No profession on the part of the middle-class positivist be- gins to move one like the superb manifesto with which Tyndall, on the full crest of the achievement of nine- teenth century science, expressed cautiously, yet cour- ageously his materialistic expectations: "Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius when he affirms that 'nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself, without the meddling of the Gods!' or with Bruno when he declares that matter is not 'that mere empty capacity which philoso- phers have pictured, but the universal mother who brings forth all things as the iruit of her own womb ?' Believing as I do in the con- tinuity of nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." Of course, this is only attacking anthropomorphism with a neo-anthropomorphism, that is to say with a new personification of "nature." We may glance here at THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS the logical difficulties of atheism as we note its difficul- ties for the imagination in Prometheus Unbound, where Shelley has to create Demogorgon in order to destroy Jove. But these metaphysical verbalisms are unproductive for development at this point. For our immediate purposes we are more interested in the unacademic materialist, the man who carries our trunks, who builds the long roads of California, who mines the copper in Arizona or Montana, the iron in Minnesota, who works on our ranches or in our forests a few months and is then cast forth by our thoughtless society to lead a nomadic life during the unfruitful sea- sons or to hibernate in the moral contagions of city lodgings while we remark with utter falsity that "there is always room at the top" and that this is "the land of equal opportunity." Now this unacademic material- ist may be also clinging desperately to his powers of reflection long enough to wonder why his brother was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, while he was born with a pick-axe so invitingly near his elbow. He is naturally inclined to make short work with God who seems to him to have been emphatically a workman of the most unskilled variety. He would naturally clear the field for what is to him of supreme importance, the "class-struggle," in which the oppressed, like rest- less molecules, fight their way to some happier union, or like flowers force their way up through the earth [32] RELIGION and through the decaying plants of tradition, of full- fed, degenerate oppressors, to air and sunlight, Capitalism, asserts the militant proletarian, has played its religious shell-game long enough. Capital- ism has told us that Christ exalted poverty, that God rewards obedience. The Bible, however, appears to be the book of the capitalist, not ours, because from it the capitalist feeds us with empty words, while he gluts his own highly organized senses by means which outrage every utterance in the Scriptures. Therefore, we will sweep the field of capitalism's phantom God and phantom Satan, which are conjured before us to keep us in a state of servile content or fear in peace, to make us organized beasts in war. We will spurn aside these obstructions in order that we may struggle freely side by side with the only friends we know, our fellow- workers, against the only enemies we know, our sleek and hypocritical employers. Thus we make the situa- tion simple, coherent, and vivid to all sincere human beings. And in due time, if we in turn come to op- press some class that rises beneath us (a situation which our atheism and our sincerity compel us to admit as quite possible), then out of the rain of atoms and the wind of energies let the oppressed sweep us into the dust heap just as we now bend ourselves to overcome our oppressors. We need scarcely note that this expression of pro- [33] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS letarian materialism is still tainted with something of the laissez-faire of the master-class. But the moment- ous thing to note is that, though there has never been an act of proletarian violence that was not inspired by an act of bourgeois violence, there have been and there are in increasing numbers proletarian deeds of a humaneness quite new in the world that we know. Some of these we shall examine presently. For the moment let two examples hint at a generalization. A young Swedish friend of the author's had occasion to attend many meetings of laborers and employers in Sweden during the general strike of 1909. At every labor meeting he heard the laborers say: "Remember, comrades, the public thinks us ruffians. Prove to them that we are gentlemen. However great your humilia- tion, resist no one." At every employers' meeting he heard : "Starve the hounds. Now is the time to make them crawl at our feet." A recent number of The Weekly People translates a speech by the Finnish pro- letarian, Yrjo Maekelin. Yrjo Maekelin, who was later nearly lynched by the bourgeois White Guard (lovers of law and order and German princes), spoke as follows: "He who considers it his duty to take up weapons for the freedom of the people, must himself be without blemish, free from low instincts and of a strong and noble character. Morally he must be su- perior to his opponent in order to be able to keep the [34] RELIGION red flag of the Revolution clean." No psychoanalyst could more austerely insist that he who has not dis- covered and sublimated his own complexes will never truly help, but will, on the contrary, be running away from himself into "compensatory activities," blind "reforming" more injurious to his fellows than healing. Sympathetic readers will recall how in a recent num- ber of The Dial Professor Franz Boas marshalled his crushing ethnological erudition to prove that from "the common people are expected humbleness, mercy and all those qualities that we consider humane," that the "in- terest" of "a social class set off from the mass of the people requires that its members should not perform menial occupations" and is, therefore, more "warped by the unconscious control of tradition," that "the de- tails of the right solution of a problem can always be found by the masses," that "the ideal that they want to see realized is a safer guide for our conduct than the ideal of the intellectual group that stands under the ban of a tradition that dulls their feeling for the needs of the day." Even the crudest proletarian materialism is more religious than the so-called idealism of the master- class, because of the passionate sincerity and the readi- ness for fundamental reconstruction with which it faces the great problem on which the religion of today must focus the problem of the relations of man to his fellow-men, the deepest mystery of our age, a problem [35] " THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS which the bourgeoisie professes to face with a so-called "Practical Christianity" which is neither practical nor Christian, but which is canned sociology and faltering ethics without an atom of bold religious speculation and without a tremor towards a really courageous sur- gery of social ills, a mere quack-salve to allay those ir- ritations of the skin which are symptomatic of deep organic disorders. Out of the fierce materialism of even the crudest version of the proletarian revolt there is rising a re- vised religion. These rebels .scoff at ethics and talk incessantly of economic determinants, of material causes (whatever "causes" may mean), of the irresis- tible demand of the stomach for bread which roars down the demand of the soul for poetry and for silks. But from an ethical point of view even their most cast-iron versions of economic determinism are funda- mentally new systems of ethics. And crude as the worst of them are they are far more living, far more just than the moral sophism of those retired presidents, journal- ists, business-men, ministers, lawyers and teachers who try to refute them with ignorant abuse. The pro- letarian economic interpretation of politics is less often narrow and simple than it is a detailed description of political action far more complex and far more con- versant with facts than the abstract and romantic inter- pretations which college professors learn by rote from [36] RELIGION partisan newspapers and loosely imaginative, elegantly written books wherein nations are made to perform like the allegorical puppets of a fifteenth century morality play. The fiery progressivism of the workers and their fearless consideration of all the social mysteries give them far more right than any others except the most consecrated and daring scientists to say with Royce that "our fellows are known to be real, and to have their own inner life, because they are for each of us the end- less treasury of more ideas." Out of the materialism of the militant workers is rising much idealism; for they know that "everything ideal has a natural basis" and their emotions, their hopes, their widening sympathies, their reason tell them that at least some natural things have "an ideal development." The militant proletariat has gained, through amazing sacrifices, trenchant sin- cerity, and innumerable services to humanitarian re- form the supreme right to quote as Credo a beautiful sentence which William James wrote about the essence of religion: "If any phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be 'All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.' ' Let any one who doubts the sincerity and the sacri- fices of the militant proletariat read the following, which is but one of an increasing army of tributes from men outside the proletariat (as more narrowly defined) who have studied labor-tactics with an open [37] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS mind. Mr. John Graham Brooks supplies us with these anecdotes and comments: "With cynical hilarity a business friend has just read to me a pro- posal by Mr. Debs to raise at once $500,000 for the approaching socialist campaign. 'There you have it, like a staged farce. The starved millions, living on the margin of want, are to paint the country red with two million votes for Debs and Seidel. Not a nickel from the big interests, no blackmailing of corporations, but the whole half million subscribed by the starving, downtrodden working class.' 'And this,' he adds, 'is but an item. They pour thousands of dollars into Lawrence and a dozen other struck towns at the same time. They have just been buncoed out of a quarter of a million to free the McNamaras. They are paying for costly conventions, hundreds of lectures and a very expensive press. Doesn't such penury wring the heart?' "In this sportive mood he filled in other features of the comedy, ending with the annihilating phrase, 'they must be destitute of humor.' "This gentleman had been telling a great deal of truth, but by no means all of it or the most important part of it. These objects of his lampooning are raising far larger funds than he knew. They are doing it all over the world, in countries where the purchasing power of the year's income is far lower than in the United States. They have for years been doing it on a scale which most well-to-do people would consider insane or criminal. The propertied classes very generally shuffle and kick at ordinary taxes, but with voluntary devotion millions of working men and women bring their earned money to support an idea. They are not doing this in spurts of enthusiasm, but with tireless persistency, sustained by a great faith. "Many of them pay this price for what they know never can be [38] RELIGION theirs. On a bench by the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia, I sat one night after a socialist meeting with an old man who had seen about all one could see of service in the Confederate cause. He had for years given himself to build up a socialist sentiment in that community. 'I shall not live,' he said, 'to see even the beginning of it. But it is a great cause.' He was one of an army, far greater than the South sent to the field, who know that no extra penny can come to them, but they bring their offering just the same. " 'I haven't had a political thrill,' said a teacher to Mr. Brooks, 'except of disgust, since those great days of my youth (the days of the Civil War). Two bright boys in my Civics class began to bring me accounts of what local socialists were doing. I had read three or four socialist books of the better sort, but thought of them as stimulat- ing and harmless Utopias. I then set to work on the local programs. I was surprised to find many of my old pupils and teachers conse- crated to the movement, though many of them held positions which kept them silent. It has brought to me in my closing years the great emotions of 1860. I had come to believe that concentrating wealth had so fastened upon our political life as to lead us straight toward disaster. We may go there still, but this socialism has restored my hope. It has made me believe there are moral resources in the community and intellectual capacities among common people which will save us, if we are sane enough to recognize them and work with them.' "The I. W. W. movement is strictly a revolutionary uprising against that part of the present order, which is known as capitalism. Its ground-swell is felt in many very different types of nationality. Like every revolution it attracts the most unselfish and courageous, together with the self-seeking and semi-criminal. Garibaldi's famous [39] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS 'Thousand' had in it as large a percentage of this latter class as the I. W. W. at its worst. The King of Naples tried to treat Gari- baldi's followers like 'bums.' It proved a most damaging error, be- cause these revolutionists began to excite powerful sympathy. It was a sympathy that soon passed into political action, as many of our own great strikes pass into politics, forcing employers to yield to a new and hated influence. As the revolt of labor increases, popular sympathy acts through politicians whom, if they are gaining against us, we call 'demagogues.' "At the Lawrence strike, I saw a newcomer so fresh from the Old World that he tripped awkwardly in almost every English sentence. But he was aglow with beneficence. He said that he had been in eight different countries. 'Always it is the same. Everywhere it is the one home.' ' This is the veritable elan vital of religion. It is ab- solutely demonstrable that, despite the deceptive rise of the wage-scale, the rich are getting irresponsibly richer while the poor are not gaining ground in any fair pro- portion. The bourgeois cynic may trace proletarian religion to this sordid origin. The proletarians will frankly agree. But the true artist-critic-scientist will only revere the more profoundly the religious fer- vor of the proletariat when he sees its natural or- igins and its ideal development. And if we look back historically over the various outbursts of the religious elan we shall feel confirmed of the authen- ticity of proletarian religion. Let us remember in this connection some comprehensive phrases by Mr. R. R. [40] RELIGION Marett: "Psychologically regarded . . . the function of religion is to restore men's confidence when it is shaken by crises. Men do not seek crisis; they would always away from it if they could. Crisis seeks them; and, whereas the feebler folk are ready to succumb, the bolder spirits face it. Religion is the facing of the un- known. It is the courage in it that brings the comfort." The founders of great religions are invariably non- conformists. It is not likely that those who are to save religion from certain perversions which threaten it to- day are going to consummate their redemptive work in the conformity which toryism demands. No, conserva- tives of today are fond of religious institutions, but not of real religion. Religion has primitive associations with fear; with critical minds it sublimates fear; but with conservatives it remains enslaved by what Freud calls the "censor-wish" and can be expressed, therefore, only in pseudo-social terms. Tories have never quick- ened a drooping religion back into radiant life and they have never made a new one. Institutions are to society what habits are to the individual. Anti-social "class" in- stitutions are, as Dr. Burrow is demonstrating, exactly what the physiological "symptoms" of hysteria are in the individual, a subtle and roundabout way of preserv- ing a neurosis and tyrannizing over others with fear and perversity of one's own. Healthy social institutions may be very useful; they may emancipate men from THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS routine for higher activities; but they are at best only like the spinal column, not like the fine cortex of the brain. If they are mistaken for the higher activities they are likely to be very imperious. A people ridden by institutions is like a man overwhelmed by an intri- cate but prosaic routine, by a precise but mazeful series of reflex actions. All this is as true of religious as of political and educational institutions. Radicals are the only makers of religions. Radicals also make living in- stitutions of the emancipating variety, well fitted to give free outlet to religious enthusiasm. Laborers (as we shall see in abundant detail as we examine their seeth- ing, flexible, quarreling, experimental unions) are just beginning to mould such living institutions. Conserva- tives talk much about religion, but often cling to an in- stitutionalized mummy without realizing at all that the soul has fled. It gives them a sense of security. Today some States have become religious institutions in which many "routineers" find their semblance of religious satisfaction, and out of which they can always conjure tribal gods to lend ferocity to their wars. Everywhere the activities of conservatives are singularly perverse just now. Conservatives at present are far more violent in words and deeds than radicals. But vital religion is never irrationally or violently co- ercive for, as Mr. Marett points out, "the courage in- volved in all live religion normally coexists with a cer- [42] RELIGION tain modesty or humility," a humility wholesomely pro- portionate. Religion, then, we may define as the attitude of facing with exultant but humble courage the un- known, with the faith that "all is not vanity in the uni- verse," with the joyous confidence that "everything natural" has a potential "ideal development." Every- body is religious. But only "bolder spirits," as Mr. Marett shows, are markedly, sustainedly and unequivo- cally religious. For these bolder spirits there seems to be no conflict between religion and science. That does not mean that science confirms all of our given myths. It may destroy them and so emancipate religion, which goes on like a herald to lure us to new crises, new unknowns to experiment with. But religion is the vital force. In primitive days it inspires an Indian to dance rain for his crops. His activities are not sordid or crassly utilitarian. They are full of the wonder and beauty, as well as of the homelier desires of life. Criticism and science discover a better way of dealing with crops and so fulfill religion. Religion, thereupon, does not die. It urges or beckons on the true adven- turer to a new frontier. Today that frontier is the mystery of man's social relations and the hope that urges us is the democratic hope. The "preconscious or the nest instinct" hints of its immortality through our unquenchable yearning towards equality. We know something of the rational control of nature, but very [43] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS little of the rational control of society. The labor movement is facing this problem with a fine religious courage and humility, but not with that cowardly pas- sivity which capitalism would prescribe as the proper humility for the worker. The labor movement has made also a very searching criticism and arrived at a very radical hypothesis (the abolition of the wage- system) ; it has initiated and carried very far a cam- paign of genuinely scientific experimentation that is astonishingly resourceful (the varying union-structures and the varying union-functions). But the basis of the labor movement is in a great new religion, often vague but always vivid, which thrills at the mention of "solidarity" as Christians once thrilled, hundreds of years ago, at the mention of universal brotherhood, which inspires proletarians, as it inspired primitive Christians, to that militant or paradoxical "non-resist- ance" which remakes huge societies. [44] IV CRITICISM But let us beware, as all profoundly militant prole- tarians will beware, of allowing our religious elan, un- critically, to go its Dionysiac way to the extent of lull- ing in us the purifying spirit of Cartesian doubts. Un- less we are chastened by some calamity or unless we keep our reason strong this elan will betray us. It was partly because of an uncriticized religious faith in the omnipotence of the so-called "natural sciences" that while we studied the scientific control of gases, of soils, the "predictability" of the appearance of comets and eclipses, the Brownian movement of physical particles, the behavior of paramecia, we left all control of masses of men to brilliant but irresponsible leaders nourished on historical superstitions, hemmed in by sluggish and pedantic laws, harassed by short-sighted financial capi- talists, who are "efficient" in their organization of railroads or oil-mines in Africa, Mexico or China, but who are like adolescents learning how to gamble when they try to forecast those awful death-locks of races which their ambitions make inevitable. Thus we have THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS drifted on until all the contributions of western civil- ization are threatened with becoming at best like the contributions which aliens draw from the silent pyra- mids, from dead poets and from contemplating the roofless pillars of the Parthenon. By a casual deduction from an "evolutionary formula" we have developed an uncriticized religious faith in the "type" in "man," which has fortified much irresponsible prattle about the "sanity of the people." It is hardly necessary to dwell on the fatalistic implications of this belief. Professor William Graham Sumner's Folkways is an encyclo- pedic exposure of the utter groundlessness of all our sentimentalism about the wholesome conservatism of the crowd; it shows that there are no more potent in- struments for the slave-owner and the demagogue than mob-intuitions or mob-prejudices, which may be used not only against another mob, but against the very mob which possesses them; that these mob-prejudices of our most sophisticated twentieth century populations have often a rigid ancestry extending back for centuries into savagery. Let criticism awake then to purify our re- ligion and make our religion truly strong. It will be our privilege, as critics, to contemplate the most pessimistic contingencies ere we have winnowed our faiths to make them working-hypotheses. Let us glance at these words, for example, by as thoughtful a biologist and psychologist as Mr. Trotter: [46] CRITICISM - "We see man today, instead of the frank and courageous recog- nition of his status, the docile attention to his biological history, the determination to let nothing stand in the way of the security and permanence of his future, which alone can establish the safety and happiness of the race, substituting blind confidence in his destiny, un- clouded faith in the essentially respectful attitude of the universe towards his moral code, and a belief no less firm that his traditions and laws and institutions necessarily contain permanent qualities of reality. Living as he does in a world where outside his race no allowances are made for infirmity, and where figments, however beautiful, never become facts, it needs but little imagination to see how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of Nature's failures, ignominiously to be swept from her work- table to make way for another venture of her tireless curiosity and patience." Thus speaks our doubting Thomas, criticism. Crit- icism is apparently an almost ineradicable stage in our mental processes. But it can be slurred over. For it is logic. And logic is often painful. Criticism is the fiery realization of new relations as in the case of the Russian revolution. Criticism, indeed, burns more brightly in young Russia today than in any other terri- tory of the world. It is Russian criticism which prom- ises today the truest advance towards democracy. Even though its working-hypotheses, through stress of the awful rottenness left by czarism and the consequent im- portunate problems, be occasionally too hastily formu- lated, even though these hypotheses be rejected by more selfish states, they cannot, once uttered to the world, be [47] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS readily forgotten by humanity. It is as though young Russia had listened to hopes like those of Bergson and fears like those of Trotter, and having purified her hopes by the criticism that goes to the roots of every tradition, found her religion modified but still strong. Every individual, even the "humblest," is to some degree a religious visionary, a critic, a scientist and an artist. Stevenson puts it charmingly and soundly as far as the artist part of all of us is concerned: "It is said that a poet died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to the versa- tility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagi- nation. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted." He in whom scientific experimentation is most resourceful, we artificially segregate in histories which celebrate Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Cuvier, Faraday. He whom generous and joyous impulses rather than cau- tion seem to dominate, and who brings with rare elo- quence strong faiths and deep despair to his fellow- men, we call an illustrious poet, a painter, an architect, a musician, an actor, a dancer, a religious prophet. The critic or philosopher is one who purifies and organizes data for use by formulating an hypothesis, and he is [48] CRITICISM great if his perspective is so spacious that he makes our efforts for progress more reflective, and, therefore, as certain as they can ever hope to be in this universe or pluriverse whose ultimate meanings are so mysterious to us. Among the early Greek thinkers, and even among sages as late as the Renaissance, men took all knowledge for their province because the data of knowledge were not so numerous that this seemed absurd. Then came the division of intellectual labor. Specialism, emerg- ing in minds even as comprehensive as Descartes, be- came intensified in the eighteenth century and even more intensified in the nineteenth. Out of this neces- sity has grown an unnecessary and unsound habit of classifying branches of learning as if they were uncon- nected or very loosely connected on all sides. To be sure none of us can return to the all-embracing re- flective habits of an Aristotle or a Bacon. But we ought to talk less about subjects as if they had an independent existence. We ought to recognize these branches of learning as stages of thought ever receding, ever re- curring with varying degrees of intensity and breadth. Sciences are, in fact, forming new intimacies with each other. Note, for example, the young alliance called bio-chemistry and note "animal behavior." Among latter-day philosophers the growing enthusiasm for a generic study of value is making for larger continuity. [49] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS In philosophy also the various kinds of new realists and pragmatists have succeeded in reviving what Pro- fessor R. W. Sellars calls a more "frank interaction" between philosophy and science after a "temporary estrangement which lasted the greater part of the nineteenth century." Finally, philosophy is more alert in what Professor Sellars emphasizes as one of its func- tions: "the discovery and fostering of new special sciences," which separate off after they "have secured a healthy growth" without wholly forfeiting the philos- opher's interest. There is a wonderful world-wide stirring towards a new orientation and unification of the "social sciences," which, with the help of the more empirical and flexible labor-movement, excel all other currents in bringing synthesis back to its proper rela- tions with analysis. When we talk, then, about re- ligion> philosophy, science and art we must think of them, not as separate areas, but as states of mind which we all share in differing proportions and which we may expect a rapidly growing number of people to share more richly, with more versatility and with better and better balance. And so we must pass from a consideration of the religious presupposition of proletarianism to its critical implications. As we saw danger in uncriticized re- ligion, let us beware of making criticism in turn all im- portant. This seems to have been Hegel's tendency. CRITICISM And we must beware of still another excess : to Auguste Comte neither the religious nor the critical, but the scientific, was, unfortunately, supreme. In the world's dawn, men, he thought, were religious. Then, with widening enlightenment, they turned their warmly colored myths into the cool, clear crystals of concepts. They saw no more the breasts of the nymph in the brake. Pan was dead. The gradual curves of the sea- foam no longer suggested a cradle for the exquisite limbs of Aphrodite. Men argued with spare, sinewy dialect about the meaning of naturalness, goodness, love, truth, virtue. This was the age of philosophy. Then came the age which fully emancipated us, thought Comte, the positive age, the post-critical age, the development of science, crown of human achieve- ment. Comte was quite right in his ordering: religion, philosophy (criticism), science. But he was wrong in his supposition that man's perfected thought rested in scientific investigation. Indeed, he lived a contradic- tion. For did not he himself pass on again from his scientific vigils to religious enthusiasm? He devised what he called the religion of humanity and was fain to trick it out with a pompous array of priests and rituals. Comte's cycle, in short, was one which the race passes through not once, but again and again in a lifetime, in a year, in an hour sometimes, sometimes in the utterance of a single sentence. Comte's account was THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS not a history of dead epochs, it was really a sketch of the living psychological and logical processes of human beings past and present: religion, criticism, science, art, religion, criticism, science, art, and so on, no one factor supreme except for a time. Not science (made a fetich by Comte), not criticism (imperialized by Hegel), not art or religion no one of these is supreme in any permanent way. But at a given moment, in a certain age, or for a certain in- dividual luxuriating in a definite or indefinite experi- ence, coping with a specific dilemma, exultant with hope or sick with fear, any one of these stages will be momentarily supreme. These stages whirl round and round, higher and higher (if our organisms grow) lower and lower (if our organisms decay) like a flam- ing spiral; religion, criticism, science, art, religion, criticism, science, art in perpetual mobility. Is it not clear that men are great by virtue of passing frequently through all these stages, experiencing genuine "con- versions" when any one of the transitions is particularly dramatic and rich with emotional tone, circling higher and higher, as long as their lives are great, with a bal- ance of all stages ever firmer, a harmony ever richer? Darwin came to prefer the reading of cheap novels to the plays of Shakespeare, a fact over which many self- styled "humanists" have done much pharisaical, too audible sighing. But will these "humanists" really CRITICISM venture to deny a majestic poetic vision to one who, from a sea-voyage, from the reading of Malthus and Lyell, and from the observation of a few domesticated animals could see the tremendous continuities and metamorphoses of natural selection? Shakespeare seems at times to be uncritical, a moral indifferentist, and at times he certainly is. But who will deny a vast synoptic power to the singer whose amazing tolerance fills The Tempest, an ethical understanding far more in accord with the modern sciences than are the hysteri- cal angers of professional moralists? We may see, from all this what a fata Morgana is that old wives' fear and pride that insists on an abso- lute antithesis between criticism and creation, how servile is the half-truth that criticism is at two removes from life. And now let us return to our two companion questions: What is criticism? and what is proletarian criticism? Criticism we may define as that stage in the cycle of thinking and acting which provides a rational hypo- thesis for progress by the purification and organization of data for experimental use. It is equally futile to imply with Matthew Arnold that criticism, though in- dispensable, is not creation; or with Oscar Wilde to vaunt critcism as "more creative than creation." The word creation is a perilous word, because it is impossi- ble to find anything in any sense alive which is not in [S3] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS some fundamental sense creative. Similarly, as some propagandists have discovered to their cost, it is quite impossible to find a single being who is not in some sense a parasite. It is probable that this futile attempt to sharpen an antithesis between "criticism" and "crea- tion" and then to dub "criticism" parasitical or "de- structive" has had a wider vogue among English-speak- ing peoples because of the absurdly narrow meaning attached to the word "criticism" in the England of the eighteenth century, and perhaps because of the pro- verbial Anglo-Saxon scorn of "ideas" as opposed to "facts." On the other hand, even the French do not seem to have secured a much greater terminological precision (for all their unquestionable supremacy in most of the kinds of criticism) by using "critique" for the literary work of a Lemaitre or a Brunetiere, "crit- icisme" for the German "kritik," that is for the epist- emological analysis of a Kant or a Renouvier. If the English usage is too narrowly confined to opinions about matters of art or fault-finding, the French choice of two words implies a purely fictitious chasm between evaluations of art, and siftings of scientific data, and meditations on the problem of knowledge. There is much in common underlying Kant's explorations of the pure and practical reason, the organization of Gottingen seminars to winnow the data for humanistic sciences, Poincare's inquiry [54] CRITICISM into the meaning of "energy" in a physical science, Anatole France's account of the adventures of his soul among literary masterpieces, and the gossip of painters in a studio about their technique. We may draw distinctions to much more purpose if we describe the critical or philosophical stage of thought by contrasting it with sentimentalism on the one side and cynicism on the other. Suppose we learn that religious impulses arise through fear of evil in- fluences and presume with Herbert Spencer that man first thought of personal immortality when in a trivial moment he caught a furtive reflection of his hairy visage in a woodland stream; suppose we recognize that families were first welded by sexual appetites; suppose we recall that the systematic labor by which the prison- ers of the Goths turned aside the course of the river to sink into its bed the gorgeous tomb of Alaric was slave-labor consummated by the massacre of the ex- hausted slaves; that the toil which upreared the enor- mous stones of the Pyramids was slave-toil that must have cost thousands of lives in the dawn of history. Suppose we admit that labor-unions and the rapid growth of modern capitalism were alike made possible largely by the almost fortuitous control of steam. The cynic, when he contemplates these "causal" chains, smiles at the sordid and capricious origins of all that man holds sacred. The cynic is one who is palsied by ess] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS criticism and stiffened by the fallacy that in the origin of a process all that follows is contained implicit, that there is nothing new under the sun. The cynic is not quite as dangerous as he is often thought to be, though he is an almost useless member of society. But the shallow optimist or sentimentalist is very dangerous. His faith is so fragile that when he is confronted with squalid or humble origins he covers his face with his hands and strives to preserve together his sensibilities and his ignorance. He tries to crush the first whisper- ings of criticism within him. If a friend urges these criticisms upon him he grows angry. Thus hugging his "phantasies," shunning "reality," he tends towards de- mentia praecox or towards paranoia. For, as psycho- analysis has demonstrated, the difference between the sane and the insane is one of degree, not of kind. He upbraids his friend with disloyalty, with treason. In a brilliant essay Mr. Owen Wister has shown how in- jurious and pervasive this "optimistic squint" has been in American life, how it refuses with obstinate frivolity to solve with a little troublesome foresight and willing sacrifice the dread perplexities that intrude today. When the sentimentalists are too persistently admon- ished to open their eyes beyond an optimistic squint, they have been known to gather in mobs to crucify, stone, tar and feather, or lynch the prophets. But the critic is one who knows that "everything ideal has a [56] CRITICISM natural basis and everything natural an ideal develop- ment," who, as Professor F. J. Woodbrige likes to say, "looks at a swamp and sees there a metropolis" like Petrograd, which he will some day rear because as critic he knows that he must see the industrial slavery in all its ugliness in order to lead men towards democ- racy, in order to unseal the eyes of men for some vision of a "Beloved Community." The critic, then, must recognize that- at least one of the chief origins of re- ligion was and is brute fear, and he will only marvel all the more at its ideal fulfillment in a cathedral. It is not necessary and it is certainly not wise for him to suppose his metropolis or his "Beloved Community" to be already existent, even in some etherealized meta- physical sense of the word "existent" A sound critic will be, as William James observed, neither pessimist nor optimist; he will be a meliorist. And now we are ready to examine the particular criticism or philosophy called proletarian, which must purify that religious elan which syndicalism expresses with the rapturous cry of "solidarity," which the Rus- sian workers have expressed with a renewal of the old Marxian slogan, "working men of all countries unite!" which was put up after the Revolution on the facade of the imperial palace in Petrograd. Proletarian crit- icism or philosophy has culminated in the famous, but widely misinterpreted, principle or working-hypothesis [57] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS of "direct action" with its corollary, "the abolition of the wage-system." To consider that "direct action" is to be accounted for historically by describing it as the mere survival or recrudescence of the old-fashioned anarchistic "propaganda of the deed," is an absurdity possible only to those who have made no attempt to study the extraordinarily complicated and rich achieve- ment of federalistic labor organizations in twentieth century France, the milieu in England which Tom Mann found ready after his experiences in Australia, the peasants of South Italy awakening in the Great War, the peculiar sufferings of the migratory laborers in the Pacific and southwest regions of the United States, the enormous experiments of the Soviets of revolutionary Russia. As a matter of fact the most impressive intellectual ancestor of "direct action" is the "categorical impera- tive" underlying the ethics of Kant, with its presup- position of the moral autonomy of the individual, and his sacred right and responsibility to so act that he could will the maxim of his conduct to be a universal law, in so far as he can, after earnest and implacable reasoning, see the truth. Some will remind us of the unbridled emotionalism of these masses and of the "anti-intellectualistic" attempt of M. Georges Sorel to associate it with Bergsonism. But, as Mr. Walling has shown at some length in The Larger Aspects of [58] CRITICISM Socialism, the autonomous action of radical laborers is experimental or pragmatic rather than anti-intel- lectualistic. As the distinguished English scholar, Mr. G. D. H. Cole, sums it up in a pregnant sentence: "The development by the working-class of institutions of its own, what M. Lagardelle calls 'Socialism of In- stitutions,' is far more really the central point of its philosophy than Bergsonian elan vital." We have tried to devote all due emphasis to what we have called the religious aspect of proletarianism and to show that it is the most vital religion in the world. Too often proletarians themselves try to explain it away in vain and fail thus to claim what would be of tactical advan- tage. But we must be careful now not to fall in with the new sentimental school that would describe prole- tarianism as all religion and all intuition, as a reaction against the cynical school which for nearly two gen- erations has described it as utterly devoid of religion. As for syndicalism specifically, it is the most critical proletarianism and, indeed, the most critical humanism of any kind that has yet appeared and it is, therefore, pre-eminently rational. It is radical in the real sense: it goes to the roots of things. As Sombart saw: "They (the syndicalists )have seen more deeply than any other socialist thinkers into the evils of our modern civiliza- tion." Proletarians are more pragmatic than Kantian in so far as they place more ethical emphasis on the con- [59] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS sequences than on the motives of a deed. But, like the sterner Pragmatists, they do not find it necessary to sacrifice any of the principle of rational individual autonomy, which they interpret and apply with great richness. Twentieth century "direct action" implies no mysti- cal faith in any "natural law" which might, according to eighteenth century physiocrats, act through benev- olent landlords or which might, according to nineteenth century Spencerianism, act through that bourgeois competition miscalled individualism. Syndicalism is as suspicious of "natural law" as it is of the present State. Nor does it have any pseudo-Darwinian faith in a beneficent struggle ending inevitably in the "survival of the fittest," for it thinks that the qualities of the socio- logically fittest may be determined only by careful and elaborate investigation and by criticism, not by trusting blindly to "nature" or "chance" or "politics." Finally syndicalism is in the forefront of investigation with all critical scientists in its repudiation of the deduction of a "natural law" of "gradual change," which Darwin ac- cepted too hastily from his own observations too strong- ly colored by Lyell's geological generalizations, which Victorian sentimentalists turned into a comfortable doctrine of evolutionary fatalism, a force by virtue of which we were to toboggan gently, willy nilly, into Utopia. Syndicalism has seen that even Socialists have [60] become uncritical gradualists because of certain spe- cious dialetical turns developed from Haeckel's so- called Biogenetic Law and from Morgan's unilinear idea of human evolution. But the social hypotheses of syndicalism are perfectly congruous with the biology of De Vries and Bateson (their allowance for some "mu- tations," "releases," sudden changes) as opposed to a snail-like "recapitulation." And the hypotheses of syndicalism may be correlated with the findings of modern ethnologists that human societies do not each one necessarily pass through the same stages of evolu- tion. England may skip much of New Zealand's State Socialism. Russia may skip most of England's nine- teenth century capitalism. The American Federation of Labor may work out its own healthy federalism and larger fighting-units, without inevitably passing through all the experiences of the Confederation Gen- erale du Travail. But speculations of this sort must await our examination into the nature of history. [61] V HISTORY AND FREEDOM MOST so-called history today, whether proletarian or bourgeois, implies some naive form of causal determin- ism. A soap-boxer finds the phrase, "the materialistic conception of history," just as ecstatically mouth-filling as does a lover the Shakespearean harmonies "Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediment." An academician finds a more decorous auto-intoxica- tion in a more equivocal curiosity over "the economic interpretation of history." Once upon a time Descartes, who did so much to set us all agonizing over epistemology, divided the uni- verse into two parts: that which is mechanical, e. g., the stars, dirt, animals, our bodies, in short most of the things which he was eager to find out something about; and that which is spiritual like the soul which he stuffed away in our pineal glands, the will which he used when he was argumentatively in a tight place, and God whose existence he proved with his particular version of an immortal quibble called "the entological argument," which has dazzled student-lamp-dimmed eyes from [62] HISTORY AND FREEDOM Augustine to Anselm, to Descartes, to Spinoza, to Hegel, to Royce. But like Descartes most of the scientists of the seven- teenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were eager to explore matters mechanical, and rather inclined to leave spiritual considerations to priests, poets, lovers and elderly ladies. As long as scientists studied "na- ture" more passionately than "human nature," Car- tesian mechanism or some variation of it worked very well. But when they tried exultantly to apply to the study of elusive man the same methods which cast il- lumination on the infinitely slow movements of stars, the silent development of crystals, the cut and dried volatility of acids and gases, our scientists made griev- ous blunders, premature plunges which have bank- rupted bourgeois economics, fossilized much experi- mental psychology, and forbidden history to become a science in anything but name. From Descartes' dualism and from many far less in- spiring sources, but most of all from that inner conflict between primal and rebellious desires and the censor wish which Freud describes, all "respectable" people have developed the vicious habit of rending sciences apart into the "descriptive" and the "normative," and making social chasms between the "menial" worker and the man of "leisure" whose befuddled mind Mr. Thor- stein Veblen has laid bare in a unique satire. If think- [63] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS ers had dared to follow the truly "world destroying thought" of David Hume, when he exhorted mankind to extend the scientific study of "nature" to "human na- ture,' the evil ways into which psychologists, econom- ists, and historians fell might have been avoided. The attack of the British empiricists on the Cartesian doc- trine of innate ideas (most of which were to Descartes like the axioms of geometry) had halted the continen- tal hope of exploring the universe in a rigid mathemati- cal way. Hume carried empirical doctrines to fine un- compromising conclusions including his merciless ex- posure of the difficulties of the whole concept of "cause." But Kant, although he certainly was "awak- ened from his dogmatic slumber" by the reading of Hume, restated the work of the emancipating English philosopher with such a vast surplusage of pedantry and of reactionary vestiges (along with some spacious discoveries), that he allowed himself and his followers to sink back into the old dualism, somewhat rarified, but still vicious. In other words, Kant gave up trying to fence off the universe which we contemplate into two parts, the mechanical and the spiritual; but he tried to split our stream of thinking into two parts: a restricted method of "pure reason" and a broader, vaguer method of "practical reason." To later minds it appeared that economics and history might use the "pure reason" with a basis in the "category of causality," while ethics [64] HISTORY AND FREEDOM might remain divorced stumbling blindly to find its way by means of the "practical reason." Orthodox economists and historians and psycholo- gists still strive to fence off all their material in the me- chanical area of Descartes' unreal bipartite universe, or to limit their way of thinking to Kant's "pure reason." In the eighteenth century Adam Smith made a fine ef- fort to take a more synthetic view of economic "facts" and moral "ideals." But later economists and histo- rians yielded more and more to a temptation towards a very artificial abstraction of material and a restriction of method. They saw that the mechanistic philosophy of French scientists (a naive version of one part of Descartes' rationalism) had made great progress with physics, chemistry, mineralogy, anatomy, statistics. So economists and historians hustled their apportioned phenomena into the bondage of a most fantastic causal chain. The more heterodox members of the post-Kan- tian school of philosophy produced an heterodox eco- nomics and history. Where Hegel had described the supreme reality in the universe as being the rational, ever-changing "World Spirit," Marx confined him- self to "mother-earth," and found the greatest reality for man to be the influence of the materialistic ever- changing tool of production. Certainly there is much truth in what has been loosely referred to as his "eco- nomic determinism." Man in his daring explorations [65] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS of "natural" phenomena had discovered and unleashed forces which, in the guise of machinery, threatened and still threaten to make him and his social organization their slaves. The materialistic necessitarianism of Marx had also a great practical influence when we re- member that it was prepared mainly for workers who had visions as restricted and desperate as those of the machine-destroying Luddites of England and the weav- ers of Germany. As Bertrand Russell puts it: "There is an almost oriental tinge in the belief, shared by all orthodox Marxians, that capitalistic society is doomed, and the advent of the communist state a preordained necessity. As a fighting force, as an appeal to man's whole emotional force, Social Democracy gains inesti- mable strength from this belief, which keeps it sober and wise through all difficulties, and inspires its work- ers with unshakable confidence in the ultimate victory of their cause." Russell considers that The Communist Manifesto, so easily accessible to all laborers, is "for terse eloquence, for biting wit and for historical insight . . . one of the finest pieces of political literature ever produced." It has, he continues, "all the epic force of the materialistic theory of history: its cruel unsenti- mental fatality, its disdain of morals and religion, its reduction of all social relations to the blind action of impersonal productive forces . . . [Marx] rests his doctrine, not on the 'justice' preached by Utopia-mon- [66] HISTORY AND FREEDOM gers (as he calls his socialist predecessors), not on sen- timental love of man, which he never mentions with- out immeasurable scorn, but on historical necessity alone, on the blind growth of productive forces, which must in the end swallow up the capitalist who has been compelled to produce them." The Marx-inspired worker could flout despair in days when despair seemed irresistible, and adjure his fellows not to destroy ma- chinery but to plan to perfect it and assume control over it in accordance with unalterable law. "Economic de- terminism" could replace the Lord of Hosts. Little wonder that the class-conscious proletarians were in- clined at first to cling as yearningly to their atheism as Hebrews and Puritans cling to their warrior deity. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, how- ever, militant workers have been coming more and more to feel the force of sentiments similar to those which Dostoievsky puts into the mouth of a bank offi- cial who was "a sort of superintendent of a whole regi- ment of political detectives :" ' 'We are not particularly afraid of all these socialists, anarchists, infidels and revolutionists ; we keep watch on them and know all their goings on. But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists. Those are the people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people! The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.' " But nobody dreads the academic historian who is po- [67] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS lite to Christianity and who has diluted Marxism into an economic interpretation of history. Marx formu- lated with his "materialistic conception of history" at once a magnificent gospel for proletarian action and a great hypothesis which has been as helpful in all brave, sound organizing of the sciences of human nature, as has been the Darwinian hypothesis in the organization of the once bickering sciences or biology. But we must, at the risk of appearing for the time far more revisionist Marxian than we are, confine ourselves to an assault on that naive form of causal determinism known among academicians and socialists alike as "eco- nomic determinism." It is a blind product of literary influences like the dualisms of Descartes and Kant, of social influence like the cleavage between the status of the "menial" worker and the man of "leisure," of a compromise which is but a quack cure of that internal conflict in each of us which Freud describes as the con- flict between the primal wishes and the censor or repres- sive, conventionalizing part of us. A glance, however, at the present fortunes of the "category of causality" will rid us of this bogy-dualism. The very simple "causal mechanism" of both the more naive contemporary Marxists, and the orthodox eco- nomists and historians is doomed as far as the scientific study of man is concerned. First the new emphasis on the study of the generic meaning of value militates, on [68] HISTORY AND FREEDOM the whole, against a mechanistic view of social phe- nomena. Then again students of the more methodo- logically advanced sciences of man (notably psychology and ethnology) tend to abandon the confusing word "cause" altogether and, making as little as possible of the mere postulate of the "uniformity of nature," talk of "correlating x and so and so" instead of saying "so and so is the cause of x." Others, more fearful of as- suming such a profound scientific humility, yet recog- nizing that the old distinction of "final cause" and "effi- cient cause" gave way during the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries to an exclusive devotion to "efficient causes," are beginning to talk about different "levels" of "efficient causality" or about "differential reactions" to "stimuli." All these tendencies among progressive intellectuals in their re-orientation of the sciences of man, are strongly paralleled by the change in the spirit of the labor movement from grim fatalism and its ca- pricious opposite, trial and error desperation; from Marxian necessitarianism and its capricious opposite, "muddling through," to the flexible experimentalism of the syndicalists, of the industrial unionists, of the guild socialists, of Nikolai Lenin. While it would be very rash to expect much from the "vitalists" in biology and while the old "indetermin- ism" is naught but a disguised fatalism, it would be equally rash to place our trust with the "mechanists." r i THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS Nobody has shown more clearly than Emile Boutroux how, as we overlook our mechanical, physical, chemi- cal, biological, psychological, and sociological "laws," as we pass from the study of "natural" phenomena to the observation of more and more distinctively "hu- man" affairs, we find it increasingly difficult to subject our material to any inflexible causal category. "On the one hand, mathematics is necessary only with reference to postulates whose necessity cannot be demonstrated, and so is only hypothetical after all. On the other hand, the application of mathe- matics to reality is only approximate, and seems as though it could be nothing else. Under these conditions, what is the doctrine of determinism? It is a generalization and a passing over to the limit. Certain concrete sciences approach mathematical rigidity; the infer- ence is that they are all destined to attain to the same perfection. The distance that separates us from the goal may be increasingly lessened ; the inference is that it may become nil. This generalization, how- ever, is a theoretical view. As a matter of fact, the distance between mathematics and reality is not on the point of being abolished, and if it is lessening, the number of intermediaries which would have to be intercalated to affect the junction of the two appears more and more to be infinite. Historically the idea of reducing the real to the mathematical is due to ignorance of the incommensurability of the real and of the mathematical; ignorance, in this case, has had good results, for less eagerness would have been shown in making for a goal known to be inaccessible. The application of the Cartesian idea not only demonstrated its fertility, it also transformed into a transcendent ideal what, to Descartes, was a principle and a starting- point. "But if we compare with the present state of science the testimony [70] HISTORY AND FREEDOM of consciousness in favour of freedom, we shall find this testimony far more acceptable now than it was in Cartesian dualism, for instance. When things were reduced to matter and thought, to assume man to be free and his freedom to be efficacious, was to admit that spirit, as substance, moves matter, as discrete substance. Now, this is in- comprehensible, whether we assume that spirit creates motor force or admit that what is not itself motion can directly determine motion. Science, however, by no means establishes the reality of this dualism. It rather shows us a hierarchy of sciences, a hierachy of laws, which we can compare with one another, but not blend into a single science of external things and into a single law. It shows us, besides, along with the relative heterogeneity of laws, their influence upon one another. The physical laws involve living beings, and the biological laws combine their action with that of the physical laws. In presence of these results, we are led to inquire whether thought and motion, along with the abyss that separates them, might not be our mode of bringing things clearly before the mind, rather than their real mode of being. Motion, per se, it would appear, is but an abstraction, as also is thought, per se. What exists are beings whose nature is intermediate between the pure idea of thought and of motion. These beings form a hierarchy, and action moves amongst them from above, downwards, and from below, upwards. Spirit moves matter neither immediately, nor even mediately. There is no crude matter, however, and what constitutes the being of matter is in communication with what constitutes the being of spirit. That which we call the laws of nature is the sum total of the methods we have discovered for adapting things to the mind and subjecting them to be moulded by the will. In the beginning, man saw nothing but caprice and arbitrariness every- where. Consequently, the freedom which he attributes unto himself had nothing on which it could lay hold. Modern science showed him physical law everywhere, and he imagined he saw his freedom being engulfed in universal determinism. A correct idea, however, of the [71] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS natural laws, restores him to true self-possession, and at the same time assures him that his freedom may be efficacious and control phenomena. Of things without and things within, the latter alone, said Epictetus, depend on ourselves, and he was right at the time he spoke. The mechanical laws of nature, revealed by modern science, form, in reality, the chain that binds the without to the within. Instead of being a necessity, they set us free; they enable us to supplement, by active science, that state of contemplation in which the ancients were plunged." Not many of our laborers have cultivated any in- somnia over these subtleties about the history of science or the nature of history or the present status of the deter- ministic-indeterministic controversy. Yet more of them have thought about it than most "educated" people sup- pose. If you doubt it visit the "East Side" in New York City, ask library-attendants there what the inhabitants of the "Ghetto" read most assiduously, and compare your results with what you find engaging the attention of most of your fellows in the "upper classes." An I. W. W. in jail at Seattle wrote to his friend and mine, Professor Carleton Parker, for the Critique of Pure Reason. Nor would any one who knew this man as well as Professor Parker and I did doubt that he would read the book and read" it rigorously. While the growing mi- nority of proletarian critics sharpen their wits on discus- sions more or less like those with which we have just been grappling, the rank and file of the proletariat gropes its way along to a point of view less closely rea- [72] HISTORY AND FREEDOM soned but substantially the same in its conclusions as re- gards the reality of freedom for them. You still hear much talk in little socialist "locals" about "economic determinism." But most of the socialists there will ex- plain to you that Marx was not an "economic determin- ist," and will quote you passages from Marx and Engels to establish for them a more complex point of view. What these socialists and, along with them, many rank and file workmen who would noisily proclaim them- selves anti-socialists are most busy demonstrating and demonstrating beyond cavil is that there are many capitalists in the world who are disproportionately de- pendent on the work of others, and are disproportion- ately rewarded by society, that enormous waste and in- justice follows, but that the difficulty is to be solved by experiments in the greatest laboratory for the social sci- ences in existence, the changing labor-unions, which are verifying with growing autonomy and sense of control the Marxian hypothesis that "surplus value" must be, in the words of the British Labor Party, "for the com- mon good." The most enlightened and audacious of these proletarians state their expectations in terms of direct action, the abolition of the wage system, the re- construction of a new society, "within the shell of the old," the perfecting of a neo-federalistic State which receives rent from autonomous national guilds or indus- trial unions wherein the workers control the productive [73] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS processes and the dignity of labor is restored with the joy of labor. Thoughtful laborers, then, and forward-looking stu- dents of the sciences of man are rapidly ridding them- selves of the notion that human history is to be re- counted in terms of "economic" or any other "mechan- istic" "causal determinism." They are also very sure that history is something much more subtle and demo- cratic than a picturesque account of the doings of "he- roes." They know that it is not merely a faithful nar- rative of "facts," of "incidents." But beyond this agree- ment as to what history is not or is only in part, few men, even the most thoughtful, are clear. Many intel- lectually intrepid men agree gropingly and implicitly on certain constructive features. If you read, to take a few distinguished examples almost at random, va- rious utterances by Professor W. Warde Fowler, Pro- fessor John L. Myres, Professor Percy Gardiner, Pro- fessor James H. Breasted, and many others, you would be vaguely but strongly impressed with a sense of their fundamental concord. But just what is explicitly this emerging reconstructive view of history? It has re- mained for Professor Frederick J. Teggart to make this articulate for us in two recent books of the greatest im- port, volumes around which students of the sciences of man and practical labor-unionists could rally to take many a large survey of the great processes which have [74] HISTORY AND FREEDOM made man what he is, to plan outlines for the present and future conduct of man. We have said that Marx did more than any one else to energize sustained efforts towards the organization of the sciences of man. It has remained for Professor Teggart to broaden the base and to make this organization more coherent. Read- ers of Professor Teggart will observe that he does not utterly reject, but rather purifies and reconciles in a larger whole the most fruitful of the older theories touching the nature of history, the Marxist, for instance, and the views of Buckle. It ought, moreover, to be per- fectly clear that while Professor Teggart's phraseology is through and through "deterministic," his brand of "determinism" presents no incompatibility with that "feeling of freedom" or that "presupposition of free- dom" which we shall find in a later essay playing a very fundamental part in a rapidly spreading critical atti- tude. Nor does Mr. Teggart's "deterministic" view of the sciences of man collide in any way with M. Bou- troux's account of the complexity of sociological cate- gories as contrasted with those of physics. Mr. Teg- gart does not repudiate M. Boutroux's theory of a "hier- archy of beings." As we turn from that stage in our thought which leads to the formulation of a hypothesis, and in which we fairly tingle with a sense, a promise of freedom, towards that stage in which we try, as Dewey describes, to verify our hypotheses and to control our [75] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS data or, in the other words of McDougall, towards that "fourth level of conduct" in which we act on prin- ciple, we naturally look upon data external to us (data which we may control) in a "deterministic" way, or better, in a way which implies that our data is deter- minable, that our knowledge of it may be extended. Thus as we look back in time and abroad in space over those great processes which in a broad sense are making and have made man as he is today, we, if I may so, determinize them. We know that our knowledge will always be all too fragmentary to admit of the absolute determination of processes past, present, or future. But by a provisional determinizing we expect to con- trol our data well enough to save ourselves from many a blind act in the future, to save society from many a pathetic situation. How markedly Professor Teggart's point of view differs from those which are usually styled "determin- istic" shines clear in his repudiation of necessitarian concepts of progress, his scorn of historical monism based on our "Europocentric tradition," his assertion that history is not to be studied artificially as linked chains of "events" but as "processes" which may yield some answer to his fundamental question: "How has man come to be as he is?" These "processes" turn out to be something much more complex than the processes which in our mechanistic "natural sciences" like astron- [76] HISTORY AND FREEDOM omy are brought under the sovereignty of mathematics. They are more like those of biology and sociology which M. Boutroux places so high in his hierarchy of progressively non-mechanistic sciences; they are more complex (as Professor Teggart sees them) than the processes of Darwinian biology with its emphasis on continuity and gradualness; they are more clear than the quilted stuff which masquerades as the stream of group life in that loose aggregate of information which is usually called "sociology." A few phrases from Pro- fessor Teggart will at once make the non-mechanistic, complex, and definite character of these processes clear. He finds, to be sure, that "Man is prone to remain as he is, to fixity in ideas and in ways of doing things," and that "only through nature's insistent driving has he been shaken out of his immobility and set wayfaring upon the open road," that "political units have arisen at cer- tain definitely circumscribed places . . . not con- sciously selected or decided upon by men" but deter- mined by the conformation of the earth's surface, that is "by localization of habitable areas and the possibilities of travel." But he also shows the process by which the "comparatively recent phenomenon" of "political or- ganization" arose in a world of primitive kinship socie- ties and he emphasizes the crucial importance of a study of this startling transition which is so significant for us because it has not even today been completed and just [77] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS here he gives us ample opportunity to reconcile his par- ticular brand of "determinism" with a reverence for moral autonomy. It is true that political units have appeared, not by voluntary rejection of kinship organi- zations, but under stress of the conflict of two races brought into collision through wanderings which may be traced to harsh geographical influences. But "the cardinal point is that the conflict, in breaking up the older organization, liberated the individual man, if but for a moment, from the dominance of the group, its observances, its formulae, and its ideas." And we may add : this being so, these individuals would more or less explicitly formulate for themselves the principle of moral autonomy or "direct action," which has inspired them and their successors from the days when the first egoistic warrior-king urged it (perhaps in the form of a divine origin theory) against his enemies and his weaken kinsmen, to the days when Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Kant generalized it for democracy, and to the days when contemporary trade-unionists emphasize it as the basis of emancipating their clasas, their crafts, and themselves. In other words, it is doubtful if primitive man thinks of freedom very much, if at all, in his kin- ship organization, surrounded as he is with taboos; but, as men pass to political organization, more and more frequently are they fired with an inner sense of freedom. [78] HISTORY AND FREEDOM We are not interested in the metaphysical demonstra- bility of absolute "free will" or "determinism;" we are merely interested in the question as to whether that sub- jective sense of freedom, that "presupposition" which moves us in moments when we have the greatest sense of creativity and self-control, is at all congruous with the mood which investigates the problem of "how man has come to be as he is." Indeed Professor Teggart's argument, as he himself insists, enables us to work at last towards a new and en- lightened individualism the moment we grasp the truth that "throughout the past we are presented with the anomaly of men righting to maintain the institutional- ized vestiges of the self-assertion of aggressive individ- uals on occasions of long-past upheavals." Surely this intellectual's view could well serve to give energy to the proletarian protesting against the "institutionalized ves- tiges of the self-assertion of aggressive" capitalistic 'in- dividuals on occasions of" comparatively recent, unven- erable "upheavals." The oppressed proletarian will also be confirmed in his sense of autonomy to learn that "the spirit of self-assertion has arisen from time to time in the subordinate elements of composite groups." Let Professor Teggart proceed in order that the joy of syndicalists and soviet-leaders may be unconfined. "What we ordinarily designate 'constitutional history' is largely oc- cupied with the efforts put forth by one or another element, class, or [79] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS order included within a political group to contest the dominance of a ruling minority, and the theory of sovereign ownership. From this internal contest has arisen the theory of individual 'rights' (of which perhaps the most fundamental is that of preventing other people from interfering with a man's use of his own property), and the theory that political authorities may be tested and reformed in accordance with current ideas." But Professor Teggart's irrefutable iconoclasm only begins here. He will delight both militant proletarians and pioneers of the new education with his warning against "the preponderant disposition on the part of students of man to regard the exterior rules and con- ventions, laws and social usages as the essential matter for consideration." They will jubilate over his scepti- cal regard of the "opinion" of "legislators, publicists, and social workers," that "the advancement of man is to be effected by the simple expedient of modifying the existent regulations." Syndicalists and pragmatists, seekers of an alliance of intellectuals and wage-workers, making rejoinders to the over-zealous Marxist who belittles "ideology" as contrasted with "economic causes," will be interested in Teggart's acceptance of the "practical agreement among all classes of investigators, psychologists, logic- ians, and anthropologists that the differentia of man consists in his possession of articulate speech or spoken language" not in those materialistic gifts and disposi- tions which "he shares in common with his closest non- [80] HISTORY AND FREEDOM human relations." This leads our author to the decis- ion that any organization of the sciences of man must, "if we are to consider the contest of life in addition to the exterior forms of human association . . . concern itself with the factors and processes through which the idea-systems of different groups have come to be as we find them today." From this it is a short step to a com- parison and contrast between civilized and primitive man, in which Professor Teggart's sentences will serve as excellent material for the proletarian in search of the motives conscious or unconscious which actuate the capitalist, the parasitical artist, the bigoted churchman, the orthodox educator, and the demagogic politician, who try to keep us in a state of comparative savagery. For, as Professor Teggart emphasizes, "primitive man does not 'think,' he performs definitely prescribed ac- tions under the eye of the community which, in turn, is vitally concerned in the exactness with which the repre- sentation of formula or ceremony is carried out." Once more, then, the lesson for us is that real progress im- plies autonomy in the face of the widespread idolatry of conventions. Thus in our critical analysis of his- tory we come to the history of criticism : "It has been indicated that the breakdown of kindred organiza- tion, following upon migration and collision, tended to release the individual from the domination of the group, and to create a situation in which personal initiative and self-assertion became possible. It has [81] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS now to be pointed out that, while this release may be regarded as affecting primarily the submission of the individual to the mandatory authority of the group, essentially it opens for the individual the possibility of thinking for himself without reference to group prece- dent. The emergence of individuality, with its accompanying mani- festations of personal initiative and self-assertion, is intimately asso- ciated with the beginnings of independent mental activity, of thinking, which may lead the individual to question the validity of inherited group ideas. "This striking result, it must be understood, is not achieved by the individual of his own volition or accord; it is thrust upon him by the force of circumstances. To make the point clear, we may say, specu- latively, that had there ever been but one system of ideas common to all men, advancement would have been impossible, for progress in ideas springs from comparison, and a sense of difference could not arise from contemplation of different instances of the same thing. Con- versely, the critical spirit is easily enough aroused by the juxtaposition of different means for attaining the same end; so that different ob- servances for effecting the same result, different mythological ex- planations of the same phenomena, when brought into contact, may be expected to lead to questioning and comparisons. "That some such path has actually been followed in the past seems clear. Ernst Curtius pointed out, long ago, that the influence of sea-navigation upon the development of the Greeks has been very marked, as it suddenly brought face to face men who had been living under widely different conditions, and hence induced an endless comparing, learning and teaching. How easily we may add to Professor Teggart's example of the development of the Greeks and to the others which follow in his book the example of the develop- ment of trade-unions ! And we may do well, as we read [82] HISTORY AND FREEDOM the following sentences, to think of the Mexicans, Afri- cans, Japanese, Italians, Slavs, Celts and other races in America mingling in the hop-fields, the textile-mills, and the packing-houses, and learning to unite and assert their new convictions against captains of industry and employers' associations. "The important point is that different ideas in regard to the same subject, when maintained in opposition by members of the same group, necessarily evoke comparison and critical discussion. The outcome of this is not always, nor even generally, a choice between two alternatives, for the debate will leave neither of the original positions wholly unchanged, and hence a new idea-system will arise which is not a selection of materials drawn from various sources, but a resultant of the juxtaposition of different bodies of thought. . . . "In confirmation of the hypothesis that the changes which have con- tributed to human advancement have ensued from the collision of groups from widely different habitats, and hence of different idea- systems, we may point to the initial stages of those great outbursts of intellectual activity which have distinguished every people which has risen above the level of primitive man. So, the historian of China is forced to repeat, from chapter to chapter, the formula: 'first the successful invasion, the destruction of the old power, and then the formation of new nations, governments, and types of men,' and the summary of results in each case is typified in the statement that 'not the least of the Mongols' gifts to China was the stimulus and fertili- zation of the native intellect in the domain of the imagination.' Similarly, Vincent Smith, the latest historian of India remarks that 'the rule of the able and long-lived monarchs of the Gupta dynasty coincided with an extraordinary outburst of intellectual activity of all kinds. The personal patronage of the kings, no doubt, has some [83] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS effect, but deeper causes must have been at work to produce such results. Experience proves that the contact or collision of diverse modes of civilization is the most potent stimulus to intellectual and artistic progress, and, in my opinion, the eminent achievements of the Gupta period are mainly due to such contact with foreign civil- izations, both on the east and on the west.' Again the entire history of Babylonia and Assyria is an epitome of such situations, and this leads a recent historian to observe: 'It may be put down as an axiom that nowhere does a high form of culture arise without the com- mingling of diverse elements.' 'The Euphrates valley from the time it looms upon the historical horizon,' he continues, 'is the seat of a mixed population. Egyptian culture is the- outcome of the mixture of Semitic with Hamitic elements. Civilization begins in Greece with the movements of Asiatic peoples, partly at least non-Aryan, across the Agean sea. In Rome we find the old Aryan stock mixed with a strange element known as Etruscan. In modern times, France, Germany and England furnish illustrations of the process of the com- mingling of diverse ethnic elements leading to advanced forms of civilization.' Ultimately, attention may be called to Petrie's con- clusion in his memorable study of The Revolutions of Civilization that 'every civilization of a settled population tends to incessant decay from- its maximum condition ; and this decay continues until it is too weak to initiate anything, when a fresh comes in, and utilizes the old stock to graft on, both in blood and culture. As soon as the mix- ture is well started, it rapidly grows on the old soil, and pro- duces a new wave of civilization. There is no new generation with- out a mixture of blood, parthenogenesis is unknown in the birth of nations." It is perhaps most significant of all for our conten- tion that Professor Teggart's large "determinism" is perfectly congruous with our emphasis of autonomy, of HISTORY AND FREEDOM the capture of self-control, of Freudian "sublimation" that he firmly repudiates any notion that his theory of migrations, collisions, and the release of individual idea-systems implies the permanent necessity of war as a goad to progress. We have but to master a scientific outlook over the panorama of the centuries and its meaning for us, so Teggart thinks, we have but "to un- derstand the elements of history" and we can to a con- siderable extent control them. Even though "progress is exceptional" and "fixity and stagnation" all but "uni- versal" we are thus given the talisman to make progress more frequent, more self-conscious. So, just as the so- cialist has come to smooth out the angularities of his ecstatic fatalism over the "class-war" and the "dictator- ship of the proletariat" and has more and more prog- nosticated the dissolution of all fortuitous classes so we may plan more and more sophisticated stimuli for "re- leases" we may learn to Induce releases by methods more humane than the wars of political states or of economic classes. And if "releases" are bound to be "catastrophic" we may yet discover how to manage cat- astrophic changes so that they will not unnerve us, as they do now in the days of the Bolsheviki when fear breeds such tragic hysteria among our western conser- vatives. ^ With our gain in the knowledge of man's ways we will also be less fatalistic over the fact that there have [85] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS always been, and perhaps always will be, "some in- dividuals with greater personal initiative than the ma- jority of their fellows." We may get the best from these "geniuses" and aid them to the richest and truest self-expression without allowing them to oppress us. It is interesting to remember in this connection that, at the other end of the scale, the feeble-minded, the psyco- paths, and the insane are differently treated today by the psychiatrists. Once the criminologist did little more than preach the negative doctrines of segrega- tion and sterilization. Now, while he quite properly continues to preach these, he adds positive programs that these unfortunates may in their segregation have the fullest possible self-expression. Study not the crime in abstraction, he says, but the individual as a concrete whole. And the psychoanalysts are showing us that the class-war that rages within each of us is not to be successfully consummated by automatic sup- pressions, but by democratic reconciliations of con- flicting impulses. Truly equalitarianism gains apace, despite the awful rack of the Industrial Revolution and the grim findings of biology; the dreams of Locke and Jefferson, Shelley and Marx and William Morris have not been dreamed in vain. But it is high time that we refrained from our ap- plications and reconciliations and gave Professor Teg- gart the floor for a detailed sketch of his great synthesis. [86] HISTORY AND FREEDOM "The scientific student of human history cannot accept Darwin's assumptions and procedure as a model upon which to pattern his in- quiry, but he is not, therefore, left without guidance. An alterna- tive method for approaching the investigation of how things have come to be as they are was suggested by Huxley. The great exponent of Darwinism pointed out that any hypothesis of progressive modification must take into consideration the fact of persistence without pro- gression through indefinite periods, and, furthermore, urged upon Darwin's attention the possibility of occasional 'rapid leaps' or changes in nature. In short, Huxley recognized three different sets of pro- cesses as contributory to the emergence of the present status: first, those represented in fixity, stability or persistence; second, those manifested in slow continuous modifications; and, third, those re- vealed in explicit changes or events. "In later discussion the elements unrecognized by Darwin have more and more forced themselves into the foreground of debate, and have colored the views held by all investigators. Thus De Vries supposed that after periods of relative fixity, during which they are subject only to fluctuating variations, living beings may pass through shorter periods when their forms are abruptly modified in different directions by discontinuous changes. So, too, George Darwin ex- pressed the opinion that the study of stability and instability furnishes the problems which the physicist and biologist alike attempt to solve, and he envisaged the course of 'evolution,' not as uniform and slow, but as divided between a sequence of slight continuous modifica- tions accumulating through a long period, and somewhat sudden trans- formations which would appear as historical events. Again, his brother, Francis Darwin, regarded 'evolution,' not as a process of modification, but as a process of drilling organisms into habits, and thought of an organism as a machine in which energy can be set free by some kind of releasing mechanism. This latter idea . . . has been car- [87] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS ried further by William Bateson, who also believes that variation occurs as a definite event, and that we can see no changes in progress around us in the contemporary world which can be imagined likely to culminate in the evolution of forms distinct in the larger sense. Finally, not to multiply instances unnecessarily, the essential features of what I have called the alternative mode of approach is brought out by Hans Gadow in asking why it is that mammalian material can produce what is denied to the lower classes. Why have they not all by this time reached the same grade of perfection ? 'Because,' he says, 'every new group is less hampered by tradition, much of which must be discarded by the new departure, and some of its energy is set free to follow up this new course, straight, with ever-growing results, until in its turn this becomes an old rut out of which a new jolt leads once more into fresh fields.' "The savage is completely hedged about by conventions, at once minute and obligatory, the violation of which is attended by drastic penalties. Hence, as McDougall remarks, 'in primitive societies the precision of the customary code and the exact coincidence of public opinion with the code, allow no occasion for deliberation upon con- duct, nor scope for individual judgment and choice.' 'We see the same result among all savage communities still existing on the earth, and among all peoples of whom we have any record at the dawn of civilization. Their actions, whether individual or collective, are hampered, controlled, or enforced at every step by custom.' It is, unquestionably, due to this rigid enforcement of custom that the lower groups have remained for long periods of time in a fixed or stationary condition, that their manners, customs, and modes of life have continued almost unaltered for generations. "While, however, the discipline of the individual by the group may be more immediately apparent in groups less advanced than our [88] HISTORY AND FREEDOM own, the same process is visibly operative in modern life. For, in- deed, what we mean by 'civilization' and 'culture' is neither more nor less than the store of ideas, beliefs, conventional opinions, and tastes which is transmitted from each generation to the next, and into which each member of the community is inducted by his elders. And while the modern teacher, but recently become self-conscious of his function, has much to say of the responsibility of the com- munity for the 'education' of the child, there has been, as Cook re- marks, a pretty successful education of the race from the days of the primitive prehistoric man. It is but formulating the practice of the ages to say that the resources of government and law, religion and morality, must be enlisted to constrain the individual in order to procure a common likeness in impulses, habits, and ideas within the group. "It follows from this unsought initiation into the idea-system of his ancestors that, even in the most backward group, the individual enters upon life at a relatively high stage of human advancement; he stands upon a platform which has been laboriously constructed by his unremembered predecessors. At the same time, it must be recognized that, even in the most advanced groups, this initiation imposes severe limitations. At best, the platform is narrow; and the individual acquires habits of thought and a fixity of ideas which ren- der him unduly tenacious of what has been inculcated in him, and unduly suspicious and obstinate in presence of what may appear to him to be different or new. While, then, the educative discipline tends to preserve what has been acquired, it presents a very real obstacle to further advance. In face of this consideration, the theory commonly expressed, that the 'inheritance of the permanent achieve- ments of one generation by the next is the main factor of progress,' that, in fact, human advancement has been due to the maintenance of tradition, to the drilling through which the individual has been put [89] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS in possession of the acquisition of the group, will be seen to express but a partial truth, for if this process had been the only one in operation, advancement would, manifestly, have been impossible. "The processes of modification are of various types and these are of varying degrees of influence. In the first place, we may readily see that while the initial discipline of any two individuals may pro- ceed along the same lines, and while their lives may be led in the same surroundings, their experiences in life will never be identical, and in maturity their responses to any given excitation will not be exactly the same. The difference of response will be all the greater if the lives of the two men have been passed in different circum- stances. Again, while every member of a primitive group is drilled in its traditional observances and customs, the performances of these obligatory acts cannot be identically transmitted from generation to generation; unconsciously and unobserved, modifications will creep in. This is true even in respect to verbal formula;, the value of which is believed to reside in their exact repetition, for here, in addition to the possible treacheries of memory, the reproduction will be affected by the unceasing modifications in the use of words. Language, in- deed, provides in itself a perfect illustration of the fact that use entails wear, and it is in a language that the processes of modification have been most carefully observed. "Despite the prepossessions we unconsciously absorb from an ac- quaintance with biological discussions, we must avoid the assumption that human history displays any such regular and even process of change as is postulated in the Darwinian conception of 'evolution.' This supposition leads inevitably to theories of slow unbroken prog- ress directed towards some determinable end, but the evidence before us provides no basis for optimistic philosophizing. What we find [90] HISTORY AND FREEDOM actually throughout the course of history are the unmistakable results of constant processes manifested in fixity or persistence, tempered by other processes which gradually effect a modification of this rigidity. In addition to these two sets of processes, however, there is abundant evidence of the fact that at different times and in different places certain events have led to significant changes in the groups affected, and that these changes stand in direct relation to the phe- nomenon of 'advance.' "Investigation in different fields of the study of man has led many contemporary scholars Petrie, Haddon, Rivers, Mackinder, Hogarth, Myres, Temple, Balfour, Smith, Hall, Jastrow, Sollas, to mention but a few to observe that human advancement has followed upon the collision of different groups. Pieced together, the con- clusions arrived at so far may be summarized in the statement that definite advance has taken place in the past when a group, forced from its habitat, ultimately by a change of climate, has been brought into collision with another differing from it considerably in culture, and has remained upon the invaded territory . . . "It is only when we take a further step, and come to ask how conceivably usurpation of territory, or war, or admixture of peoples could affect intellectual advancement, that the underlying problem is brought to light. It cannot well be assumed that either the inter- marriage of differing stocks or the struggle of battle will of itself bring about this result; and while it is said that 'if you want to change a man's opinions transplant him, it does not follow that the change will be effected by the scenery. In short, the 'change' that leads to advancement is mental. What, then, is of importance to notice is that when enforced migration is followed by collision, and this by the alien occupation of territory, there ensues as a result of the conflict the breaking down or subversion of the established idea- system of the groups involved in the struggle. The breakdown of [91] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS the old and unquestioned system of ideas, though it may be felt as a public calamity and a personal loss, accomplishes the release of the individual mind from the set forms in which it has been drilled, and leaves men opportunity to build up a system for themselves anew. This new idea-system will certainly contain old elements, but it will not be like the old, for the consolidated group, confronted with con- flicting bodies of knowledge, of observances and of interpretations, will experience a critical awakening, and open wondering eyes upon a new world. Thus it is not the physical contact of men that is of supreme importance in human advancement, but the overthrow of the domi- nance of the traditional system in which the individuals composing the group have been trained, and which they have unconditionally accepted; though advancement seems rarely to have been possible, in the past, save when diverse groups have been set face to face in uesperate struggle. "Here, then, is a process which differs essentially from those pre- viously described, for it is manifested only when some exterior dis- turbance or shock has, for the time being, weakened or overcome the influence or effect of the previously described process; when mani- fested, however, this process is the same in all cases. The hypothesis required may now be stated in the form that human advancement follows upon the mental release, of the members of a group or of a single individual, from the authority of an established system of ideas. This release has, in the past, been occasioned through the breaking down of previous idea-systems by prolonged struggles be- tween opposing groups which have been brought into conflict as a re- sult of the involuntary movements of peoples. What follows is the building up of a new idea-system, which is not a simple cumulation of the knowledge previously accepted, but the product of critical ac- tivity stirred by the perception of conflicting elements in the opposed idea-systems. [92] HISTORY AND FREEDOM "In modern groups, the participation of the individual in the group idea-system is irregular and incomplete, and . . . under actual conditions each member of a given community acquires a personal system of ideas which differs considerably from that of his fellows, though drawn from the same source. As a consequence, the contact of individuals, being accompanied by the interchange of differing personal views, leads to a continual criticism and modifi- cation of our outlook upon the world; and, indeed, the attitude which we regarded as specifically characteristic of members of ad- vanced groups is a wide tolerance of these differences in ideas, and a conscious admission of the merely tentative validity of our most cherished convictions. "I have indicated that, throughout the past, human advancement ha, to a marked degree, been dependent upon war. From this cir- cumstance, many investigators have inferred that war is, in itself, a blessing however greatly disguised. We may see, however, that this judgment is based upon observations which have not been pressed far enough to elicit a scientific explanation. War has been, times without number, the antecedent of advance, but in other cases, such as the introduction of Buddhism into China, the same result has followed upon the acceptance of new ideas without the introductory formality of bitter strife. As long, indeed, as we continue to hold tenaciously to customary ideas and ways of doing things, so long must we live in anticipation of the conflict which this persistence must inevitably induce. "It requires no lengthy exposition to demonstrate that the ideas which lead to strife, civil or international, are not the products of the highest knowledge available, are not the verified results of scientific inquiry, but are 'opinions' about matters which, at the moment, we do not fully understand. Among modern peoples, the most important [93] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS of these opinions are concerned with the ordering of human affairs ; and in this area all our 'settlements' of the problems which confront us must continue to be temporary and uncertain compromises until we shall have come to apply the method of science in their solution. Science is not a body of beliefs and opinions, but is a way or method of dealing with problems. It has been said by a notable contemporary that men begin the search for truth with fancy, after that they argue, and at length they try to find out. Scientific method is the term we use for the orderly and systematic effort to find out. Hitherto, the most serious affairs of men have been decided upon the basis of argu- mentation, carried, not infrequently, to the utmost limits of destruc- tion and death. It should be possible to apply in this domain the method of finding out, and it has been my hope to contribute, in however tentative a manner, to this end." In sketching the history of any great tendency of the last two hundred years, in considering the modern aspects of the momentous transition from kinship soci- eties to territorial societies (political states) concerning which Teggart has written so profoundly, we must al- ways visualize two great synchronous wars, wars which have their systole and their diastole, but which have been all but continuous: the war of the modern nation and empire makers and the war of economic classes. To attempt to think in this way seems at first to court the confusion of Babel. But many tragic misunder- standings, many tragic overemphases, diplomatic errors, military mistakes, imprisonings just and unjust, riots and alarms and lynchings, hectic debates, suicides, disgraces are today swarming because of our inability [94] HISTORY AND FREEDOM to recognize and to think and act implacably, cour- ageously, unequivocally, critically and constructively, in relation to both of these wars at the same time. And those who are destined to win the great diplomatic and military and economic victories of the immediate future, will be those who can think with the least em- barrassment and act with the greatest decisiveness and complexity in the two wars. You can neglect neither. You can wish away neither to any purpose. You can underemphasize neither. The "pacifist" shrinks away too much from the one or the other or both. The angry hand of the chauvinist trembles too much. In sketching the history of any great tendency of the last two hundred years we must, moreover, look not only at the two processes which we have described as two synchronous wars, but also at the process which is a progressive dissemination of the sense of freedom among all kinds and conditions of individuals as in- dividuals. This is to take the view of evolutionary ex- perimentation, which is, in a number of variations, the view of Dewey, McDougall, Boutroux, Freud and Teggart, the view, indeed, of many other brilliant for- ward-looking thinkers whom we cannot hope to assem- ble here. This doctrine of evolutionary experimental- ism, a doctrine of the probably discontinuous, but as- suredly progressive spreading and intensification of autonomous self-confidence, self-conquest, self-develop- [95] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS ment, i.e., sublimation, is brilliantly confirmed by an examination of the particular processes in the labor- movement. History is the orderly study of the hitherto almost purely accidental release of freedom with a view to making freedom universal. History, in other words, records the tremendous influences of circumstances on man, but also man's own gropings as a race and as an individual, towards that free reconciliation of his own inner conflicts of desires, and the conflicts of his desires with circumstances, which we call psychoanalysis. Professor Teggart's book closes with a general ex- pression of hope that the "release" may ultimately be so understood and controlled, as to yield to the individual all the joys of "advancement" without the horrors of violent collision as a necessary concomitant. Just here psychoanalysis can supply for Professor Teggart many of the details. It has elaborated a technique for so aid- ing the "release" in each individual as to grant him the full measure of healthy emancipation without the curse of violence. And psychoanalysis lifts the "in- ertia" which is the curse of what, with a blasphemous disregard of the etymology of the word, we furnish our youth as "education." [96] VI LIBERTY In France during the French Revolution there was a good deal of talk about giving people liberty and there was the guillotine. In the United States today we talk much of the land of liberty and we allow at large prominent men whom competent psychiatrists would certainly classify as paranoiacs, while we im- prison certain individuals because they are altogether too much like Jesus Christ. The reason why eighteenth century France and twentieth century America fell into such tragic equivocations is because neither coun- try faced with sufficient courage the great law that no- body can grant liberty to any one except to himself. Russia has faced this, sublimely non-resistant before a great real principle of life. It is fair, apparently, to say that the discovery of the moral autonomy of the individual is the supreme dis- covery of modern human thought. Undoubtedly al- most every primitive warrior-king, who experienced "release" in the trial and error transition from the kinship society to the political state, articulated for his exclusive self some version of the doctrine of moral [97] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS autonomy. All the great religious seers, notably Buddha and Christ, have discovered it for themselves whether they preached it or not. In the seventeenth century Descartes practised autonomy, very shrewdly, without preaching it at all, except in a vague odor of theology. In the same century even as thoughtless a person as Lovelace, the cavalier, realized for a moment of lyrical breathlessness, that "stone walls do not a prison make" for a man who is free. In the same cen- tury John Bunyan, by virtue of a sort of psychoanalysis of himself that anticipates the rougher features of the intricate and subtle Freudian tactic, gradually re- lieved himself of most of the conflicts within him- self which imprisoned him, and finally sublimated his somewhat morbid and decidedly infantile im- pulses to lie and swear, by writing in prison a sublime lie and truth called Pilgrim's Progress. One could multiply from the seventeenth century, wherein modern thought begins, examples of humble in- dividuals, no longer kings, who found out for them- selves the principle of moral autonomy. But it took another century to formulate it as a universal prin- ciple for all men. This is the greatest achieve- ment of Immanuel Kant. But his version of it reeks of the study. And his elaboration of it was often all but a denial of it. We had to wait another century for a bolder and more popular generalization [98] LIBERTY of moral autonomy by the French syndicalists, that is the French syndicalists of the proletariat, not of the parlor. From the various strictly proletarian phras- ings of it we may select the version by Pouget. "Direct action means this: the workers struggling constantly with their present environment, no longer expect anything from men, powers or forces outside of their own ranks. It means that, against our present society, which only knows 'citizen,' a new society is rising, made up of 'producers.' The producers, realiz- ing that the social body is shaped by its system of pro- duction, intend to transform entirely the capitalistic mode of production, to eliminate the employers and thereby to conquer industrial freedom. Direct action means that the working-classes recognize the principle of freedom and autonomy instead of bowing to the principle of authority." And now, to cap the climax, the most quiet and fun- damental of rebels, Freud, has developed an elaborate scientific technique to verify the essence of freedom as non-resistance. Proletarians may, on the impulse, cry out that this Viennese intellectual, with his talk of non-resistance, can be no ally of theirs. But hold. Let them examine their own "sabotage." They begin by resistance, by putting emery in the oil cups, by "going slow on the job." But at best by this resistance they confer on themselves merely a phantom of liberty and [99] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS a phantom already on the wing. As Mr. Ordway Tead has pointed out in his Instincts in Industry, such sabo- tage arouses in the sinners themselves an "antipathy" which "reveals in its true light the vigor of the con- structive impulse." The resistance by crude sabotage, then, is a resistance to one's own inner nature and, therefore, cannot confer liberty. Workmen soon dis- cover this and try a new tack. They decide not to break, but to obey all the petty laws with which the employer lends respectability to his business. But the employer does not expect them to obey these laws. To obey them, as on the railroads, will preserve the workmen from accident, but it will tie up the traffic. But the workmen decide to obey them. That is, they decide upon non-resistance. The traffic is tied up. Employers become humble. Through non-resistance the workers find freedom, confer liberty upon them- selves. In other words, they have blundered into the Freudian technique of non-resistance. Like John Bun- yan they are rough and ready psychoanalysts. Real non-resistance, i.e. the refusal to resist one's own best self, is not a passive but a militant trait that often in- volves the sternest defiance of the community. The greatest moments of the Russian revolution, from the first act to the brilliant Bolshevik coup, prove, as our real knowledge of them accumulates, to be gigantic mass-acts of non-resistance, non-resistance to truth, jus- LIBERTY tice, love. Through non-resistance to those deeper laws of his temperament which convention bids him silence, thus alone the individual discovers freedom and confers liberty upon himself. Thus, by armies, have the militant proletarians worked out in considerable detail the great principle of moral autonomy crudely ejaculated by an occasional primitive warrior-king, lyrically or meditatively hinted at by a larger number of still isolated humanists of the nineteenth century, elaborately articulated by Im- manuel Kant. But Kant himself, as we saw in an earlier chapter, left us all in difficulties by his dualism of "pure reason" with its rigorous category of causality and "practical reason" presupposing freedom, a dualism somewhat more subtle than Descartes', but still a dualism of the kind which strives in vain to shut off the flow of life in two static compartments, like a man trying to divide a river by drawing his cane through it. It is as though Descartes tried to divide the river by drawing his cane horizontally from bank to bank, while Kant, with a keener sense of reality, drew his cane vertically from mouth to source. Fichte and Hegel tried to reunite the "pure reason" and the "practical reason" into a stream confluent with life. Doubtless there is an enormous amount of weight in both of these thinkers still undiscovered, even by [WI] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS their most devoted commentators. But their followers are embarrassed by each new democratic achievement, they quarrel remotely and politely as to whether Hegel- ianism leads to Kaiserism, and altogether they remain aloof. But Karl Marx, in following the naturalistic "left wing" of the Hegelian movement, partly because of this influence and partly in spite of it, came closer to a large understanding of the terrible processes of modern society in the darkest days of its Industrial Revolution, and left forecasts of the processes of our own moment that lend themselves readily to our play- ing a coherent part in the turmoil of our day. Marx allowed the members of the "right wing" to contemplate the absolute reasonableness of the World Spirit of which Hegel told them they were all a part, and limited himself to "mother earth," plus a myth- ological force which he vaguely termed materialistic, but of which he made much more healthy use than did his rivals of their elusively harmonious Absolute. Marx found that this materialistic force exerted itself through the "tool of production" to mould social rela- tions, the state, morals, religion and all our most cher- ished values. If the tool of production is a flint axe, men live in a more scattered way and probably moral- ize somewhat tenuously about "the sanctity of private property." But if the tool of production is a steam driven factory owned by a capitalist and operated by [ 102 ] LIBERTY our army of propertyless proletarians, both the em- ployer who wishes to keep his investments, and the em- ployees who feel helpless after they have sold out their bodies for wages, become so awed in the presence of this dead property that they elevate it to an importance far greater than that of human life. Little room for liberty or freedom here! Yet Marx foresaw that these processes were rending bourgeois society because, though the means of production were becoming social- ized, the control remained with the great investor- anarchists. Some day a realization of this paradox would be driven into the skulls of the proletarians long disciplined to work co-operatively to the rhythm of the machine. Then they would say: "Why this inconsistency, why not socialization of the control as well as of the means of production? Why this excres- cent game of competition for the pleasure of a few on the surface of a great movement which otherwise would know far less discord?" Thus would come the prole- tarian revolution. How fast? How slow? Here, there, or everywhere at once? Marx was too flexible and cosmopolitan to suggest more than tentative hypo- theses, generally very shrewd and helpful ones, which he was always ready to vary in the face of new realities. People have noted that he made too much of the influence of the tool on man, too little of the influence of man the inventor or elaborator on the tool. But he did , [ 103 ] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS well at the climax of the Industrial Revolution to em- phasize the mechanistic drive. He knew that men would never make this mechanistic drive less horrible until they learned in all humility to understand it. He knew that sentimental phantasies would never heal the world malady. He asked us to face reality. He antici- pated Freud. The implication of his philosophy is that through non-resistance to laws far deeper than our fancies, through this alone comes freedom. For the more a man understands the more does his inner feeling of freedom grow. And we must supple- ment Marx's mighty work by an investigation of the inner feelings of the individual to round out his in- vestigation of the external circumstances of life. If we do this with a sense of that biological evolution which Darwin was investigating while Marx carried on his work, we will break down the old dualism of the "pure" and "practical" reason. We will realize that in the flow of thought man feels driven at the beginning and feels free at the diapason. We will realize that (in re- ligion, philosophy, science, and art alike) accurate thinking is impossible, unless we recognize that ever changing dimuendo and crescendo of the sense of free- dom, and allow for it exactly as a physicist allows in an experiment for a play of energy which he does not understand, but knows to be present and fraught with momentous consequences for him. This doctrine of [ 104] LIBERTY the dimuendo and crescendo of the sense of freedom and its bearing on the proletarian revolution we will now sketch. It will be hardly necessary to remind the reader that it is only the radical minority of workers (though a minority scattered about all parts of western civiliza- tion) that has articulated clearly the great critical principle of moral autonomy (though all of them feel it) and its economic and political corollaries, abolition of the wage system and the formation of a new and more scientific federalism. But we may readily observe that the minority of proletarians with critical insight is distinctly larger and more active than the minority of "cultured" men with critical insight. Great critics, in every walk of life, are much more rare than great poets and great business-men. We can better see the reason for this and we can better understand the deeper impulses and inner conflicts of proletarianism, if we correlate here William McDougall's description of self-consciousness and the levels of conduct. Let us paraphrase and exemplify McDougall's theory with an account of the typical evolution of an unskilled migra- tory worker of the Pacific states. The migratory worker is shamefully neglected by our society until des- peration goads him to some perfectly natural act of vio- lence, whereupon he is execrated and cast into a filthy jail with little or no chance of a fair trial. McDougall [105] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS chooses as an example of the "first level of conduct" a child moved entirely by the hunger-impulse, using various devices to get food beyond his reach by a trial and error method, the success of which is confirmed by pleasure, the failure by pain. Now even cultivated adults are as children in the presence of many new situations. And McDougall's psychological analysis here is hardly too simple for our adult migratory laborer under some circumstances. Some migratory laborers, indeed, are psychopaths and are almost literally children as far as will-control in a crisis is con- cerned. But McDougall's analysis of the mind on the first level is hardly too simple for many a strong-willed migratory laborer with impulses brutally starved by his shifting environment. Suppose, however, our mi- gratory worker remembers that if he seizes certain much-needed food he will be arrested. A conflict of fear and hunger shakes him. Here, according to Mc- Dougall, we have a second level of conduct wherein the instincts are modified, not merely by pleasure and pain, but by "the influence of rewards and punishments administered more or less systematically by the social environment." This, of course, is the level at which most of us, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, re- main most of the time. We should all do well to be cautious of patronizing our hypothetical migratory worker here. Suppose now that at this stage a delegate [106] LIBERTY of the Industrial Workers of the World comes along and preaches to our migratory worker and his associates the doctrine of the abolition of the wage-system. Our migratory worker may be too abject to appreciate the deeper implications of such an hypothesis, but he may appreciate a recommended tactic: "Sabotage" in the crudest sense of the term, covert violence (like the burn- ing of crops) to terrify the employer into more humane treatment. "Sabotage" would also be for our worker an eccentric release of his abnormally repressed instinct of self-assertion, his perfectly human longing for a sense of dignity. Barbarous as his conduct may be he has pene- trated to McDougall's third level of conduct where his actions "are controlled in the main by the anticipation of social praise and blame," the praise and blame of the only society that seems to have the slightest kinship with him and the slightest regard for justice, his squalid fellow-workers and the rhapsodical agitator. He may be apprehended and sent to jail. If he doesn't die there of tuberculosis he may emerge more abject and desper- ate than ever (especially if he is somewhat feeble- minded), unable to learn from experience, hopelessly thrown back to the first and second levels of conduct. Or (if he is, as the majority of migratory workers are, a fairly normal man) his conversation with people in jail and in court may help him to refine somewhat his hypothesis and his tactic into more subtle forms of vio- [107] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS lence or to give his life to preaching the gospel of the Industrial Workers of the World even to the point of seeking no longer to better himself in any emphatic or persistent way. But here he would be arriving within sight of McDougall's fourth level, the "highest stage, in which conduct is regulated by an ideal . . . that enables a man to act in the way that seems to him right regardless of the praise or blame of his immediate social environment," a level to which, according to McDougall, few attain, or to which, we might more accurately say, none of us attain very often for very long, though perhaps a considerable number if not all of us attain to it for fleeting moments and a very few gradually discipline themselves into sustaining it as a fairly unbroken essence of their lives. Just here some hasty sceptic may ask whether we are plotting sentimentally to put our hypothetical I. W. W. on a level with Marcus Aurelius or with Socrates in the great moments when he repudiated the offer of Crito. In a certain sense, of course not in a certain sense, of course. It is at least arguable whether, given a tolerable heredity for our Industrial Worker and as- suming him to be as able as so many of his fraternity really are, Socrates and Marcus Aurelius would, in the same environment, acquit themselves any better. But to follow such a speculative gyration would be futile. Obviously our I. W. W., even if he is at the highest [108] LIBERTY level of conduct, is not demonstrating beyond cavil a mentality equal to that of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius. But he has, after a fashion, reached the fourth level. He is certainly above custom, taboo, ser- vility to public opinion; he is certainly a stoic acting on principle; and that he can reason with agility and vigor and startling freedom from sophistry about these principles can be demonstrated to any open-minded man who has sufficient initiative to seek out and to engage in controversy with him or any of his type. We must renew our emphasis of a point with which we do not think McDougall would disagree, and which has been implied all the time in our examination of the relations of religion, criticism, science, and art we must not make our evolutionary psychology uni- linear any more than the contemporary ethnologist dares make his account of the development of societies unilinear. As with the life of a society, an individual's mental life is not to be measured off with finality in four periods or less through which he passes once and for all, and through which all individuals pass in almost mechanical recapitulation. Man's moral life probably begins at the first level of conduct with every new situation with which he is confronted, provided that the situation is sufficiently complex to evoke a di- lemma. Perhaps, as McDougall suggests, only a few men ever reach the fourth level in any situation, or per- [109] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS haps we may say that many men attain to it now and then, but attain to it for a very brief space those who are not of the very small minority of Titans. However that may be, it would certainly seem that as life goes on, the levels of conduct in all men become more and more complicated. Even the pleasure-pain stage is marked with more subtle pleasures and pains. And the fourth stage, the stage of devotion to principles, for those who reach it, lose it and regain it is always be- coming a stage of devotion to principles more and more subtly criticised by their practitioners themselves, more and more delicately and strongly modified. It is roughly true, no doubt, that a man's life can be meas- ured off in two, three or four of these levels if we make a very simple and summary biography of him. But is it not also true, and more significantly true, that he is to be seen, on closer scrutiny, passing through these levels over and over again, but in the proverbial spiral? So our redoubtable migratory worker may have at- tained to a fourth level of conduct, even if not to a fourth level, signalized by the spacious perspectives which Socrates and Marcus Aurelius knew. Yet in all three men there is that beautiful harmony of humility and pride which McDougall calls the self-regarding sentiment: they are too proud to care for the passing praise and blame of sleek Laodiceans; they are at the same time humble as they contemplate their several [HO] LIBERTY ideals, whether the perpetuation of justice, the glorifi- cation of serenity, or the furtherance of the reconstruct- ive mission of the proletariat. All three men are above the slave-morality of the "normal" majority in its pre- vailing mood, which is founded not on the self-regard- ing sentiment, but on fear-repressions of impulses which ought to be reconciled with others, redirected, sublimated. In all our three sturdier men freedom has emerged more and more clearly. The old naive debate between determinists and indeterminists, theological or economic, would not interest them. They feel free, be- cause they have learned so much self-control, to devote themselves (by the very recognition of obstacles both inside and outside the mind) to their great purposes. They are, in other words, direct actionists. And they feel that no obstacles, however retarding, not death it- self, obstruct permanently the fulfillment of the great purposes for which they stand ready to give their lives. They feel their own personalities devoted as at least partially harmonized wholes to these great rational purposes. They feel that they have strengthened through reconciliations and redirections their own weaker lineaments of character, their own paralyzing inner conflicts. They are capable of huge concentra- tion and of sustained, temperate enthusiasm. Their emotions do not belie, but they energize their reason- ings. They know not the substance of the universe as THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS a whole nor do they know all the processes therein, nor whether these be orderly or capricious or determined by mechanism or determined by a Logos, but they feel a sense of co-operation with beneficent allies, and they feel free because they know a good deal of themselves and a good deal about their fellows. In each of them "the self comes to rule supreme over conduct," so Mc- Dougall has it, "the individual is raised above moral conflict, he attains character in the fullest sense and a completely generalized will, and exhibits to the world that finest flower of moral growth, serenity. His strug- gles are no longer moral conflicts, but are intellectual efforts to discover what is most worth doing, what is most right for him to do." Each one is "dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love." John Dewey finds that "each instance" of reflection "reveals, more or less clearly, five distinct steps: (i) a felt difficulty; (2) its location and definition; (3) sug- gestion of possible solution; (4) development by rea- soning of the bearings of the suggestion; (5) further observation and experiment leading to its acceptance or rejection; that is, the conclusion of belief or dis- belief." We may elaborate these steps in our way and attempt a correlation of them with McDougall's sug- gestive exposition of the "levels of conduct" applicable to our investigation of the spiritual promise of the proletariat. [112] LIBERTY Let us think first of a young workman aglow with the obsolescent, individualistic American religious faith that in our country "there is always room at the top." He struggles ambitiously. He marries and his wife struggles hopefully with him. Children come. His nominal wages go up slowly, but the cost of living goes up more rapidly. His wife undertakes work out- side the home at the first moment possible. Their ag- gregate income barely meets the subsistence level with practically no allowance for recreation. Indeed, worthy and industrious as they are, they find themselves losing in vitality each year, with no compensatory gain, no provision for old age or accident possible, and not the slightest opportunity of making a really construct- ive change. This situation is as common as the leaves of the trees. If you doubt it, read the authoritative gov- ernmental Report of the Commission for Industrial Re- lations, edition Manly, Washington, D. C., 1916. What Dewey calls a "felt difficulty" disturbs the religious faith of our sturdy worker, now no longer young except in years. Thought begins. He may brush it aside in apathy. Or some chance speech or the sight of some horror may shock him into a sense of perspective that will prolong or renew the thought. Or we may behold a more advanced cycle of thought in a more sophisti- cated and rebellious young workman, of type so rapidly on the increase despite the inflated wages of the mo- THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS ment, or more likely because of them (in the few trades where they have really increased). This workman is full of vague but exalted religious faith in the destiny of the advancing proletariat like that which we have al- ready described. This is, of course, a far healthier be- ginning, a promise of a much more rational develop- ment than that imputed to our first hypothetical work- man. Our second laborer, then, agitates among his comrades. Let us suppose that, as often happens, they remain apathetic in status quo, be it smug craft-union- ism or timorous, unenlightened non-unionism. A l 'felt difficulty" arises in the mind of our second proletarian. Thought begins. As with a pain in the body, he "locates," he "defines" this difficulty. Just here most people, proletarian and bourgeois alike, trump up a pseudo-definition as hastily as possible and hurry on to a patent-medicine solution in order to get over as painlessly as possible the strenuous job of thinking till the pain returns with redoubled force and more deeply organic deadliness. In psychoanalyti- cal terms: most people drug their pains with phan- tasies and purposive "forgetting" or repression, but our workman, being more creative than the possessive bour- geois, being more natively free, being a sort of psycho- analyst in the rough, faces the reality inside his mind and the reality outside his mind. Let us suppose that our first young workman, with his faith in laissez-faire LIBERTY individualism destroyed, has hurried roughly through a thought-system which has culminated in the more sophisticated and sounder faith in the destiny of the proletariat. Like the second workman he becomes an agitator, but like the second workman he is momentar- ily overwhelmed by the apathy of his associates. A "felt difficulty" arises. With him a second cycle of thought begins after his hypothesis, in its more naive form, fails of verification. He "locates" or "defines" the "difficulty," the need of a more convincing, a more scientific formula, a more comprehensive working hypothesis that will better endure the logical scrutiny of criticism and will prove verifiable in contact with the chaos of facts which it must in part at least reduce to cosmos by rational and widely observant control. He has grasped already the working hypothesis of direct action or the moral autonomy of the individual proletarian and of proletarians as a group. Now he seeks to develop this by reason and by further observa- tion. He talks with other restless workers. He com- prehends more or less vaguely the fact and the implica- tions of "surplus value." He chances across one or more of the innumerable five and ten-cent pamphlets that furnish simple sketches of Marxism. He reads the Communist Manifesto. If he is a strenuous reader he may even struggle through Capital. Men have been known who have worked all day at the most grinding ["S3 ' THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS toil and spent half the night reading Capital, yes, they have been known to spend half the night reading and rereading determinedly a single one of its compact pages. At all events our worker reads or talks super- ficially or profoundly until he arrives at the corollary of direct action, the abolition of the wage-system, and until he has learned, perhaps from a pamphlet by Daniel DeLeon, the large democratic scheme of in- dustrial unionism. Here he has advanced well into the third and fourth stages of thought, the suggestion of a possible solution and the reasoning about it. He has made some inductions from observations more or less multifarious and he has passed into the deductive aspect of criticism as well. He has subdued his hopes and fears without destroying them. His new religious faith in the destiny of the proletariat is stronger than ever, just because of his bracing passage through a pessi- mistic Valley of the Shadow of Death. He has, indeed, been brave enough, or perhaps despairing enough to take a much more sweeping view of the evils of life than at the outset when he clung to the outdated, naive faith of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Ameri- can frontiersmen. He can now look often beyond his immediate and more direct interests, another dollar a day, a better habitation. Although he cannot and should not forget these terribly importunate needs he may realize that he has to look beyond them to attain [116] LIBERTY them, that in the general betterment of his fellows lies the only sound possibility of his own betterment, or he may attain to the sublime stoical attitude that even though he may never enter the promised land the only joy in life that will seldom fail to exalt him is an un- ceasing devotion in order that other proletarians whom he may never see may some time consummate the as- sault and plant their banners on the wall. The num- ber of such stoics in overalls is growing much more rapidly today than the number of "gentleman" stoics among those who study luxuriously the history of philosophy under university elms. Our worker, too, is indulging in "original research" just as significantly as some bio-chemist who, in a richly endowed laboratory, is scrutinizing the mysteries of protoplasm and the meaning of life or some symbolic logician who has evolved a new theorem as yet wholly untainted by utility. Our worker, like the bio-chemist and the sym- bolic logician, cannot, of course, be sure that he is right. All thought is dangerous. Life is full of risk. God Himself, said James, is "in trouble." But repeated failures do not crush all workers. And our hero feels that his opinions are coming to be more and more worthy of being dignified as knowledge. At all events he has ceased to be a mere observer. He is non-resist- ant, for he has given up all fantastic attempts to ration- alize away the reality of poverty and injustice. His THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS freedom has begun to emerge in a crescendo, which be- gins with the second stage of all thought, becomes in- tensified with the third, and will press through the vari- ous fluctuations of the fourth and fifth stages to a climax wherewith comes a proved sense of control. The length of time and the precision with which our worker wills to dwell on his hypothetical induction and his deductive review of it (his "elaboration of the tentative hypo- thesis to make it more clear and consistent because squaring with a wider range of facts") , the patience and courage with which he proceeds with his experimental efforts to control, to verify, this length of time differ- entiates him as thinker from his more apathetic fellows, who muddle along in a trial and and error process, now dully hopeless, now vacantly exalted. Neither our worker nor any other men, however godlike, ever "get wholly beyond the trial and error situation. Our most elaborate and radically consistent thought has to be tried in the world, and thereby tried out. And since it can never take into account all the connections, it can never cover with perfect accuracy all the conse- quences. Yet a thoughtful survey of conditions is so careful, and the guessing at results so controlled that we have a right to mark off the reflective experience from the grosser trial and error forms of action," In England today a vast army of workers, organized as laborers have never been organized before, has ap- [118] LIBERTY preached the felt difficulty and said, in sentences of such stylistic majesty and intellectual massiveness that they overawe the "cultured" conservatives: "The in- dividualist system of capitalist production, based on the private ownership and competitive administration of land and capital, with its reckless 'profiteering' and wage slavery; with its glorification of the unhampered struggle for the means of life and its hypocritical pre- tense of the 'survival of the fittest,' with the monstrous inequality of circumstances which it produces and the degradation and brutalization, both moral and spirit- ual, resulting therefrom, may, we hope (partly through the agency of the European war and partly through labor's reconstructive forecasts and efforts), indeed, have received a death blow." And the British prole- tariat has passed from this, the second stage of thought, to the third and fourth hypothesis-making and de- ductive purification in which it clears the confusion of laws and customs and superstitions that bemuse our reactionaries. This proletarian army knows, as John Dewey knows, that a "law" is a hypothesis, even after much deductive purification and even after rigorous "verification," an hypothesis and not the eternality that superstition holds it to be. British labor, therefore, concludes defiantly, in the face of trial and error s.tates- men: "If law is the mother of freedom, science, to the Labor Party, must be the parent of law." Labor is THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS learning the "love of love" and the "hate of hate," to love all men and to hate only the bad qualities and the evil systems which men indulge and make when they have not thought rigorously enough. British labor stands on tiptoe to enter into the fifth stage of verification exultantly. Its leaders are not say- ing anything at all new to those who have followed the radical thought of the last twenty-five years. But they are saying it with a tact and force that makes it possible to discuss matters which the "cultured" people once thought fanatical or Utopian, in circles which are posi- tively respectable. But the really important thing about this review of salient radical principles is its tone. Per- haps the British Labor leaders in Parliament have been aroused from their lethargic compromises by the un- rest of their rank and file, which has increased so rapidly since 1910. At all events they now adopt a militant accent and say in effect to the rulers: if you do not carry on your work well we will assume all re- sponsibility and carry it on better than you dare dream. This is a subtle change. Instead of the old compromise and vague protest it accepts the very principles which its conservative enemies profess and it guarantees to live up to them better than those who have been mouth- ing them. It has found freedom through non-resist- ance. Moreover, British Labor now explicitly recog- nizes the kinship of work with the hand and work with [ 120] LIBERTY the brain, and thus smashes that old corrupting dualism upon which the prophets from John Ruskin to John Dewey, from William Morris to Leo Tolstoy have warred with their frequent insistence on the con- tinuity of theory and practice. British Labor would say, like James and Royce, that "an idea is a plan of action." It will, then, practice what the government merely preaches. It will not oppose; it threatens to do the thing better itself. In other words, it has become scientific and critical; it will not be cynically fatalistic about the facts, nor will it try to sentimentalize them out of existence; it will recognize them and it will remember that "everything ideal has a natural origin and an ideal development." Its program, beginning with the mild demand for the universal minimum" and ending w r ith the clarion call demanding "the surplus for the common good," is a recapitulation of labor's own moral evolution. It has come to elaborate and purify and largely accept the "scientific socialism" which Marx outlined so hugely as he took a wide survey of the oceanic trial and error of the German, French and English proletariat. British Labor is conferring lib- erty upon itself through a non-resisting recognition of realities leading to a crescendo of freedom, a sense of control, of moral autonomy. [121] VII THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY We have already had occasions to dwell on the de- terrent influences of the natural sciences on the younger sciences of human nature, particularly on economics, psychology, and history. Mathematical instruments, methods of measurement which have carried us far in the control of forces which at first seemed remote from the comprehension of men, these methods so extraordi- narily successful with natural phenomena have done extraordinarily little to illuminate the secrets within our own hearts or to harmonize our relations with our friends and enemies at the next door. Economics went blind astray measuring distribution with little thought of consumption. History chopped up human life into useless conceptual atoms or molecules called events. And psychology has tended towards a similar pseudo- chemical or pseudo-physical analysis of the mind into faculties or some sort of compartments or some sort of mental electrons that are neither demonstrable facts nor fruitful concepts. In all three of these sciences, also, a very naive overestimation of the validity of sta- tistics has palsied our groping minds. [122] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY But now we are beginning to evolve a method in psychology which is really scientific, not a pseudo- scientific imitation of details of method that have proved valid in physics, chemistry, and astronomy, but which cannot thus be certified for the peculiar phenom- ena of psychology. In dealing with the "stream of con- sciousness" we did wrong to try to isolate a mental atom. But psychopathology has given us a clue to the real psychological equivalent of the isolation of the atom in chemistry. There is, we learn, no difference except in degree between the sane and the insane. In these tur- bulent days we can hardly dare to question this gen- eralization of the psychopathologists. But in the in- sane certain mental reactions stand out more vividly in the general stream of their reactions than in the more subtly integrated reactions of the sane. By studying these reactions in the insane, by studying the regressions of the insane to the simpler behavior of the almost for- gotten days of childhood and to the simpler behavior of primitive ancestors we can attain all the benefits of a more artificial analysis without any of the disastrous consequences of orthodox general psychology which analyzes, not mental behavior, but "mind" or "con- sciousness" treated as if it were a receptacle, a curious, immobile phantasm conjured to stand still as Joshua conjured the sun and Canute's courtiers the waves. Among all the psychopathologists I have read or talked [123] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS with I know of none more sensible and comprehensive than Doctor Adolf Meyer, in whose words we may best see the methodological ground-work of the new psy- chology : "What is of importance to us is the activity and behavior of the total organism or individual as opposed to the activity of single de- tachable organs. It is more than cerebration; we must take our do- main broadly as behavior and passive and constructive adaptation of the entire individual. It differs from the ordinary physiology because it represents an integration of biologic activity on a specific level through its having the characteristic of more or less consciousness and because of its hanging together by associative function. From the point of view of science, behavior and mental activity, even in their implicit or more subjective forms, are not more subjective than the activity of the stomach or the heart or blood serum or cerebrospinal fluid or the knee jerk. Each individual has his own mental activity, but to say that we cannot see it and make it accessible and understand it in others is a philosopher's scare like the statement that we can never know whether the world exists, because we know only mental states or processes. Common sense has never worried about the reality of the world. I hope we shall soon be agreed on the fact that we need not worry about the psychobiologic reality and the objectivity of those actions and internal workings of living beings which we call mentation and behavior. "I urge the student to trace the plain life history of a person and to record it on what I call the life chart; the result is a record of a smooth or broken life curve of each one of the main organs and func- tions, and in addition, a record of the main events of the life of the whole bundle of organs, that is, 'the individual as a whole' and of [124] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY the facts which determined and constituted his behavior. This realm of objective and determinable facts of the individual as a per- son constitutes what we as physicians need to know as psychology. The science dealing with these facts I call psychobiology, in order not to step on the toes of the introspectionist who might want to reserve the term 'psychology' for the traditional type of subjective psychology. Its facts are behavior in the widest sense of reactive and constructive adaptation of the completely integrated organism. We ask: What are the individual's assets: the reactive and associative resources in the form of effective and expressive activity and its abortive forms, conations, affections, cognition, discrimination, and reconstructive and constructive imagination ? Under what conditions are they apt to go wrong and under what conditions can they be modified again for the better? You can readily see that we are dealing with the absolutely objective and positive facts, peculiar only in the way which they hang together by association in the wealth of equivalents and combinations, and in the varying extent and depth to which they implicate the parts of the integrated organism. So much for the student's general orientation with its restoration of the common sense attitude. "As an instance of the study of assets, we take up the Binet-Simon and other genetic standards and survey the successive epochs of human life and their psychobiologic problems : infancy ; then the period of acquisition of signs and language; the early childhood passing into what Joseph Lee calls the 'Big Injun' stage and the school childhood; the preadolescent and adolescent period; the period of emancipation; the period of adult aggressive life; the period of maturity; the matron's period; and the period of senescence each with its own psychobiologic features and problems. "Within this broad and clearly biologic frame, the student be- comes ready to see a proper setting for the more detailed and specific THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS chapters, among which I take up first the cognitive-representative data: reactions to things present (sensation and perception), reac- tions to things absent (memories and images), reactions with ideas and words and concepts or orientation; all activities depending more or less directly on the collaboration of brain and sense-mechanism. Then we take up the affective processes which determine the general trend of association and involve, beside the brain, mainly the sym- pathetic system and internal secretions, as Cannon has so well shown lately; and then the overt actions, specified as effective and expres- sive, and the laws of habit-formation, memory and association, and conation or will and its relation to instinct. We then consider the various degrees of consciousness and attention; and we introduce the data of hypnotism and the subconscious determining influences shown in the association experiment. "On this ground, we take up the genetic account of several leading functions or instincts as given in Pyle's 'Outlines of Educational Psychology' and incidentally the psychobiology of sex life. "A review of the nonmental components of the mental integra- tions, the foundation of fatigue, and waking and sleep states, of the share of the circulation, of internal secretion, and of brain organi- zation, rounds off the course and leaves us with a well-checked out- line of examination of the mental resources and reaction tendencies of any patient, to be used and developed in the third and fourth year courses in psychopathology and psychiatry. "Psychobiology as thus conceived forms clearly and simply the missing chapter dealing with functions of the total person and not merely of detachable parts. It is a topic representing a special level of biologic integration, a new level of simple units having in com- mon the fact of blending in consciousness, integrating our organ- ism into simple or complex adaptive and constructive reactions of overt and implicit behavior. I contrast (i) mentally or more or [126] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY less consciously connected reactions, and (2) nonmental reactions of individual detachable organs which may as well be studied in the test tube and isolated and then certainly give us no evidence of con- sciousness. With this frank contrast we avoid panpsychism and solipsism and absolute subjectivism and all the other bugbears con- fusing the medical and lay mind and the would-be scientific psy- chologists. "Science deals with a world of things, facts, and relations appear- ing in several distinct levels or types of integration. Physics deals with one set of aspects of matter and ether; chemistry with another, namely, the laws of behavior of atoms and their affinities and com- binations; physiology with a biologic level, that is, those objects and their parts which grow by reproduction and metabolism; and as psychobiology we treat the functions of total organisms which blend in more or less consciousness in a manner constituting a special level of integration which has been especially and most characteristically enriched by the interindividual and social development of language. This level of integration we treat as psychobiology when considered as actual functioning and behavior of living organisms. All that which constitutes psychobiology to the physician is, therefore, also physical as well as mental. We can further recognize an ultra- biologic level of facts when we consider the products of such func- tioning, as logic and mathematics or theory of relations, or as history and record of the human race, including also the more than biologic realms of fact, philosophy, and religion. In this way we obtain an orderly perspective of the various sciences, but eliminate the contrast between physical and mental. "It is desirable, I think, to make the student feel that he does not have to draw too sharp a line between mentally integrated and non- mentally integrated activities. Many reflexes or instincts or reac- [127] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS tions can appear on the physiologic level or on the psychobiologic level. The difference lies in the mode of hanging together, the set- ting and the extent and kind of possible interrelations. "On the physiologic level the reactions last as long as the stimulus, are commensurate with the stimulus, and occur as it were according to the laws and requirements of contiguity. "The entering into the psychobiologic level brings a more exten- sive scope of potential links and interrelations with the laws of con- sciousness and of associative relations. "The reaction becomes part of what I describe to the student as a burst or geyser of daily activity, with laws of blending and laws of falling into trends laid down according to the principles which expe- rience With this special level of biologic regulations must furnish us. The student must realize that the mechanisms of the psycho- biologic level are not limited to the type of consciousness which we know in waking life and which most psychologists cultivate exclu- sively. . . . Many conditions will . . . become intelligible only if we take into consideration the special characteristcs of special types of consciousness, such as dream states, half-dream states, states of dis- traction, hypnosis, and special affective states, the study of which can do full justice to the fact that some of these special states will prove open to explanation and reproduction or at least facilitation by the introduction of detachable physiologic lifts, chemicals, narcotics, or internal secretions, of which we know that they can produce modifi- cations of the hanging together of psychobiologic trends. "The difference between modern psychology and the older form is that we can no longer be satisfied with mere plausible statements and amplifications of the obvious, but must test and verify objective facts under controlled conditions and controlled modifications." [128] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY How would the theories with which we endeavor to rationalize the economic behavior of men endure scrutiny with such a psychological method as this? Orthodox economic, both the foggy and timorous ver- sion of the universities and its blustering travesty in the market place, could not endure such a scrutiny for a moment. And at first glance Marxian economics, too, seems to rest so completely, with its doctrine of the class struggle, on the untenable self-interest psychology of eighteenth and much nineteenth century fancy that it seems doomed to a similar fate. But Marxian eco- nomics, as we shall see, is saved in large part by the in- consistency which enabled it to escape from the self- interest premise or "complex," to which, like Man- chester economics, it bound itself, but to which it did not remain true. The intuition of Marx was even greater than his massive logic. In order to understand just how orthodox economics is ruined by its psychological presupposition of self- interest, while Marxism survives it we must survey briefly the history of modern psychological theories concerning the original nature of man. In the eight- eenth century the concept of self-interest did not seem at all vague and unworkable. Animals were marvelled over as creatures of God-inspired instincts. Man was [ 129] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS sharply separated as a creature of reason. As a creature of reason his self-interest would become a purely be- nignant force for society as soon as we reached that state of blessed anarchy towards which all eighteenth century dreamers implicitly or explicitly aspired. But, although anarchists are the most inspiring people in the world, the supreme custodians of our dearest hopes, and in a most serious and important sense the authori- ties on the subject of Utopias without visions of which the human race would lose heart, yet anarchists are one and all too psychasthenic to work out practical programs of transition in details, or even to give us enduring scientific speculations. Just what is self- interest? Are we sure that animals are instinctive in behavior, men rational? Among all anarchists, from Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson to* Shelley, to Tchernychevsky to Tolstoi we seek in vain for reassur- ing data. Meanwhile along came Darwin, Huxley, Romanes and others to demonstrate only too clearly that there is no such chasm between "instinctive" animals and "rational" man. Amidst the many disillusions of the nineteenth century the sweetly fatalistic belief in man's rationality began to wane as biologists organized their data to throw further light on the problem of evolution. And just here, orthodox economics, though it knew it not, was given a death-sentence. For if man is not notably rational, laissez-faire will not bring the [ 130] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY millenium. But just here Marx was more realistic. For if man is not notably rational class-struggles are very likely to be brute facts. Predatory anarchists, like our financiers tend towards that psychasthenic dis- order, which we call paranoia, with its delusions of grandeur and its mania of persecution. Benevolent anarchists, like Shelley and Tchernychevsky, tend to- wards that psychasthenic return to childhood, or even to prenatal life, which we term dementia praecox. Far be it from me to allow a greater insight to the hysterical type. Ultimately the psychasthentic is more likely to sound his own soul more deeply and to see farther into the future for mankind at large. He is less likely to be blinded by traditions. But the hysterical socialist was naturally more quick, in his extroverted way, to grasp the external facts of the harrowing Victorian period and to catch a few of their immediate implications. Thus, though their psychological presupposition was the identical false one of Manchesterian "democrats" and visionary anarchists, yet Marx and Engels wand- ered restlessly about and absorbed so many of the facts of their day that their theory was more empirical and, as economic theory, more enduring, although we now have to leaven it with some of the Utopian ideals which they despised in order to make it the invincible suc- cessor of the senescent economics of respectable pro- THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS fessors and bankers. But we are anticipating. This will be more clear presently. By the time of William James, psychologists were ready to say that man had more instincts than animals. William James prepared a loose, but notable inventory of instincts which he set forth with his characteristic combination of bravery and humility. Recently Pro- fessor Thorndike has revised that list. Striking out more boldly and fancifully, MacDougall has described elaborately the structure of instincts and listed off self- assertion (with an accompanying emotion of pride or elation), self-denial (including the emotion of humil- ity), flight (including fear), pugnacity (with anger), curiosity (with wonder), the parental instinct (and tender emotion), the gregarious instinct, etc. And these instincts, we art told, are often at war with each other. Just so, we had been told by Marx, classes are at war with each other. Doubtless there is much more than a merely analogous relation between the war of instincts within the individual and the war of classes in society. And if the psychoanalysts could perfect our technique for resolving within ourselves the war of in- stincts assuredly there would be less class-war or at least a sublimated class-war. But this would imply that necessity for a "change of heart," in which Utopian (or dementia praecox) anarchists believed, but which both Manchester (or paranoid) anarchists and [ 132] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY Marxian (or hysterical) socialists repudiated as "against human nature." "You can't change human nature." But what is human nature? What is the orig- inal nature of man? Let us return to our history of psychology, for this is a psychological question. Man, as well as animal, has instincts. And these in- stincts are at war within the individual. Economists like Graham Wallas, John A. Hobson and Carleton H. Parker find, therefore, in psychology the implication that "self-interest" is a very vague phrase to apply to a man torn, let us say, by a conflict of tenderness and self-assertion within himself. But in the market-place, the orthodox paranoiacs rejoin, self interest reigns. Professor Parker answered them yet once more and answered them unanswerably: Is a man utterly dif- ferent in his office from what he is in the bosom of his family? So, putting away the self-interest psychology along with all other childish things we go on with the latest psychological findings concerning the original nature of man. With these findings, I repeat, Man- chesterism is scattered to the winds, but Marxism, rein- forced with a leaven of Utopian anarchism, survives. The most careful accounts of the original nature of man furnished by recent schools of psychology have come from the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts. I believe the views of these schools to be reconcilable. Both schools tend to reduce the number of innate [ 133] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS human dispositions, in which James, Thorndike and MacDougall have been inclined to believe. But they do not admit any room for a regression to the infantile self-interest psychology. Among behaviorists we may choose Professor John B. Watson as one of the most emancipated and one of the most cautious. After prolonged observation and experiment he finds only three emotions which seem to him primal fear, anger and joy or love. Of these, though he himself does not say so, joy or love may be the most unequivocally primal. For fear and anger seem to require strange or obstructive influences in the environment to evoke them, while joy or love may exist even before the babe leaves the womb. Among instincts commonly listed I would note also at the risk of overemphasizing a part of Professor Watson's observations that certain distinctly possessive activ - ities like manipulation and hunting, of which some psychologists have made so much as innate, do not to Professor Watson's behaviorism seem so much innate as a bastard compound of random activities too frag- mentary to be called instincts and of early habits im- possible without environment and some sort of arti- ficial training. Bertrand Russell has diagnosed modern society as suffering from an over-development of "pos- sessive," as opposed to "creative impulses." Strange if behaviorism, this cool ultra-objective psychology, [134] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY should restore the Utopian love of love, give us new hope that love is the most original of emotions, and out-Russell Russell by pointing to the conclusion that "possessive impulses" are not only over-developed, but, like hunting and manipulation, to a considerable extent artificial, to a considerable extent maladaptations. Following an independent path, the brilliant Ameri- can psychoanalyst, Doctor Trigant Burrow, finds quite definitely to his satisfaction that possessive impulses are not really native to man, but rather the product of that "repression" of his original nature which, since the great discoveries of Freud, we have found to be an om- nipresent accident in the random contact of human na- ture with nature. Nature is not so benignant to us as Wordsworth thought. But perchance man is going to prove as fundamentally beautiful as Shelley and Tcher- nychevsky and Tolstoi longed to believe. Behaviorism seems certainly not just now to bar the way for such a theory. Once evolutionists were prone to describe every biological activity as having a "pur- pose" in a natural selective sense. Now, more and more post-Darwinians, notably a behavioristic psychologist like Doctor Watson, make much of "random activities." The eighteenth century was 'partly right. The in- stincts of man are few. But man is not rational. And so the eighteenth century was partly wrong. Yet, on the whole, the latest biology and psychology THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS does something to renew our hope in that "human per- fectibility" which glows in the pages of eighteenth century dreamers about "progress." Man, to be sure, comes into the world much more helpless than the her- mit wasp. Man has fewer instincts and, alas, no sign of "reason" to begin with. And his native endowment includes a mess of random activities which may warp him with all sorts of perverse fixations in contact with this bitter world. Appalling thought! No, not alto- gether. May we not discover means for the use of these random activities by organizing them towards a freedom beyond the scope of animals with their more precise but far more circumscribed lives? Let us turn to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis talks of our innate impulses or "wishes" as the "libido." With Freud this libido is overwhelmingly "sexual," with Jung it is a mental elan. Freud's thought is clearer but tends towards pe- dantry. Jung's is more emancipating, but vaguer. We may leave Jung aside just here (without forgetting his magnificent contributions to other aspects of psychoan- alysis, particularly to its classificatory phase and to the correlation of dreams of the individual with myths of the race) as of little help in our particular quest for the original nature of man. With Freud repres- sion is due to sex. If you follow this line of thought you get into many difficulties particularly in endeavor- THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY ing to describe infantile sexual activities and in ex- plaining the wherefore of repression in more detail. But Doctor Burrow maintains that "Repression is not due to sex; sex is due to repression." By sex we mean here, as common sense usually does, the more obsessive, quasi-fetichistic, possessive manifestations of amorous- ness with all the oscillations of seduction and rivalry and hate and jealousy, of "winning" one's "mistress" or "lord," of the reckless generation of children, of crude and equally reckless contraceptive methods, of desper- ate bursts of asceticism, of auto-erotic flights from real- ity, of tragic homosexual caricatures of friendship, of anxiety disguising voluptuous longings, of artificial, ritualistic "tenderness" disguising hate, the thousand and one modes of feverish behavior from some of which no one of us is free unless perchance psychoanalysis has made him whole. Certainly, then, we would not make light of Freud's emphasis on the multifariousness of sexual activity, fulfilled, crushed, and perverted, in our distracted lives; but we would question the inevitability of so much sexual activity, of haphazard and discordant congeries of random activities now goaded on and now palsied with a profound self-doubt and a profound fear, hatred, ignorance of life's facts. What if, deeper than all this overt or covert lust, this jealousy, this ascetic- ism, this perversion, this egoism, we found something quiet, not scornful of bodily communion when such [137] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS grows out of natural occasion and is not possessively sought, but fundamentally a seeking for harmony, iden- tification, comradeship. This is not a doctrine to be argued about in a few pages. Perhaps it is not to be argued about at all, but rather found by each person for himself when he comes into a knowledge of himself verified and made practical by a long analysis of his dreams, his "absent-minded" activity, of all the reac- tions in which he will find innumerable signs of his feverish disloyalty to himself and to his fellows until, by a tireless scrutiny of his artificial layers of vileness, a scrutiny in the presence of a psychoanalyst comrade, he will feel a growing lightness of heart, a growing of freedom to love without fear. To come into such a knowledge of one's self is certainly to achieve a long quest, an achievement to which the present author would certainly make no pretensions. Yet this view seems to point towards more light than most. Try it out faithfully, experimentally, and you may find that it has a profound biological support There have been other psychoanalysts who have of late groped towards a point of view most significantly similar to Doctor Burrow's though, so far as I under- stand them, less clear, less uncompromising, less un- equivocal. Doctor Poul Bjerre has developed a strik- ing theory of hypnosis which, despite the feud between some advocates of hypnosis and those Freudians who THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY claim that psychoanalysis is absolutely free from sug- gestion, is relevant here. Especially instructive in this regard is the treatment of alcoholists and morphinists. Generally these are easily approached through hypnosis. In order to explain this fact the 'dissociation of the nervous system' is spoken of, but just what the meaning of this phrase is, is not pointed out. It seems to me that the matter ought rather to be understood as a reflex reproduction of the intoxication, in the same way as in the chloroform insensibility. Patients who have the mor- phine-drowsiness fresh in mind, say almost as in accord to some rule, after the first hypnotic treatment: 'It was exactly as if I had had morphine!' One patient of mine, an alcoholist, looked delighted and exclaimed: 'This was just as good as a genuine spree!' Here may also be found the cause for the peculiar fact that desire for alcohol often disappears after the very first hypnosis. The patient no lon- ger needs the external means for producing intoxication; it comes through reflex action. The further treatment is then based upon the fact that the weaning from hypnosis is easier than is the weaning from the alcohol habit. But as little as with the choloroform insensibility, must hypnosis be identified with morphine- or alcohol- intoxication. "It has been agreed upon by all investigators that the possibility of entering the hypnotic state diminishes with years. That is to say, that with each year the individual gets farther away from this pos- sibility. It is then necessary to take only one step more to arrive at the following: Hypnosis is a temporary sinking back into that primary state of rest which obtained during fetal life. "I also constitute the thing as follows: Birth is a violent revolu- tion through which the hitherto harmonious existence is rent asunder. The human being comes into touch with the external [ 139] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS world, and in connection therewith develops a new state of the organ- ism which we call waking life. This condition must be balanced by another also new condition; so sleep comes. The two conditions are contradictions which can be understood only in and through each other. Looked at psychologically we must suppose a fetal conscious- ness, even if this is so far removed from us, that we do not see any analogy at all through which we can comprehend it. It is as im- possible for us to imagine a life without consciousness as to imagine an object which occupies no place in space. Through the division of existence at birth, a development of the consciousness arises in two directions: the one has as its goal our wide-awake relation with the world, the other our dream world. Physiologically the organism adjusts itself to these new demands. The element of destruction which the awakening life carries with it, makes it necessary that the organism even more strongly than before, may be able to concen- trate itself upon the inner reconstruction, as this occurs during sleep. "If we reckon only with consciousness after birth, it is quite true that an existence is unrecognized by the psychologist, where this state of primal-rest is still preserved, although detached things dis- appear out of it. In order to understand the fact that such a condi- tion shows itself during hypnosis, it is necessary to go back to the existence prior to birth. No matter how little we may know con- cerning consciousness as existing in that state, so much may be quite certain, that it is not occupied with a single thing belonging to the outside world. So considered it may not be too bold to presume that all the Nirvana fantasies are added to this trace of memory. "Concentration in itself takes the thought to a time when that division, which the world carries with it, had not yet arisen." Behold now how, from an entirely different angle, Doctor S. Ferenczi finds himself groping in the same [ THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY direction as he considers the starvation and debasement of the longing for friendship. He is not thinking of rather mysterious matters like hypnosis or prenatal life. But in his survey of the aspirations, repressions, and perversions in western civilization he sees evidence of a fundamental will to love that has been starved by maladaptation. And, lest certain readers be scenting a new premature revolt against Freud, let us remember that Doctor Ferenczi takes particular pride in his orthodox Freudianism and is recognized by the master as a faithful follower. After noting "to what an extent present-day men have lost their capacity for mutual affection and amiability" and the prevalence among men of "decided asperity, resistance, and love of dispu- tation" in place of "those tender affects which were so strongly pronounced in childhood" he concludes that this is an abnormal "affective displacement" which goads some men towards homosexualism and many others towards obsessive desires for women manifested in " 'chivalry' . . . the exaggerated, often visibly af- fected, adoration of woman" and in "Don Juanism, the obsessive and yet never fully satisfied pursuit of con- tinually new heterosexual adventures." He concludes: "I do not wish to be misunderstood ; I find it natural and founded in the psycho-physical organization of the sexes that a man loves a woman incomparably better than his like, but it is unnatural that a man should repel other men and have to adore women with an ob- THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS sessive exaggeration. What wonder that so few women succeed in meeting these exaggerated demands and in satisfying, as well as all the other ones, also the man's homo-erotic needs by being his 'com- panion,' without doubt one of the commonest causes of domestic un- happiness." But it would appear that Doctor Burrow remains unique in his unequivocal recognition of profound im- plications in the Freudian psychology regarding the original nature of man which Freud himself has not been ready to recognize. Unfortunately the most im- portant work of Doctor Burrow remains unpublished. It may well be that we do him an injustice here in pa- rading his views. But he himself, in his study of the phenomenon of "incest-awe," has been willing to pub- lish statements that are absolutely fundamental for us in our consideration of the progress of intellectuals and wage-workers towards an entente and the ways in which this entente may be facilitated and redirected for the greatest good of society and the individual. "The relation between the mother and the suckling infant," writes Doctor Burrow, "is primary and biological. It is unitary, harmoni- ous, homogeneous. For the infant the relationship is an essentially subjective one. It exists simply, without conscious arrangement or adaptation. It is the one single instance of inherent biological union the one perfect, complete phase of conjugation. It exists simply and of itself, being exclusive of choice, of calculation. It is spon- taneous, disinterested. Existing without object, it is, so to speak, one with life, like the course of the planets or the growth of trees. THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY Being preconscious, it is in the truest sense unconscious. As I else- where expressed it, 'the infant's organic consciousness is, at its biologi- cal source within the maternal envelope, so harmoniously adapted to its environment as to constitute a perfect continuum with it.' Such is the character of this original biological union with the parent soil this mental oneness of the infant with the maternal organism. "This unity with the mother, however, exists only in respect to the affective sphere, to the primary feelings and instincts. That is, it belongs to the subjective life of the organism, for there is as yet no cognition, no objectivation, no contrasting of the ego with the outer world, of the self with other selves no consciousness in the habitual sense. "Love is unity, participation, understanding. It is simple, har- monious, unquestioning. Love is one with itself. It is life in its sub- jective relation. Cognition on the contrary pertains to contrast, demarcation, distinction. Knowledge is ulterior; consciousness strategic. Cognition is close kin to pride. It is one with self as an end. In other words, it is synonymous with acquisition, aim, calcula- tion. Hence it is kin to self-interest, to desire, that is to say, to sex. "In this view, then, the incest-revolt is the shock due to the im- pact of consciousness with its inherent self. This is the meaning of sex. This is the meaning of sin. Sin consists not in nakedness, but in the knowledge of nakedness not in the genital organ, but in the fig- leaf with which it is concealed. It is to behold our nakedness. It is to objectivate and render conscious an inherently preconscious, sub- jective state of being. This is why sex is 'impure.' Convention does not make it so. It is of itself impure. That is, it is not simple, not unmixed, not unalloyed. "I repeat, incest is not forbidden, it forbids itself. It is the pro- [143] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS test of our organic morality. Its prohibition is inherent. It is primary and biological. The fall of man consisted in his having eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Here again knowledge is sin. This is what is meant by man's 'original sin.' " . . Essentially similar to the Hebrew tradition of the fall of man, as told in the story of Adam and Eve, is the Greek account of the fall, as related in the story of Prometheus and Pandora. . . . "This prohibition imposed upon hero or heroine against the doing of some one thing which if done will bring evil is the central theme of the folk unconscious as shown throughout the legends of myth- ology. In the legend of Psyche and Eros, Psyche must never see Eros. If she does, he will not return. She contrives to see him and he is lost to her. So of Zeus and Semele. Semele is beloved of Zeus, but must never ask to see him in all his godlike glory. She does ask and is withered by his glory. In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, you remember that Orpheus can bring Eurydice back to life, if, lead- ing her from Hades, he will refrain from turning to look at her. He turns and looks at her and loses her forever. Again, Elsa must not ask the name of Lohengrin. She does so, and he must depart. There is a like motive in the story of Pandora's box, in that of Lot's wife, in the story of Prosperpine and others. In countless varieties of setting this same theme with its ever-recurring prohibition motive is pre- sented over and over again in the allegorical symbols of the race- unconscious. "That the folk mind should be imbued with so deep a conviction of sin, as indicated by this general prohibition motive inherent in its earliest and most durable legends, must indicate some deeply biological principle within human consciousness. It seems to me that this prin- ciple is nothing less than the innate abhorrence of the primary af- [ H4] fective sphere of consciousness toward the ruthless incursions of an alien objectivity. "It is, I believe, from this source that has arisen the widespread perversion of the human spirit which has caused the hideous distortion of human values embodied in the repressive subterfuge and untruth of our so-called moral codes and conventions. I cannot see the ex- pressions embodied in these reactions of the social organism as other than vicarious representations of an organic law of life as the feeble efforts of man's immature consciousness to compensate his es- sential nature for the frustration and denial of his inherent life. These distortions of life represent the organic outrage to this innate principle of unity within him occasioned by the enforced encroachment of conscious objectivation upon his original spontaneous subjectivity and oneness." Before birth we know love. In the world we are too often afraid to love and we express that hate and fear, that repression of love in terms of obsessive sex- uality (hetero-sexuality, homo-sexuality, and auto- eroticism) and in terms of that paranoia which we call moral denunciation or moral prohibition. Well may Mr. Graham Wallas, in his Great Society, have sug- gested that fear, though useful to animals, is probably purely obstructive in the relations of men. Because we are afraid in the world to love, we hate, we seduce, we capture, we flee. We fight to remove obstacles be- cause that seems the quickest way. It is the most fev- erish way; it is an insane combination of blind construc- tion and destruction with the preponderance of the one or the other a matter of mere luck. Then we THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS feverishly try to protect ourselves by filling the world with miserable compromise institutions called state, church, property, marriage. The belief, then, that the most salient feature of the original nature of man is the wish to love is a conclu- sion towards which more than one of the most forward- looking of our psychologist intellectuals finds himself impelled by the findings of cautious and courageous research. Now it is a profoundly inspiring fact that many of the most militant wage-workers today are giving us a large mass verification of this hypothesis of the fundamental wish to love as the basis of man's or- iginal nature. We must accept with the Marxists the class-struggle as a fact. We may at the same time be- lieve with psychoanalysts like Doctor Burrow that love is the primal and the supremely constructive human agency if we dare to recognize our autonomy and that this love may be more and more emancipated by a new education revised by the psychoanalytical method. How many militant proletarians are coming to recog- nize the profoundly revolutionary and reconstructive value of love will be made clear when we survey a few significant tendencies in the psychology of direct action. But we have still uncomplete the task of show- ing the convergence of younger intellectuals and younger wage-workers on a fundamental principle in THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY economic theory as revised under the influence of the new psychology. II In the field of economics the forward-looking intel- lectual and the direct-actionist among wage-workers are at one in discerning the break-down of that "mar- ginal utility theory of values" which was launched by conservatives against that "labor theory of values" which slowly evolved out of the democratic gropings of Locke, Adam Smith, Ricardo, out of a sort of school of nineteenth century English radicals, and, above all, out of Karl Marx. The marginal utility theory of values, based on a self-interest psychology, makes value the relation between an object and one of man's less fundamental, possessive wishes. It tries to elevate the "ego-complex" of a man into the whole man. Man himself does indeed often try pathetically to deceive himself into mistaking his ego-complex for his whole personality. The pathos and comedy of this is well illustrated by Professor Edwin B. Holt apropos of a boy's wish for tobacco which would be a perfectly legitimate economic valuation under the marginal utility theory. "Tobacco, like long trousers, figures in the paraphernalia of adults, and to 'act grown-up' is a very common boyish wish, or mode of be- havior. This wish is one component of a large complex of inter- related responsive settings, the 'ego-complex' ... It is apt to [147] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS have such variant forms and associates as the wish to be inde- pendent, 'to do as I like' (of which the exaggerated form is the general wish to disobey), to go with big boys, to be a sea-captain, cow- boy or pirate. Now these, which with their like are all that lend charm to tobacco as an implement of boyhood, are all the clear out- growths of the still earlier wish to 'run away' from home, so often seen in children of ten and less. This in turn is no innate tendency and must derive its impetus from somewhere. It does, and from just such sources as that which I first mentioned an injudicious mother (or father) undertaking to be a fence between the child and its little bauble of flame. The cautious reaction was then secured toward flame-plus-mother; but the innate tendency to reach out to- ward flame (which in turn gets its energy from the flame stimulus direct) was not modified, as it would have been if the mother had trusted the simple truth that flame is hot. She wished to teach the child to avoid flame; what she did teach it was to avoid her (as being the impediment, which the flame itself ought to have been, to its innate tendency). This and similar misdirections on the parents' part soon produce a child that toddles off down the street in the aim of running away from home, and that later, in the desire to act grown-up and independent, assembles a gang of street gamins behind the barn to smoke cigarettes and gulp down poison from a whiskey bottle. For these children have been taught that fire does not burn. But all this must not be, and so the father finds himself 'forced' to get a rawhide whip; with which he adds fear to the al- ready existing tendencies which make the child wish to act and to be 'grown-up' and forever away from parental restraints. When such motor settings are once established in a child, almost every ob- ject in the environment tends to stimulate them to action ; and so the nervous paths of disobedience are amply energized. Tobacco is notably such an object." [i 4 8] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY This points well the contrast between the feverish, possessive strainings for a false independence (that competitive coercion of others which we call the ego- complex) and the quiet, real independence which re- joices in free comradeship with others (which we call the spirit of autonomy) . What happens to us when we are led by the nose by our ego-complex? In trying to save ourselves we lose ourselves. We disintegrate into a petulant and explosive bundle of whims. Similarly, or- thodox economics, in trying to save itself by the glorifi- cation of the ego-complex and by making value the rela- tion between an object and the ego-complex, has disin- tegrated into a bundle of fragmentary subjects. Pro- fessor W. H. Hamilton has well shown how, because of the untenability of the orthodox theory of value, the so-called economics of our colleges today is not a sci- ence at all but an unorganized group of studies (trans- portation, banking, taxation, labor, etc.) which, how- ever useful they may be as collections of observations on special subjects, have no shred of that continuity which is necessary for the large control that certificates a science. Meanwhile the militant proletarian recognizes the truth of what Marx said about the "class-struggle," the "labor theory of values," and the right of the worker to that 'surplus value' of which he has been dispos- sessed under the wage-system. [H9] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS Marx and the militant wage-worker of today are right. For value, real value is not the relation between a volatile, artificial, possessive wish and an object. Value, that is to say, value which is to be useful and intelligible as a controlling phase of scientific method, is the relation between the whole mind of man and an object. And the mind of man, according to the psycho- biology of Doctor Meyer, according to behaviorism and psychoanalysis, in other words according to all dynamic modern psychology, the mind of man is his integrated behavior, not one reflex action, one detached appetite, not his head, liver, kidneys, or heart, not a maladaptation or travesty of freedom like the ego-com- plex. Karl Marx was blunderingly on the right track when he mingled economic theory and moralistic agita- tion. Bourgeois economics has made sport of this and done the same thing far more crudely itself. But modern wage-workers see in their rough and ready way what academic economists did not see but what really contemporaneous students of the logic of science like John Dewey and other forward-looking intellectuals have discovered that an utter distinction between "nor- mative" and "descriptive" science is unsound, unwork- able, that "every science aspires to be an art" and logi- cally must so aspire, that economics and ethics there- fore cannot be separated. And modern psychology, as Holt shows, supports the old Socratic dictum that vir- THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY tue is cool wisdom, not paranoidal "projections," i.e. feverish searches for the mote in our neighbor's eye regardless of the beam in our own. And wisdom, we now see, is composed of attitudes or acts, implicit and overt, it is the integrated behavior of a healthy human being, naturally free, seeking no support in the approval or disapproval of one's fellows, but suffused with that warm, serene love of one's fellows for which man was perfected in the harmonious temple of his mother's womb. Now the Marxian emphasis on "socially neces- sary" labor power as the measure of value is really an emphasis on the integrated behavior of a man who is what Christ would have called "whole." Marx is really much closer than many of his friends and foes have thought to John Ruskin who said, "There is no wealth but life." Against the ego-complex of the capitalists, then, indeed for the sake of the capitalists themselves, self- deceived as they are by long indulgence of their pos- sessive and excited random activities and badly formed habits, proletarians may, quite scientifically and with a serene sense of autonomy that is the only possible basis for true love and sound co-operation, insist upon that right to create freely which will necessitate the abolition of the wage-system, the organization of sur- plus-value "for the common good," and the abolition of private ownership of the paranoidal variety. In vain THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS will our moribund orthodox economics prate of "ex- change value" (a relation between a capricious, uninte- grated wish and an object, involving suppression, ex- cess, and compromise) and what they call "real value" (a revival of an untenable mediaeval conception of value as a quality inherent in an object that is some- how quite independent of the knower). There is dawning a social organization in which it will be seen that all economic goods can be rationally valued only in terms of the socially necessary and joyous labor that contributes to their production, a society in which work- ers will logically control, at least in considerable part, what they produce through their harmonious fellow- ships, industrial unions, Soviets, or guilds. In vain do orthodox economists aver with pseudo-realistic unction that they deal impartially with the "is," not rhapsodi- cally with the "ought." Thus they take refuge in that old, impossible dualism of the "physical" and the "spir- itual" rephrased as a dualism of "fact" and "ideal." Neither capitalist nor laborer pays notable heed. Both of these practical individuals insist upon dealing with the "ought" as often as the "is" and, while recognizing a certain working distinction between "facts" and "ideals," insist that any practical conduct and any vital science will consider both. In consequence, economics, which surely aims to be a help to capitalist, laborer, or both, must come perilously close to ethics and psy- THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY chology and discourse occasionally about autonomy, justice, and integration, or land in the mental treadmill, and feebly iterate that whatever is is. Man is not the mere creature of pleasures and pains even when most concentrated on economic activities. His mind is not to be partitioned off into a sort of quilt of little mutually independent units, convenient mathe- matical functions of units of material economic goods any more than his mind is to be regarded as a mere collection of unintegrated reflex actions each exclu- sively devoted to its particular stimulus. As actions become more and more characteristic of a human per- sonality the importance of specific stimuli wanes, the importance of an organizing purpose waxes. This larger purpose is the value relation. So the present capitalist system, with ingenious economic rationali- zation, turns out to be an impossible system for the sane human mind. And no sane human mind can remain content with merely "describing" or "explaining" what happens to exist in the market-place. There is nothing fundamentally unscientific, then, in the ethical crusade of militant proletarians against the system of capitalism with its irrational horrors. This system is hate. A crusade against it is that hate of hate which is the love of love. It must be admitted, however, that some proletarians overemphasize the power that must be correlated with THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS production. We must with Mr. G. D. H. Cole concede that "the consumer, the person for whom the goods are made, must decide," at least within certain limits, "what is to be produced, when it is to be produced, and in what quantities." As Mr. Cole points out, we need the State as the organized will of the consumer to offset the possible tyranny of producers' guilds. Such a State would not be very much like the present State which is, as Doctor Burrow could demonstrate, a compromise, a "symptom" exactly like the physiological "symptoms" with which hysterical individuals hide their own deep- est desires from themselves and coerce the terrified and over-indulgent members of their families. Every healthy person is both a producer and a consumer and he should rejoice in identifying himself with organi- zations which give the highest expression to each of these activities. Non-producers and excessive consu- mers would, in such a society, be treated as sick people by psychiatrical and general medical methods, which would eventuate in cure or humane segregation as ne- cessity dictated. There would be little room for those sadistic activities which we self-righteously denominate as "just punishment." But we had best linger for a longer space over our economic meditations before we elaborate on the kind of State in which a sane and sin- cere individual could find identification. In due time the wage-workers, in concert with the THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY pioneer intellectuals who share their proletarianism, will reconceive the State. Meanwhile, in the economic sphere, inspired in part by the magnificent if some- what confused philosophy of Marx and inspired even more by their own evolving conations, the wage-work- ers are formulating in constantly increasing numbers the hypotheses of "self-government in industry" and "abolition of the wage system." With these hypotheses they enter into the great task of experimental verifica- tion through their marvellously flexible and constantly changing trade unions which, with their fairly fluid structural variations (craft, occupational, industrial, federation, amalgamation, etc.) and their very fluid functional variations (mutual benefit, collective bar- gaining, boycott, label, sabotage, strikes of various kinds) constitute the most tremendous laboratory ever reared by the cunning, the audacity, and the nobility of men. In England, for nearly a century, intellectuals have been working towards an entente with wage-workers. Robert Owen, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Thomas Huxley, Frederic Harrison, William Morris, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, these are only a few of the wide ranging and illustrious minds that have found more or less to identify themselves with in the lives of the wage- workers. The youngest of the British intellectuals, the brilliant guild socialists, may well furnish us with ' THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS that residuum of economic theory which will be ad- missible in a book of this scope. These guildsmen are proud to record that their data are largely provided by the conduct of laborers, that their theories are little more than the clearer articulation of those propounded by the more thoughtful minority of laborers, particu- larly those of France, England, and America (viz, the I. W. W. and other "industrial unionists"). They are proud to note that their theories, after being tricked out in the robes of the intellectuals, are again espoused by a growing number of English laborers, particularly in the "Triple Alliance." We shall be able to under- stand this after we have sketched an episode in the his- tory of direct action in the British labor movement. Meanwhile let us round out our economic theory with the brilliant sentences of two leading guildsmen, Mr. S. G. Hobson and Mr. A. R. Orage. "The fundamental fact, common to every kind of wage, is the abso- lute sale of the labor commodity, which thereby passes from the seller to the buyer and becomes the buyer's exclusive property. This ab- solute sale conveys to the buyer absolutely possession and control of the products of the purchased labor commodity and stops the seller of the labor commodity from any claim upon the conduct of the industry. The wage-earner's one function is to supply labor power at the market price. That once accomplished, he is economically of no further consideration. "If . . . we transform the conventional conception of the economic [156] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY function of labor by crediting it with its proper human attributes and rejecting the pure commodity thesis sans phrase, then we remove labor from the wages or inanimate category to the living or active category of rent, interest and profits. This intellectual process accomplished, we have revolutionized political economy ; labor is at last in a position to contend with rent, interest and profits for the 'first charge' upon production. Whether it can, in fact, secure that first charge depends upon its power of economic organization upon its will and power to constitute productive and distributing guilds. And upon the power and capacity of labor (the human energy, not the commodity) thus to organize itself upon a sound economic basis depends the final test of democracy as a living principle. If labor, as we believe, can ef- fectively organize itself, producing and exchanging commodities more efficiently than is done under the wage system, then we shall speedily discover that whilst wages under the present system have no charge upon production, labor, organized into guilds, would have a first, second and third charge not only upon production, but upon the in- dustrial structure as a whole, "The problem of economic organization is almost as important as the problem of economic resources. A community rich in natural wealth, but defective in organization, may find its economic position inferior to a community, poor in natural resources, but effectively organized for economic purposes. This becomes mote and more a truism with the growth and efficiency of transportation facilities. Thus Lancashire, which does not grow an ounce of cotton, is the cotton centre of the world. Organization is the clue to what will prove a mystery to the historian a thousand years hence. Now the wage system is uneconomic, not only or even primarily because it is based upon a false conception of the nature of labor, but because it is the fruitful parent of faulty and uneconomic organization. The concentration of surplus value in the possession of a small class in- [157] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS evitably circumscribes the human area from which organizing capac- ity may be drawn. "At the outset we arc met by the fact, becoming more apparent every day, that the rack wage system in itself is immoral; that is, it does violence to the natural instinct of man. It is not to be denied that the realization of the immorality of one class of men reducing another class to and maintaining them in a condition of property! ess- ness in order to exploit their wage labor for private profit has been slow in coming. Even at this moment the realization is confined to a comparatively few minds. But the analogy of the wage system with chattel slavery even in this respect is striking ; for it took several milleniums for society to realize that chattel slavery was fundament- ally contrary to the nature of man. When, however, this immorality was realized, and, above all, felt, the economic system dependent upon it was doomed. ... In the end ... we believe that what is morally right is economically right; it is in this faith that moral reformers and practical economists find themselves so often on the same side. "The abolition of the wage system involves not merely an eco- nomic revolution, but ex hypothesis, a spiritual revolution also. A spiritual revolution, indeed, will be necessary as a precedent condition of the economic revolution; for we are not so blind to the lessons of history as to imagine that an economic revolution for the better can be engineered by force and greed alone. Would then this spiritual revolution which we hypothecate be likely to destroy what is already spiritually desirable in existing society? Rather it seems es- sential that it should come not to destroy, but to fulfill; not to make a complete break with its own spiritual past, but to release that past for new conquests. And in this assumption we are supported not only by reason, but by facts manifest to everybody. For it is clear to-day, if it was never clear before, that spirituality of mind, culture and [158] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY innate taste, are not now, if they once appeared to be, the monop- olies of any one class. They can no more confidently be looked for among the wealthy, leisured classes of today than among the artisan and professional classes. The gloomy forebodings of Mr. Balfour that literature, science and art would droop and die under the demo- cratization of industry are based, therefore, upon a profound mis- apprehension of the distribution among our nation of the spiritual qualities of which he speaks. It is the nation that has always pro- duced them ; and the nation may be relied upon to continue to produce them. "Even today, with the mass of the population degraded by wage slavery, is it the young aristocrat or the young democrat who dreams dreams? Is it the Pall Mall lounger or the untiring Socialist worker in the provinces who lives in ideas? Is it the young man just down from Oxford or Cambridge, or the studious working man who today soaks himself in genuine literature? Publishers, booksellers and librarians could tell Mr. Balfour strange stories on this head." Ill In the field of politics there is a growing movement on the part of radical intellectuals and adventurous wage-workers towards what we may call neo-federal- ism. We see it in the movement of some individual churches for emancipation from capitalism as exem- plified by the superb exodus of Doctor John Haynes Holmes and his congregation from their endowed edi- fice; in the so-called "sociological school" of lawyers in America (Justice Brandeis, Doctor Frankfurter, etc.) in French and Italian syndicalism; in German "inde- pendent socialism" and sparticism; in the agitations THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS of the American I.W.W. against the well developed "Servile State" in Australia and against its incipient analogue in the United States; in the growing talk about "academic freedom" in the United States; in British guild socialism; in the French writings of Duguit and others; in the English writings of Maitland and others; in Mr. Harold J. Laski's two brilliant volumes recently published in America; above all, in the indomitable soviet experiment in Russia whether this be destined for crucifixion or acclaim, at all events immortalized as the savior of the new society of the twentieth century. Today it is obvious that the State is not the will of the organized consumers or of any totality or majority except in so far as inertia and superstition are to be regarded as the fundamental traits of the totality or majority. The State is the will of various limited groups who happen to be in power. And the power which they possess is a psychopathological phenome- non. How are we to define the State in terms which will not blink the facts or outrage our ideals? We may accept Mr. Cole's definition : "A State is nothing more or less than the political machinery of government in a community." We may with him deplore the widely current monistic confusion of the terms "State" and "Community." We will agree with him that "the real action of the State in any time or place is ... deter- mined by the distribution of power in the community," [160] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY that "political power is in itself nothing," that political power is important only as "the expression of social power" which "may assume many forms military, ec- clesiastical, agrarian, economic, industrial but under most conditions, it is inevitably in the main economic and industrial in character," that "capitalism contrib- utes the funds of the great parties, and therefore con- trols their policies" in the main, even though we admit that "this domination of capitalism is not absolute." Mr. Cole's following paragraphs are most clear and inclusive for our purposes. "As a territorial or geographical association, the State is clearly marked out as the instrument for the execution of those purposes which men have in common by reason of 'neighborhood.' It is easiest to make plain the meaning of this principle by taking first the case of a municipal body. That body represents all the citizens as en- joyers in common of the land, housing, amenities and social char- acter of the city. The municipal council, is, therefore, or would be if it were democratic, the proper body to deal with those public mat- ters which, broadly speaking, affect all the citizens equally and in the same way, that is, affect them as citizens. It has not the same prima facie qualification for dealing with those matters which affect the citizens in different ways, according as they happen to be bakers or tramwaymen, Protestants or Catholics. The municipal council rep- resents the individuals who inhabit the city as 'users' or- 'enjoyers' in common, and is qualified to legislate on matters of 'use' and 'enjoy- ment' ; but if we would represent individuals as bakers or tramway- men, Protestants or Catholics, we must seek other forms of organ- ization in which these things are made the basis of representation. [161] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS "The case is the same with the national State. Parliament does, in so far as it is democratic, represent men as 'users' or 'enjoyers' in common, this time on a national instead of a local basis. It is, there- fore, qualified to deal with matters of national 'use' or 'enjoyment'; but it is not equally qualified in those matters which affect men dif- ferently according as they are miners or raihvaymen, Catholics or Protestants. "The theory of State Sovereignty falls to the ground, if this view of the fundamental nature of the State is correct. State Sovereignty, if the phrase has any meaning at all, implies, not, indeed, that the State ought to interfere in every sphere of human action, but that the State has ultimately a right to do so. It regards the State as the rep- resentative of the community in the fullest sense, and as the superior both of the individual 'subject' and of every other form of association. It regards the State as the full and complete representative of the individual, whereas, if the view just put fonvard is correct, the State only represents the individual in his particular aspect of 'neighbor,' 'user' and 'enjoyer.' The advocates of State Sovereignty, if they do not regard the State as being the community, do at least regard it as 'sustaining the person of the community,' whereas our whole view is that the person of the community cannot truly be sustained by any single form of organization. "This difference of views appears most distinctly when we sur- vey the differing views taken by various schools of thought concern- ing the nature of associations other than the State, and their relation to the State. A controversy, medieval in its origin, but revived in modern times, has centred round this question, and has derived topical interest in our own day and from our special point of view, because it has arisen in an acute form in connection with the legal position of Trade Unionism. The Osborne decision, which rendered illegal the use of Trade Union funds for political purposes, was based upon a totally wrong conception of the nature of Trade Unionism. Special [162] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY legislation accordingly had to be passed to restore to the Unions even a modified freedom in this respect. "The real principle at issue was greatly more important than the important special point involved. The judges, in giving their de- cision, were really affirming their view that Trade Union rights are purely the creation of statute law and that Trade Unions themselves are artificial bodies created by statute to perform certain functions. Some opponents of the Osborne decision, on the other hand, expressed the view that a Trade Union is not a creature of statute law, but a natural form of human association, and, therefore, capable of growth and the assumption of new purposes. In short, there was really, on the one side, the view that all the rights and powers of other forms of association are derived from the State, and, on the other side, the view that these rights and powers belong to such associations by virtue of the nature and the purposes for which they exist. "Let us now try to apply the view which we have taken of the State's real nature to this particular case. Trade Unions are asso- ciations based on the 'vocational' principle. They seek to group together in one association all those persons who are co-operating in making a particular kind of thing or rendering a particular kind of service. In the common phrase, they are associations of 'producers,' using 'production' in the widest sense. The State, on the other hand, we have decided to regard as an association of 'users' or 'enjoyers,' or 'consumers,' in the common phrase. If this view is right, we cannot regard Trade Unions as deriving their rights, including the right to exist, from the State. Associations of producers and consumers alike may be said, in a sense, to derive these rights from the community ; but we cannot conceive of an association of producers deriving its right to exist from an association of 'users.' "Our view, then, of the nature of rights of vocational and other forms of association is profoundly modified by the view we have taken of the nature of the State. We now see such associations as natural [163] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS expressions and instruments of the purposes which certain groups of individuals have in common, just as we see the State, both in national and in local government, as the natural expression and instrument of other purposes which the same individuals have in common when they are grouped in another way. Similarly, our whole view of the relation of the State to other forms of association is profoundly modi- fied, and we come to see the State, not as the 'divine' and universally sovereign representative of the community, but as one among a num- ber of forms of association in which men are grouped according to the purposes which they have in common. Men produce in common, and all sorts of association, from the medieval guild to the modern trust and the modern Trade Union, spring from their need to co- operate in production; they use and enjoy in common, and out of their need for common action and protection in their use and enjoy- ment spring the long series of States, the various phases of co-opera- tion, the increasing developments of local government. They hold views in common, and out of their common opinions spring propa- gandists and doctrinaire associations of every sort; they believe in common, and out of their need for fellowship and worship spring churches, connections and covenants. "In all this diversity of human association, the State can claim an important place, but not a solitary grandeur. States exist for the execution of that very important class of collective actions which affect all the members of the communities in which they exist equally and in the same way. For other classes of action, in respect of which men fall into different groups, other forms of association are needed, and these forms of association are no less sovereign in their sphere than the State in its sphere. There is no universal Sovereign in the community, because the individuals who compose that community cannot be fully represented by any form of association. For different purposes, they fall into different groups, and only in the action and inter-action of these groups does Sovereignty exist. Even so, it is [i6 4 ] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY an incomplete Sovereignty ; for all the groups which together make up Society, are imperfectly representative of that General Will which resides in the community alone." This articulates with special clearness and fulness what all progressive people, revolting against the hor- rors of Prussian monism (which we now see to be the conviction of many besides Prussians), feel today with an unconquerable wistfulness. And we should not stint at this crucial point our citation of men who are think- ing this thing through. Nobody that I have read has thought it through with a finer sense of proletarian im- plications and a sturdier sense of all the implications that are just now accessible than Mr. Harold J. Laski. "We are urging," writes Mr. Laski, "that because a group or an individual is related to some other group or individual it is not thereby forced to enter into relations with every other part of the body politic. When a trade-union ejects one of its members for re- fusing to pay a political levy it is not thereby bringing itself into re- lations with the Mormon Church. A trade-union as such has no connection with the Mormon Church; it stands self-sufficient on its own legs. It may work with the State, but it need not do so of necessity. It may be in relations with the State, but it is one with it and not of it. The State, to use James's terms ... is 'distribu- tive' and not 'collective.' There are no essential connections. . . . "If we become inductive-minded and make our principles grow out of the facts of social life we shall admit that the sanction of the will of the State is going to depend largely on the persons who interpret it. The monarchs of the ancien regime were legally the sovereign power in France, but their will was not the will of the State. It [165] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS did not prevail because of the supreme unwisdom of the manner in which they chose to assume that their good was also the popular good. They confused what Rousseau would have called their 'private good' with the 'common good' and Louis XVI paid the penalty on the scaffold. The will of the State obtains pre-eminence over the wills of other groups exactly to the point where it is interpreted with sufficient wisdom to obtain acceptance, and no further. It is a will to some ex- tent competing with other wills, and, Darwin-wise, surviving only by its ability to cope with its environment. Should it venture into dan- gerous places it pays the penalty of its audacity. It finds its sovereign- ty by consent transformed into impotence by disagreement. "But, it may be objected, in such a view sovereignty means no more than the ability to secure assent. I can only reply to the objec- tions by admitting it. There is no sanction for law other than the consent of the human mind. It is sheer illusion to imagine that the authority of the State has any other safeguard than the wills of its members. For the State, as I have tried to show, is simply what Mr. Graham Wallas calls a will-organization, and the essential feature of such a thing is its ultimate dependence upon the constituent wills from which the group will is made. To argue that the State is degraded by such reduction in nowise alters, so far as I can see, the fact that this is its essential nature. We have only to look at the realities of social existence to see quite clearly that the State does not enjoy any preeminence for its demands. I shall find again and again that my allegiance is divided between the different groups to which I belong. It is the nature of the particular difficulty which decides my action. "There are, in this view, things which the State cannot demand from its members. It could not, for instance, demand from one of them that he assassinate a perfectly blameless man ; for so to demand is to violate for both men the whole purpose for which the State ex- [166] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY ists. It would have, on the other hand, a clear right to ask from each member such contribution as he can afford to a system of national education, because the modern State has decided that the more educated are its members the more are they likely to fulfill its end. What I mean by 'right' is something which the pragmatist will under- stand. It is something the individual ought to concede, because ex- perience has proved it to be good. So when the State demands from one of its members toleration for the religious belief of another as a right each should enjoy, it means that the consequences of toleration are more coincident with the end of the State than the consequences of religious persecution. Our rights are teleological. They have to prove themselves. That is why, I confess, one of the main comforts I derive from the study of Aristotle is the conviction that he at- tempted to delineate a pragmatist theory of the State. He gave to his rights the rich validation of experience; and surely a right that has no consequences is too empty to admit of worth. "The view of the State I am endeavoring to depict may, perhaps, be best understood by reference to a chemical analogy. The chemist draws a picture of his molecule it is a number of atoms grouped to- gether by certain links of attraction each possesses for the other. And when a molecule of say hydrogen meets a molecule of oxygen some- thing new results. What is there may be merely hydrogen plus oxygen; but you must treat it as something different from either. So I would urge that you must place your individual at the centre of things. You must regard him as linked to a variety of associa- tions to which his personality attracts him. You must on this view admit that the State is only one of the associations to which he hap- pens to belong, and give it exactly that pre-eminence and no more to which on the particular occasion of conflict, its possibly superior moral claim will entitle it. In my view it does not attempt to take that pre-eminence by force ! it wins by consent. ['167'] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS "Surely, too, that State will be the stronger which thus binds itself to its members by the strength of a moral purpose validated. When, for example, your miners in South Wales go on strike, rather than attempt their compulsion by Munitions Acts to obey that for which they feel no sympathy, and thus to produce that feeling of balked disposition of which Mr. Graham Wallas has written so wisely, you seek means of finding common ground between their group and yours, you will have done better. Is there not a tre- mendous danger in modern times that people will believe the legal sovereignty of a State to be identical with its moral sovereignty? Right is a dangerous word for it is political no less than ethical, and in the hands of a skilful statesman the meaning may be in- sensibly fused. So it will be preached eventually that where a State, from this theoretic conception of Oneness, has a legal right, it has also a moral right, which passes so easily into a moral obligation. Government, then, stands above the moral code applied to humbler individuals. It is almost unconsciously exalted into tyranny. It gains the power to crush out all that conflicts with its own will, no matter what the ethical implications of that will. I can then well understand why to an historian like Treitschke power can be the end of all things. For then power is moral and becomes more profoundly moral as it grows in extent. Is there the slightest justification for such a conclusion? "In the realm of philosophy, the last forty years have seen the con- stant disruption of absolutisms. In the sphere of politics they are assuredly but the expression of what our rulers are fain to believe from half-instinctive desire. The history of recorded experience seems to show that this kind of dogma is the stumbling-block in the way of all progress. The State has sovereign rights; and those who manipulate it will often cause it to be used for the protection of exist- [168] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY ing rights. The two get identified; the dead hand of effete ances- tralism falls with a resounding thud on the living hopes of today. "Such difficulties as this the pluralistic theory of the State seems to me to remove. As a theory it is what Professor Dewey calls "con- sistently experimentalist," in form and content. It denies the right- ness of force. It dissolves what the facts themselves dissolve the inherent claim of the State to obedience. It insists that the State, like every other association, shall prove itself by what it achieves. "I am well enough aware that in any such voluntarism as this room is left for a hint of anarchy. To discredit the State seems like enough to dethroning it. And when the voice of the State is viewed as the deliberate expression of public opinion it seems like the destruction of the one uniquely democratic basis we have thus far attained. But the objection, like the play queen in 'Hamlet,' protests too much. It assumes the homogeneity of public opinion, and of that homogeneity not even the most stout-hearted of us could adduce the proof. Nor is its absence defect. On the contrary, it seems to me that it is es- sentially a sign that real thought is present. A community that can- not agree is already a community capable of advance. "It is from the selection of variations, not from the preservation of uniformities, that progress is born. We do not want to make our State a cattle-yard in which only the shepherd will know one beast from another. Rather we may hope to bring from the souls of men and women their richest fruition. If they have intelligence we shall ask its application to our problems. If they have courage we shall ask the aid of its compelling will. We shall make the basis of our State consent to disagreement. Therein shall we ensure its deepest harmony." At a time when mob-sentiment oscillates between the THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS paranoidal anarchy of laissez-faire and its new born antitheses and successors, monistic state-capitalism and state-socialism, it is not easy to grasp the economic and political philosophy of the future without contaminat- ing it with vestigial principles from the competitive individualism of Manchester economics, the romantic law-breaking of Bakounin, the aberrations of contem- porary profiteers and parochial craft-unionists, and the mechanistic fears and obsessions of new bureaucracies. We reel between the equally hateful extremes of Prus- sianism and that arrogant type of individualism which is competitive, paranoidal. But Mr. Hobson and Mr. Orage can show us in some detail how we may make our transition with due respect for external reality and due reverence for the autonomy in the soul of each in- dividual. And the paragraphs which we quote from them formulate a practical program the first planks of which are already being worked gropingly into prac- tice by shop-stewards in England, by Amalgamated Clothing Workers and Seattle and Winnipeg strikers in America. "There is no mystery attaching to the organization of the Guild. It means the regimentation into a single fellowship of all those who are employed in any given industry. This does not preclude what- ever subdivisions may be convenient in the special trades belonging to the main industry. Thus the iron and steel industry may comprise fourteen or fifteen subdivisions, but all living integral parts of the parent Guild. The active principle of the Guild is industrial de- [ 170] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY mocracy. Herein it differs from State Socialism or Collectivism. In the one case control comes from without and is essentially bureau- cratic; in the other, the Guild manages its own affairs, appoints its own officers from the general manager to the office boy, and deals with the other Guilds and with the State as a self-contained unit. It rejects State bureaucracy; but, on the other hand, it rejects Syndicalism, because it accepts co-management with the State, al- ways, however, subject to the principle of industrial democracy. Co-management must not be held to imply the right of any outside body to interfere in the detailed administration of the Guild; but it rightly implies formal and effective co-operation with the State in regard to large policy, for the simple reason that the policy of a Guild is a public matter, about which the public, as represented by the State, has an indefeasible right to be consulted and considered. It is not easy to understand precisely how far the Syndicalist disre- gards the State, as such ; nor is it necessary to our task that we should make any such inquiry. For ourselves we are clear that the Guilds ought not and must not be the absolute possessors of their land, houses, and machinery. We remain Socialists because we believe that in the final analysis the State, as representing the community at large, must be the final arbiter. "But the recognition of State organization and State functions does not invalidate our main contention that economics must precede poli- tics. On the contrary, it strengthens it. The difficulty with modern statesmanship is that it has to spend its strength on ways and means when it ought to be doing a far greater work. It is like a scientist or an artist who is perpetually distracted from his real work by domestic worries. Remove from statesmanship the incubus of financial puzzle- dom and it may achieve glory in the things that matter. And in all human probability a finer type of politician will be called into ac- tivity. Financial considerations corrode politics as effectively as they [171] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS do the individual worker. Now if the Guilds are in economic com- mand, if, further, their labors exceed in results the present wage system, it follows that they will not be miserly in devoting all the money that is required for the cultural development of the com- munity. "it will be for the Guilds to decide, by democratic suffrage, what hours shall be worked and generally the conditions of employment. All that mass of existing legislation imposing factory regulations, or relating to mining conditions, to the limitation of the hours of work (legislation which we have previously described as sumptuary), will go by the board. The Guilds will rightly consider their own conven- ience and necessities. It may be discovered, for example, that times and conditions suitable to the Engineering Guild will not suit the Agricultural Guild. Legislation attempted from the outside would in such an organization be regarded as impertinent. Even the exist- ing old age pensions would be laughed to scorn as hopelessly inade- quate. "There can be no doubt that the old tendency inside the existing wage system is to level wages. The old distinction between the skilled and unskilled is rapidly being dissipated, both by the develop- ment of machinery and the economic pressure exerted by foreign com- petition, and the increased price of money. With this tendency we have no quarrel; on the contrary, we welcome it. But this wage approximation has as yet hardly touched the rent of ability still more or less willingly paid to those in the upper reaches of the administra- tive hierarchy. That they will finally find their true economic level is certain. Meanwhile their services are rightly in demand and their remuneration is assured. Even if the process of wage approxi- mation goes much further than we now foresee, it is nevertheless in- evitable that the graduations of position and pay will be found neces- sary to efficient Guild administration. We do not shrink from grad- [172] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY uated pay; we are not certain that it is not desirable. There will be no inequitable distribution of Guild resources, we may rest as- sured; democratically controlled organizations seldom err on the side of generosity. But experience will speedily teach the Guilds that they must encourage technical skill by freely offering whatever in- ducements may at the time most powerfully attract competent men. There are many' ways by which invention, organizing capacity, statis- tical aptitude or what not may be suitably rewarded. It is certain that rewarded these qualities must be. "It is the maintenance and protection of the Guild members that really constitutes the social revolution now rendered urgent by the failure of the present industrial system to maintain and protect its wage slaves. Here, then, we reach the practical issue of the abolition of the wage system. The fundamental distinction between Guild control and private capitalism is that, whereas the latter merely buys labor power as a commodity, and at a price (known as wages) which yield the maximum rent and interest, the Guilds co-operatively apply the human energy of their members independent of capitalist charges, and distribute the proceeds of their members' labor among their mem- bers without regard to rent or interest. Competitive wages, in fact, are abolished and in consequence, there is no surplus value, no rent; no wages, no interest ; no wages, no profits. "Once a member of his Guild, no man need again fear the rigors of unemployment or the slow starvation of competitive wage. Thus every transport worker, providing he honestly completes the task assigned him, will be entitled to maintenance a maintenance equal to his present wage, plus the amount now lost by unemployment, plus a proportion of existing surplus value that is, plus his present individual contribution to rent and interest; and, finally, plus what- ever savings are effected by more efficient organization. He will not, therefore, receive wages (as we now know them), because he will re- [ 173] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS ceive something much greater possibly three times greater than the existing wage standard. "We pin our faith to the democratic idea without reserve. We believe that the workman is the shrewdest judge of good work and of the competent manager. Undistracted by irrelevant political notions, his mind centred upon the practical affairs of his trade, the workman may be trusted to elect to higher grades the best men available. In the appointment of their checkweighmen, for example, the miners almost never make a mistake. Doubtless injustices will from time to time be perpetrated; but they will be few compared with the million injustices done today to capable men who are habitually ignored in the interests of capitalist cadets. "We differentiated ourselves from the Syndicalist by admitting the right of the State to co-management with the Guilds. In the most formal manner, now, we assert that the material of all the Guilds ought to be vested in the State; the monopoly of the Guilds is their organised labour power. Over their labour power the Guilds must have complete control; but the State will be rightly and equitably entitled to a substitute for economic rent. A substitute, we say; not economic rent itself; for economic rent is a product of competitive private ownership. Adam Smith was the first to point out, and Tho- rold Rogers the first to prove, that rent was originally what we con- ceive it will be again under Guild Socialism, namely, a tax in return for a charter or licence. It was only when capitalism arose that the tax called rent was raised by successive stages to the competitive rack-rent it is to-day. But how will the tax payable by the Guilds to the State be computed if not by competition? By the needs of the State and the proportionate means of the Guilds. Assume that the estimated budget for any following year is 250,000,000. This sum will require to be found by the citizens in their individual or in [174] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY their collective capacity. But for those individuals who are organised in Guilds, it will, we imagine, be most convenient to tax them collec- tively, that is, through their Guilds. Thus the Guild would, in each instance, be required to levy on itself in behalf of the State an amount proportionate to the numbers of its members. "We do not deny that in mass production or distribution there is an ever-present danger that the individual may pass into the machine a unique individuality and come out at the other end a mere type. But that, after all, is not the least of the criticisms that apply to the existing industrial system. There is practically no culture of industrial genius under private capitalism certainly there is no sys- tematic culture. Given ten distinctive individualities, without means or influence, how many will live to enjoy the full fruition of their faculties ? If only one of them 'arrives' it is remarkable ; yet the pri- vate capitalist is quick to exploit him: 'See,' he says, 'how, under our glorious industrial system, real ability rises to the surface.' But meagre though the harvest of genius or special talent undoubtedly is, there is this also to be remembered that probably the nine men who never arrived were spiritually and morally the superiors of the suc- cessful tenth. How often, for example, do we hear it said of some- body: 'He's a remarkably able man, but much too modest no push, you know.' By 'push,' in this instance, is meant the capacity to ex- ploit one's fellowmen. Or, again, how often do we hear it said of the successful man: 'Yes, he's clever enough, but absolutely without scruple.' Or, yet again: 'He knows how to get the most out of bet- ter men than himself.' Or, 'He was cute enough to surround him- self with clever young lieutenants.' It is not necessary to labour the point, which, briefly summarised, may thus be stated: Private capitalism limits the individual interests and, therefore, necessarily crushes all those faculties of mankind that do not definitely minister to those limited interests. Here we come upon one of the fundamental [175] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS laws of democracy. No system can be truly democratic unless it calls into activity the full maximum number of faculties inherent in the democracy. "The problem, then, of the modern State is to give free play in their appropriate environment to the economic and the political forces respectively. We have seen that they do not coalesce; that where they are intermixed, they not only tend to nullify each other, but to adulterate those finer passions and ambitions of mankind that ought properly to find expression and satisfaction in the political sphere. It is a quality inherent in private capitalism to dominate and mould State policy to its own ends, precisely as it exploits labour. If the interests of private capitalism were synonymous with those of the community as a whole this danger might be theoretical rather than real. But we know that the assumption of unity of interest between private capitalism and the State degrades the standard of national life and stifles all aspirations towards that spiritual influence which is the true mark of national greatness. But, whilst the separation of the political and economic functions gives equipoise and stability to the State, nevertheless the policy and destiny of the State, in the final analysis, depend upon its economic processes being healthy and equit- able. For this reason amongst others, the State, acting in the inter- ests of citizenship as distinct from Guild membership, must be ade- quately represented upon the governing bodies of the Guilds." But sometimes the guild socialists slip over on rather equivocal ground. Mr. Hobson and Mr. Orage, in their eagerness to bring economic responsibility and power within their national guilds and thus to emanci- pate the State for more spiritual activities, surrender spiritual activities somewhat too readily and too largely THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY to the State. They are prepared, for instance, after insisting that the guilds have charge of technical edu- cation, to surrender all studies which make for "cul- ture" to the organizing genius of the State. In the light of the terrible servitude of the education of "culture" today is this dealing quite wisely with unborn genera- tions even though we confidently prophecy the extinc- tion of the perverse moods of the profiteer? Another guildsman or associate of the guildsmen, Senor Ramiro de Maeztu, is so eager to impale the defects of the older democratic idolatry of rights along with our recent reaction towards authoritarianism that he be- comes extremely anti-voluntaristic. Like some of the more extreme "neo-realists" he comes to invest a divin- ity in certain abstract principles which are conceived to subsist independently of all individual minds and which may, by their very nature so conceived, tempt us only too easily into a toleration of a new kind of des- potism, to flee the King Stork of the "ego-centric pre- dicament" only to fall under the bidding of some plau- sible new version of King Log's "eternal principles." These men would do well to listen to some of Mr. Laski's warnings. But their colleague, Mr. Cole, is freer from their more dubious tendencies. What is the dilemma that confronts the guildsmen? This dilemma, producer versus consumer, is nothing but the conflict between what Mr. Bertrand Russell [177] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS would call impulses and desires from the point of view of individual psychology. An industrial, central Guild Congress, representing the diverse guilds and their pro- ductive impulses will be pitted against "the great ter- ritorial association of Parliament representing the con- sumers and their geographical idiosyncracies" and their desires. Mr. Cole's analysis of this balance of power is more satisfactory than that of any other guilds- man. "The system of National Guilds appeals to me first of all as a bal- ance of powers. Guildsmen have always recognised, and drawn a distinction between, two forms of social power, economic and politi- cal. Economic power, as they hold, precedes political power. The social class which at any time holds the economic power will hold the political power also, and will be dispossessed in the political sphere only by a new class which is able to overthrow it in the economic sphere. "The first question which National Guildsmen have to face, in adopting this position, and, at the same time, holding to their double theory of social organisation, is whether the very nature of the dis- tinction which they draw between economic and political power does not result in obliterating the difference between them. This is the fundamental character of the criticism urged against them by Syndi- calists and Marxian Industrial unionists. 'You agree with us,' such critics will say, 'that the State is only a pale reflexion of the economic structure of Society. Why, then, seek to preserve this mere mechani- cal device of capitalism when the conditions which created it have ceased to exist?' "It is not enough for Guildsmen, or, at least, it does not seem to be enough, to reply that reflexions may have their uses, and that, if [178] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY capitalistic industrialism has turned the State to its own ends, demo- cratic industrialism, in the day of its triumph, may with good effect do the same. This is an answer, and perhaps a sufficient answer; but it is not, I am convinced, the right answer for Guildsmen to make. For I am not convinced that the State must be, under all so- cial conditions, merely a pale reflexion of the economic structure of Society at least, in any sense which would preclude equality of power between them on many issues. "In countries given over to capitalist industrialism, the State is con- trolled by the industrial capitalists. That is a true description of things as they are, and it is clear that things can be changed only by means of a re-distribution of economic power. But, when this re-dis- tribution has taken place and National Guilds are in being, will it still be true that economic power precedes political power? "In our interpretation of history, the evolution of Society is seen as a long series of struggles between social classes for the possession of economic power. We envisage National Guilds, as Marx envisaged his conception of Socialism, as the culmination of this long process. We do not doubt that development will continue after National Guilds have been brought into being; but development will assume new forms. The class-struggle will be over, and the 'social class' will be a thing of the past. Under these new conditions will the old relation between economic and political power remain unchanged ? Is it not rather true that the existing relation arises out of, and de- pends upon, the class-struggle, so that with the ceasing of the class- struggle it, too, will cease to exist? The contrast between economic and political power has only a strained application to those primitive conditions which preceded an acute division of classes: the strain will be altogether too great if we try to apply it to conditions in which there are no distinctions of class. "What, then, will be the relation between economic and political power under the Guilds? A relation, I think, of equality equality [ 179] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS upon which the poise and vitality of Guild Society fundamentally depend. For, to me at least, the balance of power is the underlying principle of the Guilds and any departure from it would be destruc- tive of their essential character. Let me explain more precisely what I mean. "We have disputed, time and again, about the Sovereignty of the State, and its application to Guild philosophy; but we have often conceived the problem rather in a negative than in a positive way. Sometimes we have started with Guilds as a positive system, and have tried to see in what respects we desire to limit their authority by State intervention, or by the assigning of certain functions to the State rather than to the Guilds. At other times, we have started from the side of the State, and considered in what respects we desire to see its power limited or its functions curtailed. What we have seldom done is to consider at the same time the positive character of both the State and the Guilds, so as to focus at once the whole prob- lem of the relation between them. "This, however, is what we must try to do when we attempt, not to define the limits of State or Guild action, but to lay bare the basic principle of National Guilds. The fundamental reason for the preservation, in a democratic Society, of both the industrial and the political forms of social organisation is, it seems to me, that only by dividing the vast power now wielded by industrial capitalism can the individual hope to be free. The objection is not simply to the con- centration of so vast a power in the present hands, but to its concen- tration anywhere at all. If the individual is not to be a mere pigmy in the hands of a colossal social organism, there must be such a divi- sion of social powers as will preserve individual freedom by balancing one social organism so nicely against another that the individual may still count. If the individual is not to be merely an insignificant part of a society in which his personality is absorbed, Society must [180] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY be divided in such a way as to make the individual the link between its autonomous but interdependent parts." So far so good. Mr. Cole is clearly sufficiently wor- ried about a premature and too free-handed division of functions that will lend too much power to the State- incubus from which we are trying to escape all over western civilization by internal class-wars and external national wars or imperialistic coercions conducted simultaneously. Mr. Cole is a national guildsman be- cause national guilds seem to him "to offer the only reasonable prospect of a balance of powers." He calls himself a national guildsman "in the name of individ- ual freedom." Perhaps he will not, then, be as easy- handed in turning over education for culture to the new State as Mr. Hobson and Mr. Orage. He will not be as implacably fearful of the insistence on the "rights" of the individual as Senor Ramiro de Maeztu. He will not anathematize "desires" as magnificently and as morbidly as Mr. Bertrand Russell. He argues well that this balance of powers which he so wisely recognizes as fundamental is not only attainable but maintainable in spite of lurking dangers in the future. And yet even Mr. Cole can hardly be altogether reas- suring to such inveterate pluralists as those of us who have been bred under that American ideal of separa- tion of political powers which sprang so inductively from the drift of the pre-revolutionary colonies and [181] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS which, despite the occasional usurpations of a Hamil- tonian Congress or President or Supreme Court, re- mains our ideal. Mr. Cole is so impressed by the fact of these usurpations that he denies the possibility of a separation of political powers in the State. He assu- ages his longings for pluralism in his picture of the guilds. He grants to the State a monistic character that might, at the last, lure us into traps against which Mr. Hobson, Mr. Orage, and Sefior de Maeztu have failed to provide. Mr. Cole sees that "the old doctrine of the separation of powers is based on the principle of a division by stages." But he would now surrender these psychological and logical realities for a "division by function." At first this sounds in better accord with our new psychology as opposed to the older, more arti- ficially analytical psychology. But it somewhat slights what Doctor Meyer calls the "ultrabiologic level of facts." Economic realities have crowded out Mr. Cole's sense of some of the more sophisticated psy- chological realities. He insists that "the type, purpose and subject-matter of the problem, and not the stage at which it has arrived, must determine what authority is to deal with it." "Guild theory involves," he con- cludes, "the division of the 'legislative-executive power' according to function between the State and the Guilds; but it preserves the integrity of the judiciary, making it an appendage neither of the State nor of the Guilds, [182] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY but of the two combined." This is certainly a brilliant suggestion. Yet twentieth century Americans, after their bitter experiences with our Supreme Court, will wonder whether, even after a guild- revolution has de- stroyed "privilege" as we know it today, a judiciary, even a judiciary which is but "an appendage" and which would doubtless be subject to a flexible system of recall, would not be a terrible check to the unrm- agined hopes of future progressives, whether in fact Mr. Cole is quite realizing his dream of "equality," of "balancing one social organism so nicely against an- other that the individual may still count." Once more our meditations, so constantly likely to become stere- otyped, need the leaven of those benignant nemeses of all inertia, those invincible champions of our dynamic birthright, the Utopian anarchists. ''Politics and economics," says Mr. Cole, "afford the only possible line of division." May not this too read- ily become a new version of those dualisms which cre- ated a world of spirit and a world of matter, a world of values and a world of utilities, a world of leisure and a world of drudgery against which we have been argu- ing throughout this book? The guild socialists have given us the most coherent scheme yet elaborated. But some of us are still inclined to pluralize sovereignty yet more radically. All through this book we have emphasized the fact THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS that religion, criticism, science, and art are not wholly separable subject-matters but are flowing, merging stages in the thoughts and deeds of every man. The old democratic practice in America and the old theo- ries of certain French philosophers of a representative government divided by stages, legislative, judiciary, and executive, seem to me to have been unconscious recognitions of this psychological truth. As all men must have aspirations, purify them into critical hypo- theses, theories, laws, and execute them artistically and scientifically, so the State must formulate aspirations, criticize them and execute them as accurately and beautifully as possible. All individuals experience all these stages though most individuals (perhaps because of the malign tendency which psychoanalysts call fixa- tion, a tendency which we may progressively lighten in men) specialize in one stage, grow obsessed, blinded by complexes. But even today, despite the omnipres- ence of the neuroses and the psychoses, individuals can- not and do not quite forget those stages which they happen to be less accustomed to perfect. The critic does not wholly cease to be poet and scientist. Dar- win may find himself bored with Shakespeare but he sometimes grows lyrical as he searches for the meaning of the emotion in the features of animals and men. Doubtless all these stages will always need specialists in some sense, saner specialists, not the obsessed crea- THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY tures who call themselves specialists today. Doubtless the State will need such specialists. But the interac- tion of these stages in the State as in the individual would be more intimate and free if people became more thoroughly self-conscious of the merging of these ten- dencies in the minds of all well-balanced individuals whatever their specialties. We may agree with guilds- men that a nation should have its Guild Congresses representing us as producers and its State representing us as consumers, two organizations free to carry out their several functions with a considerable degree of independence. We may agree with the guildsmen that these two great organizations should be constantly re- adjusting their balance of power through a "Joint Com- mittee" which should have delegates from both Guild Congress and State, which should listen to the State's demand for revenue from the property operated by the guilds for the State. We may agree that the Joint Committee could best apportion this tax among the guilds in accordance with their several resources and adjust other matters of friction between us as producers and as consumers. But I believe also that the Guild Congress, the State, and the Joint Committee should each be organized pluralistically into their legislative, judiciary, and executive stages or aspects, that the Joint Committee should be composed of men not purely judicial, hypothesis-making, no matter how judicial [ 185 ] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS the main body of their functions might prove to be, but of legislators, judiciary experts, and executors, i.e., of religious aspirers or dreamers, critical purifiers of hypotheses, and artists or makers or scientific experi- mentalists. IV I have been trying to make some forecast of the processes by which intellectuals and wage-workers will unite to break-down rationally those institutions which are but hysterical symptoms, compromises, bad habit- formations from competitive random activities, morbid complexes, and inertia. With the evaporation of these evil, false, terribly depressing institutions or social hab- its we may so integrate our activities as to get a much fuller release for that wish to love, we may discover our autonomy and seek free identification, thus express- ing what we believe to be the original nature of man. Amidst all the squalor of modern industrialism we find this sublime miracle that the wish to love wells up most purely from the folk, from the wage-workers at the bottom. And the intellectual should put aside all proud hopes of leading, for the humbler, more lov- ing task of giving a little more articulate expression to these profound proletarian aspirations just as the writer of symphonies may give architectonic coherence and majesty to the myriad brooklike songs of Hun- garian peasants. ['86] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY For our observation that the deepest love, less re- pressed into possessive capitalism and sex, wells from the proletariat we may cite the authority of one of the greatest anthropologists of the world, Professor Franz Boas. "In North America, among the Indians of British Columbia, in which a sharp distinction is made between people of noble birth and common people . . . the contrast between the social proprieties . . . is very striking. Of the common people are expected humbleness, mercy, and all those qualities that we consider humane. "Similar observations may be made in all those cases in which, by a complex tradition, a social class is set off from the mass of the peo- ple. The chiefs of the Polynesian Islands, the kings in Africa, the medicine men of all countries present examples in which a social group's line of conduct and of thought is strongly modified by their segregation from the mass of the people. On the whole, in socie- ties of this type, the mass of the people consider as their ideal those actions which we should characterize as humane; not by any means that all their actions conform to humane conduct, but their valua- tion of men shows that the fundamental altruistic principles which we recognize are recognized by them too. Not so with the priv- ileged classes. In place of the general humane interest the class inter- est predominates; and while it would be wrong to say that their conduct is selfish, it is always so shaped that the interest of the class to which they belong prevails over the interest of society as a whole. If it is necessary to secure rank and to enhance the standing of the family by killing a number of enemies, there is no hesitation felt in taking life. If the interest of the class requires that its members should not perform menial occupations but should devote themselves to art or learning, then all the members of the class will vie with one [187] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS another in the attainment of these achievements. It is for this reason that every segregated class is much more strongly influenced by spe- cial traditional ideas than is the mass of the people ; not that the mul- titude is free to think rationally and that its behavior is not deter- mined by tradition, but that the tradition is not so specific, not so strictly determined in its range, as in the case of the segregated classes. For this reason it is often found that the restriction of freedom of thought by convention is greater in what we might call the educated classes than in the mass of the people. "It is therefore not surprising that the masses of the people whose attachment to the past is comparatively slight and who work respond more quickly to the urgent demands of the hour than the educated classes, and that the ethical ideals of the best among them are human ideals, not those of the segregated class. For this reason I should always be more inclined to accept, in regard to fundamental human problems, the judgment of the masses rather than the judg- ment of the intellectuals, which is much more certain to be warped by unconscious control of traditional ideas. I do not mean to say that the judgment of the masses would be acceptable in regard to every problem of human life, because there are many which, by their tech- nical nature, are beyond their understanding. Nor do I believe that the details of the right solution of a problem can always be found by the masses; but I feel strongly that the problem itself, as viewed by them, and the ideal that they want to see realized, is a safer guide for our conduct than the ideal of the intellectual group that stands under the ban of an historical tradition that dulls their feeling for the needs of the day." Modern psychology has revealed to us the chief mo- tive that corrupted and blinded the master class in the early periods of the labor movement and the mas- THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY ter class today, fear fear which defeats, in excess, even the self-assertive ends of the master himself, fear which represses his own and others' deeper wish to love and create only to pervert such impulses (since they cannot be crushed) into violence and sinister sub- terfuge, fear in which the master, hardly knowing the fever in his own conscience, turns almost unconsciously from the saving and sympathetic study of the real de- sires of his wage-slaves, even from his own deeper de- sires, from the facts of life and their logical implica- tions to erect for himself fantastic cathedrals of illu- sion with crazy spires and dark, blind recesses and mon- strous gargoyles like those which a superstitious Ameri- can press conjures before us as the alleged haunts and idols of our I.W.W. or of the Russian Bolsheviki. Against this morbid fear which has, with fluctuating degrees of intensity, corrupted the majority of the "segregated classes" for more than one hundred and fifty years how could a sense of moral autonomy struggle into being in the minds of the oppressed? How can it endure and grow today even under the caprices, now insidious, now brutal, with which the masters strive to yoke it? The miracle has neverthe- less happened, happens, and will happen. The pseudo-legal paranoia of the English "upper" classes, reached its first great climax in the Peterloo massacre. It is worth while to dwell over it with those THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS superb historians, the Hammonds, for it is very sim- ilar with its revelations of the delusion of persecution and the mania of grandeur on the masters' side along with the sublime, and stoical non-resistance on the proletarian side to a long series of episodes which have blotted the history of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth in every highly industrial- ized nation in the world, episodes which from time to time are more frequent, then less frequent, but from which there is as yet little promise of permanent eman- cipation. "The Lancashire reformers decided to hold a great meeting in St. Peter's Fields, on the outskirts of Manchester. The magistrates were uneasy about the meeting, for popular discontent, inflamed by the recent Corn Law, was acute : meetings had been held in various north- ern towns: an attempt had been made to organise a boycott of ex- ciseable goods, drilling had been going on, and several persons had found their way into prison, where it was hoped that they would learn that in the circumstances of contemporary society to speak the truth or anything like it was sedition. But though the magistrates disliked the meeting, they decided only a few hours before it began that it could not be regarded as illegal. When the vast throng as- sembled, there was nothing in its appearance to shake the opinion of the magistrates. The meeting was in its Sunday clothes, bands were playing 'God save the King,' and one out of every three persons was a woman. The chief orator of the day, Henry Hunt, a brave, vain, and sincere man, had a taste for language that sounded violent and dangerous to the authorities, but even he could scarcely lead a revolu- tion with so decorous an army. Bamford, the leader of the three [190] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY thousand from Middleton, has described the scene when his contin- gent started; how he addressed them, saying that sticks were only to be carried by the old and infirm, that the procession was to march in military order, that the reformers were determined, by taking the most elaborate precautions against disturbance or confusion, to give the lie to their enemies who said the working classes were a rabble. The Middleton Reformers, reinforced by another three thousand from Rochdale, set out on their slow march towards Manchester; a band was playing, the men were in their Sunday shirts, children were in the ranks, women and girls at their head. As they went their army was swollen by new contingents, and when they passed through the Irish weavers' quarter they were received with an en- thusiasm more demonstrative than the enthusiasm of Englishmen, expressing itself in a language that few of them could understand. When all the contingents had poured into the Fields, the meeting numbered 80,000 persons, assembled to demand universal suffrage, vote by ballot, annual Parliaments, and the repeal of the Corn Laws. The town they met in, though almost the largest in England, was unrepresented in a Parliament that gave two seats to Old Sarum. Of the eighty thousand, the vast mass were voteless men and women, whom Parliament had handed over to their employers by the Com- bination Laws, while it had taxed their food for the benefit of the landowners by a most drastic Corn Law. The classes that controlled Parliament and their lives were represented by the magistrates, who were landlords or parsons, and by the yeomanry, who were largely manufacturers. Between those classes must be shared the responsi- bility for the sudden and unprovoked charge on a defenceless and unresisting crowd, for if the magistrates gave the orders, the yeomanry supplied the zeal. Hunt had scarcely begun his speech, when the yeomanry cavalry advanced brandishing their swords. Hunt told the reformers to cheer, which they did ; the yeomanry then rode into the crowd, which gave way for them, and arrested Hunt. But that [191] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS was not enough for the yeomanry, who cried, 'Have at their flags,' and began striking wildly all around them. The magistrates then ejave the order to charge. In ten minutes the field was deserted except for the dead and wounded, and banners, hats, shawls, and bonnets: the strangest debris of any battlefield since the madness of Ajax. Eleven people died, two of them were women, one a child, and over four hundred were wounded, one hundred and thirteen being women. Of the wounded more than a quarter were wounded by the sword. So bitter were the hatreds and suspicions of class, that wounded men and women did not dare to apply for parish relief, or even go to the hospital for treatment, for fear it should be discovered that they had received their wounds at Peterloo. A correspondent wrote to the Home Office to say that the woman from Eccles who had been killed was a dangerous character, for she had been heard to curse the curate. The magistrates, hussars, and yeomanry were thanked by the Government; Fitzwilliam was dismissed from his Lord Lieutenancy for protesting at a great Yorkshire meeting; Hunt and three of his colleagues were sent to prison, Hunt for two years and a half, the others for a year. And Hunt, whose arrest was the nominal excuse for the violent onslaught, had actually offered to sur- render himself to the authorities the night before." Out of all this horror there is this one comfort to be gleaned not only from Peterloo but from every other capitalist massacre to the days of Ludlow and West Virginia the force used by the underdogs is more hu- mane than the force used by their masters. Modern proletarians resemble nothing so much as the Christian martyrs who conquered western Europe even while the lions of the amphitheatre tore at their bowels. You may cite instances of proletarian aggression. But the [ 192] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY heavier burden lies on the other shoulders. You may sneer at proletarian non-resistance as but the dumb, sullen, and scared reaction of savages before an effi- cient civilization. But the same may be said of the Christian martyrs and of scientific martyrs like Galileo. It is all the same thing except that with the proletarians it is on the largest scale yet compassed. In Petrograd, before such huge non-resistance, czarism crumbled. Doubtless fear, moroseness, helplessness do play their part in such moods. But so also, we have ample evi- dence, does self-discipline, the only discipline worth the name. Self-discipline is the phenomenon which appears at Peterloo and swells to a diapason at Petro- grad. By conquering themselves first the proletarians conquer the world. Just so, Mr. A. J. Penty tells us in his articles called "A Guildsman's Interpretation of History," the early Christians were not otherworldly but rather renounced the world temporarily in order that they might conquer it or, in other words, turned from the centrifugal and less essential part of their own natures to learn that deeper centripetal secret of their own personalities which gave them their beautiful low- liness and their sublime invincibility. Today a prole- tarian mob not infrequently rises for a fleeting moment very near to that stoical fourth level of conduct which McDougall celebrates in the rare individual. Those moments will ere long extend to hours, nay to days. If [ 193] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS there is awed horror there is also the flash of exaltation. "Everything ideal has a natural origin and an ideal development." The ideal elements grow. They are small at Peterloo, great on the Mesaba Range of Min- nesota, greater at Petrograd. Many of the most tragic retardations of the con- science of the whole English people may be traced to these attempts to check the growth of proletarian auton- omy. Labor organizations, had they been unfettered from the first, would have carried England far beyond the point she has reached today just as certain labor organizations in America, if the Steel Trust had al- lowed them to live, would have solved a good deal of our most crucial Americanization problem and made East St. Louis riots impossible. To check the labor organizations of early nineteenth century England was to drive proletarians in two directions: towards vio- lence and towards the noble but often fantastic utop- ianism of Robert Owen. Both anarchistic violence and anarchistic utopianism, if they remain untempered by hard-headed empiricism, have much in common. Both arise, psychologically, out of desperation as (so Royce has shown) a new religion may arise out of extreme pessimism. Both rest, logically, on the presupposition that human nature can be converted suddenly. Well, recent evolutionary speculation has, as Teggart has shown us, tended rather against the Lyell-Darwinian [ 194] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY emphasis on gradual change and compensation. We now realize, as Huxley did, that while some changes are gradual there are also some which are abrupt. Both Marxian necessitarians and Utopian-anarchist volun- tarists can find striking evidence in history to justify their respective tastes for gradualness or catastrophism. But the problem of that more sober voluntarism of our hour, that of William James, the voluntarism that would reconcile the biology of Darwin and the biology of Bateson and would reconcile the economics of Marx and the economics of Owen, this problem suggests the frank recognition both of changes that are gradual and changes that are sudden, of understanding both and sublimating them by drawing from our own great hidden mental energies of which William James wrote in his multifarious pioneering and for which psychoan- alysis now furnishes the technique. To turn from Francis Place to a contemporary like Thorstein Veblen is to renew one's faith in at least the progress of the pioneer intellectuals. To compare the romantic catastrophism of English labor of the thirties with the realistic gradualism of English labor of the eighties and with the evolutionary experimentalism of English labor of 1919, an experimentalism alert for opportunities both for gradual and for sudden change, all this is tremendously reassuring. But to compare the fear-poisoned minds of the employers of 1830 with [195] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS the almost equally complex-ridden minds of the Eng- lish and American employers of 1919 is to discover one of those inert sections of society of which Teggart has also reminded us. It is discouraging confirmation of Boas's description of the tradition-ridden, cruel segre- gated classes. The following masterpiece from the Hammonds, with its exquisite harmony of healing tem- perance and surgeonlike relentlessness could apply to the masters today with very little allowance for prog- ress. For appalled inertia rules with the segregated classes. "Most people take the gifts that life sends them without asking of life that it shall provide a soothing philosophy as well. To the average successful employer, or to the gentleman living on inherited property, or to the younger member of a noble family on an ancient sinecure, the reflection that nine out of ten of their countrymen were rinding life a much more difficult and painful business was not al- ways knocking with a disturbing summons at heart and conscience. They had not made the world, and the power that had made it was wiser than such wild men as Paine or Cobbett, or the workmen who cheered a mountebank like Hunt, broke up good and expensive ma- chines, and were so stupid as to think that strikes and quarrels with their employers could mend anybody's fortunes. Life was full of strange phenomena, and the Bible, with its shrewd outlook, had pre- pared the world for the poverty of the poor. Men and women took the world as they found it. This is the attitude of all people to some of the facts, and of some people to all of the facts, that meet them day by day. One of the most powerful and passionate leaders of the crusade against the long hours of the factories has told us how [196] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY he lived for many years in Yorkshire without discovering that there was any cruelty in the mills, and that John Wood's appeal came to him as a revelation. "At the end of the [eighteenth] century the belief took root among the governing class that recompense of labour was fixed by natural laws, and that no human efforts could really alter it. Any struggle against this decree of nature would cause trouble and disorganisation, and in that way would inflict injury on the labourers themselves, but it could not increase their share in the national wealth. That share must always remain somewhere about the level of subsistence. This belief was introduced by the Physiocrats, who had their eyes on the peasant of eighteenth century France. As Turgot put it, 'In every sort of occupation it must come to pass that the wages of the artisan are limited to that which is necessary to procure his subsistence. // ne gagne que sa vie.' If this doctrine were true the only changes in real wages would be those consequent on changes of diet; if the la- bourers took to living on cheaper food their wages would go down, if on dearer they would go up. It was the appreciation of this fact that set Mai thus in opposition to Eden and all the other food reformers who wanted to simplify the labourer's meagre diet still further. Now, during the last phase of the ancient regime, this physiocrat idea became naturalised in England. Both Malthus and Ricardo contrib- uted to this result. Malthus, who started in revolt against the optimism which believed in the beneficence of nature, laid down a principle of population which, by explaining poverty, robbed it of its horrors for the rich. Population, he argued, tends to multiply faster than subsistence. Poverty is therefore inevitable, and unless mankind deliberately sets itself to check the increase of the race, vice and misery are the only means by which population and food can be ad- justed to each other. This is, of course, a very general sketch of his teaching, and if we were discussing Malthus himself we should be [ 197] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS obliged to qualify this summary by noting a number of important con- siderations that enter into this argument. We are concerned not with what Malthus taught the world, but with what the upper classes learnt from him. For them his teaching was simple and soothing enough. The doctrine that poverty was inevitable and incurable put a soft pillow under the conscience of the ruling class. But his teach- ing offered still greater consolations to the anxieties of the benevolent, for it seemed to show that poverty was the medicine of nature, and that the attempts of Governments to relieve it were like the interfer- ence of unintelligent spectators with the skilful treatment of the doctor. The relief of poverty meant the increase of poverty, for if the conditions of the poor were improved, population would quicken its pace still further. Melbourne, who thought that to apply eco- nomic principles to the Corn Laws would be 'the wildest and mad- dest scheme that has ever entered the imagination of man to conceive,' thought that it was just as wild and mad to question the finality of those principles in sentencing the poor to eternal misery. For some years the influence of Malthus was supreme and fatal. Shelley, in the preface to his Prometheus Unbound, says that he had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to heaven with Paley and Malthus. It was a strange heaven that Malthus, as he was interpreted by the rich, offered to the poor. ". . . Ricardo's brilliant and rather labyrinthine deductive reason- ing has led later students to the most diverse conclusions. No thinker has been so variously interpreted, and Socialism and Individualism alike have built on his foundations. But of the character of his im- mediate influence there can be no doubt. The most important effect of his teaching in this particular sphere was to create the impression that every human motive other than the unfailing principle of self- interest might be eliminated from the world of industry and com- merce ; and that the laws governing profits and wages were mechani- cal and fixed. The share of labour was thus decided just like the THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY price of an article, by the sheer power of competition. And this share gravitated towards a minimum of subsistence. . . . "The ideas of a working-class agitation are essentially corporate ideas, the demand for a better standard for a race of men and women : the ideas of the successful small employer are essentially individualist ideas, the demand that genius and industry shall be free. On the one view a man's loyalty is due to his fellows: the wage earner thinks of wage earners as a class: he belongs primarily to a society of men with common wrongs and common hardships, seeking a common rem- edy. On the other, a man's first duty is the duty of self -development : the employer thinks of society as a collection of individuals pursuing their own ends: he mistrusts the spirit of co-operation, and he thinks that in a world where to his knowledge, industry and concentration may win the highest rewards, every man gets ultimately what he is worth. The ideal working man on the first view tries to raise the status of his class; the ideal working man on the second view tries to change his own status and to become an employer. "On this view of life it seemed specially important to avoid dis- couraging private industry and effort by removing the pressure of want. Society ought to do nothing for its members that the prudent man would do for himself, otherwise the motive to prudence would disappear, and men instead of acquiring property by self-denial would live on the public funds. Perhaps the most notable illustration of this spirit is the speech in which Brougham defended the new Poor Law in the House of Lords: a speech in which social imagination touches its lowest temperature. Applying this canon of the prudent man, Brougham argued that the only evils against which society should protect people were those the prudent man could not foresee; he could foresee old age, illness, unemployment : against these he could make provision. On the other hand, society might help him in the case of accidents and violent diseases. It is difficult, when one reads [ 199] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS this speech, to remember that the prudent man who happened to be a hand-loom weaver in Lancashire (one of the largest classes of work- people in the country) was earning a good deal less than ten shillings a week. It is perhaps still stranger to remember that no small pro- portion of the class that thought all this the wisdom of Solon were living on the public funds." But the panorama of the upper classes is not to be done in pure drab and yellow. England has been evolving an alliance of forward-looking intellectuals and wage-workers for nearly a century and a half. Hardy, Paine, Godwin did not live in vain. Shelley was and is the super-poet of the alliance. Cobbett could begin life as a conservative and end close to radicalism. Robert Owen, though he was deluged with the abuse of fellow-financiers and did, indeed, explode in fancies more lofty than fruitful in the end, inspired the union Shop Movement of 1822-32. Some intellect- uals came straight from the proletariat and thus made the growing entente more serried. Ebenezer Elliott, for instance, rose from iron working and with the help of a meager Presbyterian education, struggled through poverty to become the poet of Chartism. "When the French Revolution broke out there was no resemblance between the spirit of the working classes in the north and the Mid- lands, and the spirit of the Paris democrat, on fire with vivid and emancipating enthusiasms. The English working classes in the cen- tres of the new industry were conservative, insular, Philistine. Man- chester, like Birmingham, was predominantly Church and King; [ 200 ] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY and nobody who reads Bamford's description of the treatment his father and his father's friends received at Middleton will make the mistake of supposing that the Reformers whom Pitt persecuted were dangerous to the State by reason of their popularity. The working classes, as a body, in the north and the Midlands were profoundly indifferent to ideas or causes. So long as they could drink, watch a cock-fight or bull-baiting or horse-race, and earn a reasonable living, they were as contented as the squires whose tastes, if rather more expensive, were in kind not dissimilar. No visions exalted or dis- turbed their souls, and the sansculottes of Bolton or Wigan were as ready as the parsons or the squires to put anybody who talked or looked like a French Jacobin into the nearest or the darkest horsepond. "By the end of ... [the first third of the nineteenth century] a great change had come over the working classes. They had become what Pitt and Castlereagh tried so hard to prevent them from be- coming, politicians. They talked about the affairs of the State: they discussed the basis of rights and duties, they took an ominous interest in taxes and sinecures, and it was not the phrases of 1789 but the cry of Church and King that awakened their execrations. All the efforts of civilisation seemed to have been made in vain when the one question that absorbed the minds of the factory workers as they poured from the mills was the question whether Cobbett's Political Register had come with the latest coach. "The working classes were brought to the revolutionary temper that broke out in 1816 and 1830, and found its most complete expres- sion in the gospel of the Chartists, through a number of stages. They were not converted by a lightning flash or by the magic of a phrase or by some gradual and liberating philosophy. What came about during this period was the alienation of the working classes, due not to the positive influence of ideas or enthusiasms, but to the effect of exper- ience on ways of thinking and looking at life. To say this is not to detract from the superb and essential services to the development of [201 ] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS working-class thinking of such men as Paine, Cobbett and Place, and the lesser lights of the Reform movements : it is merely to recog- nise the truth that their teaching only bore fruit when actual exper- ience had made men ready to receive it. There was no general revolt against the established order in 1790. The normal working man ac- cepted the government and institutions of the country with as little question as the normal aristocrat. But the Industrial Revolution obliged everybody whom it affected to think about the problems it raised, and when they addressed themselves to these problems the rich and the poor started from different standpoints: the rich from the abstractions of property, the poor from the facts of their own lives. As a result there developed two different systems of morality. For it makes a great difference whether experience is passed through the sieve of hypothesis and theory, or whether hypothesis and theory are passed through the sieve of experience. The upper-class explanations ceased to be satisfying to men and women who wanted to know why they were starving in the midst of great wealth. Cobbett and Paine were intelligible to them and became their guides, just because they regarded society as existing for human needs, and asked of each insti- tution not whether it was essential to an elaborate theory of property, but how it served men and women." Great working-class leaders emerged to replace spiritual regents like Robert Owen. John Doherty called upon his fellows in The Voice of the People to organize their own education against bourgeois super- stitions and bourgeois materialism. He sounded the fundamental note that our goal is not concentrated wealth, but universal freedom. In his own ardent words, the purpose of the National Association for the Protection of Labor was "to raise the working-classes [ 202 ] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY from that state of moral degredation in which they were at present sunk." This is an exhortation to real direct action. Some sense of the labor theory of values emerges in unmistakably proletarian accents in 1818: "P . . .d, a Beggar-maker, who sits on the destinies of the Poor, we have made a Man of him, whose Mother hawked about the Streets a small Basket; on two Spinners being deputed to ask for a small advance of Price, had the audacity to thrust one from him with an Umbrella and discharged them both. Is not this more tyrannic than even the Dey of Algiers, he hears the complaints of the people, then let us hear no more of Barbarian cruelty, for though we work six days and make long hours, on an average the Mule Spinners can- not earn half a proper subsistence, as their pale countenance will fully demonstrate, while their employers gain immense profits; we know this from the prices of Cotton, Labour, and the Yarn when sold, and we shall be obliged to publish them to the world, while we are fam- ishing, starved, and insulted. "Spinners, let us swear to no man ! but we declare before God, our country, our wives, and children, we will not work and see them starve; will they call this vagrancy and immure our bodies in gaols? Unfeeling Tyrants! when we refuse to work and starve, you say we are conspiring against the Government, charge us with Sedition, send soldiers to coherse us, and in the Green Bag stile, assure the Govern- ors we are plotting against them; it is false, we are ready to protect our country against foreign and domestic enemies, but we will not submit to selfish Trading Tyrants: they asserted in the House of Lords that our employ was the most healthy followed, but Lord Liverpool detected the trading liars, and said it was impossible: let these miscreants remember what was done in France at the bridge of Pont Neuf, by a fool of an officer beating an old man with the flat side of his sword." [203] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS Again a vague, but vigorous, hint of the labor theory of values emerges in a sentence in a proletarian broad- sheet cast about the street. "The laws that condemned me were made by the great, and have no other object than to keep the wealth of the world in their own power, and entail on others keenest poverty and vilest subjection." Workers crusaded successfully for a cheap press. Their most puissant heroes were devoted men whose names have not come down to us at all. As the Ham- monds put it: "Of all the documents in the Home Office papers, none illustrates better the difficulties of that struggle than a confiscated copy-book, seized by an active magistrate and sent to the Home Office in a time of panic as a dangerous piece of sedition, in which a working man, secretary of a little society of working-men Reformers, had been prac- tising his elementary powers of writing and spelling." It is to be hoped that our handful of examples from the rich historical writing of the Hammonds will be representative enough to add confirmation to the thesis of Boas and to our own assertion of the fundamental wish to love without painting a picture of proletarians in the selected colors of idealization. These examples may give us a glimpse of the first emergence of direct action in the modern labor movement and of the first tendencies towards an entente of intellectuals and wage- workers. It is beyond the scope of this book even to outline the history of direct action in the international labor movement and its progressive convergence with [204] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY all that is best in the ethical thought of the emancipated minority of intellectuals. But we may glance a mo- ment at the psychological tendencies of the proletariat today and note its vastly more comprehensive and sus- tained harmony with the work of our most dis- tinguished educationalists, those who have not been paralyzed by dying institutions. In order to make the point in the most uncompromising, realistic fashion we will select, not the more generally accepted or "respect- able" activities of the proletariat, but those exuberant conations which arouse the greatest fear in the segre- gated classes today sabotage, the general strike, and the "dictatorship of the proletariat." "The bottom reflects the top," say some of our mili- tant proletarians. The violence of the "upper" classes is the cause of the violence of the "lower" classes. And one of our most humane intellectuals, Mr. Robert Hunter, has amassed a formidable amount of evidence in support of this in his Violence and the Labor Move- ment. But I wish to extend this thesis. In its weakest mo- ments the bottom reflects the top and for violence the upper classes must be held fundamentally responsible by all people who care to affix responsibility and to do so honestly. But I am more interested in the fact that the bottom also improves upon the top by sublimating the violences of the top. Sabotage, the withdrawal of [205] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS efficiency from industry, is, as Professor Veblen has several times shown at some length, not a proletarian, but a bourgeois invention, the very essence of the bour- geois price system of economics, the unscrupulous con- trol of supply to keep up prices. Whether it be the sabotage of individuals, such as the dumping of fish into San Francisco Bay to keep up the price of fish, whik the unfortunate may starve and be damned, or whether it be a gigantic imperialistic sabotage like the present allied blockade of Russia, which is a withdrawal of efficiency from industry for the purpose of preserving the vile price system from complete destruction at the hands of the greatest reconstructive crusade the world has ever known, capitalistic sabotage is always more brutal than proletarian sabotage and seems to grow more and more brutal. Dumping fish into the sea, with all that that implies, is more brutal than the work of any proletarian sabotagers. And the block- ade of Russia is a piece of wholesale brutality before which the more obvious and more theatrical German atrocities in Belgium pale. By contrast, proletarian sabotage is one of the most paradoxical activities in contemporary society. On its crudest level it may be putting emery in oil-cups to injure a machine. But this is so much against creative impulses and the creative impulses of the proletariat are so much less repressed by possessive activities in the proletariat than in the [206] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY tradition-ridden, property-worshipping segregated class that the proletariat is compelled by its freer love of love to make sabotage progressively humaner. So, in due time, some proletarians learn to make their sabo- tage take the unique form of obeying scrupulously the laws of an industry as on certain railroads where the employers have made scores of laws for appearance sake, which they do not desire to have observed, since to observe them may mean a widespread retardation of traffic. Some of these laws, like certain ones which re- late to the coupling of freight cars, appear to be for the prevention of accident to the employee; they are in reality for the prevention of suit against the employer, and the employee is expected quietly to disregard them. For if the employee obeys the law and take due pre- cautions over his life and limbs, the time-schedules, which are also devised by the employer, are seriously disorganized. But let us turn to an authoritative proletarian defini- tion and description of sabotage and its evolution among the workers by Miss Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: "Sabotage means primarily: the withdrawal of efficiency. Sabotage means either to slacken up and interfere with the quantity, or to botch in your skill and interfere with the quality of capitalist production or to give poor service. Sabotage is not physical violence, sabotage is an internal, industrial process. It is something that is fought out within the four walls of the shop. And these three forms of sabotage to affect the quality, the quantity and the service are aimed at af- [207] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS fecting the profit of the employer. Sabotage is a means of striking at the employer's profit for the purpose of forcing him into granting cer- tain conditions, even as workmen strike for the same purpose of co- ercing him. ......... "Take the case of Frederic Surnner Boyd. . . . Boyd said this: 'If you go back to work and you find scabs working alongside of you, you should put a little vinegar on the reed of the loom in order to prevent its operation.' They have arrested him under the statute forbidding the advocacy of the destruction of property. He advised the dyers to go into the dye houses arid to use certain chemicals in the dyeing of the silk that would make that silk unweavable. That sounded very terrible in the newspapers and very terrible in the court of law. But what neither the newspapers nor the courts of law have taken any cognizance of is that these chemicals are being used already in the dyeing of silk. It is not a new thing that Boyd is ad- vocating, it is something that is being practiced in every dye house in the city of Paterson already, but it is being practiced for the em- ployer and not for the worker. "Let me give you a specific illustration of what I mean. Seventy- five years ago when silk was woven into cloth the silk skein was taken in the pure, dyed and woven, and when that piece of silk was made it would last for fifty years. Your grandmother could wear it as a wedding dress. Your mother could wear it as a wedding dress also. And then if you, woman reader, were fortunate enough to have a chance to get married, you could wear it as a wedding dress also. But the silk that you buy today is not dyed in the pure and woven into a strong and durable product. One pound of silk goes into the dye house and usually as many as three to fifteen pounds come out. That is to say, along with the dyeing there is an extraneous and an unnecessary process of what is very picturesquely called 'dy- namiting.' They weight the silk. They have solutions of tin, solu- tions of zinc, solutions of lead. If you will read the journals of the [208] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY Silk Association of America you will find in there advice to master dyers as to which salts are the most appropriate for weighting pur- poses. . . . And so when you buy a nice piece of silk today and have a dress made for festive occasions, you hang it away in the wardrobe and when you take it out it is cracked down the pleats and along the waist and arms. And you believe that you have been terribly cheated by a clerk. What is actually wrong is that you have paid for silk where you have received old tin cans and zinc and lead and things of that sort. You have a dress that is garnished with silk, seasoned with silk, but a dress that is adulterated to the point where, if it was adulterated just the slightest degree more, it would fall to pieces entirely. "Now what Frederic Sumner Boyd advocated to the silk workers was in effect this : 'You do for yourselves what you are already doing for your employers. Put these same things into the silk for yourself and your own purposes as you are putting in for the employers' pur- poses.' And I can't imagine even in a court of law where they can find the fine thread of deviation where the master dyers' sabot- age is legal and the workers' sabotage illegal, where they consist of identically the same thing and where the silk remains intact. The silk is there. The loom is there. There is no property destroyed by the process. The one thing that is eliminated is the efficiency of the worker to cover up this adulteration of the silk, to carry it just to the point where it will weave and not be detected. That efficiency is withdrawn. The veil is torn off production in the silk-dyeing houses and silk mills and the worker simply says, 'Here, I will take my hands off and I will show you what it is. I will show you how rotten, how absolutely unusable the silk actually is that they are pass- ing off on the public at two and three dollars a yard.' "Now, Boyd's form of sabotage was not the most dangerous form of sabotage at that. If the judges had any imagination they would know that Boyd's form of sabotage was pretty mild compared with [209] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS this: Suppose he had said to the dyers in Patterson, to a sufficient number of them that they could do it as a whole, so that it would affect every dye house in Paterson: 'Instead of introducing these chemicals for adulteration, don't introduce them at all. Take the lead, the zinc, and the tin and throw it down the sewer and weave the silk, beautiful, pure, durable silk, just as it is. Dye it pound for pound, hundred pound for hundred pound.' The employers would have been more hurt by that form of sabotage than by what Boyd ad- vocated. And they would probably have wanted him put in jail for life instead of for seven years. In other words, to advocate non- adulteration is a lot more dangerous to capitalist interests than to advocate adulteration. And non-adulteration is the highest form of sabotage in an establishment like the dye houses of Patterson, bakeries, confectioners, meat packing houses, restaurants, etc." The first nai've, desperate sabotage of a loosely or- ganized body of unskilled workmen is entirely unjusti- fiable from an ethical point of view; it is simply a ques- tion of grim and squalid necessity. But sabotage has not merely an almost inevitable beginning; it gropes to- wards freedom. For the practitioners of sabotage are not fatalistic in spite of the almost crushing circum- stances under which they begin. Their working hy- pothesis of moral autonomy or direct action inspires them to experiment until they have sublimated sabo- tage until we may well stand amazed at their imagina- tive agility and fundamental health. Obviously the practice of "bouche ouverte" (the practice of telling the consumer in answer to his questions the exact truth about the goods he buys of you in drug-store or restau- [210] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY rant) is a form of sabotage on a rather higher level than the practice of putting emery into the oil-boxes. Still this remains rather petty when one considers its motiva- tion. But, without ever quite emancipating themselves from the dangerous motivation as long as they indulge in sabotage at all, the w r orkers can sublimate it still further as exemplified by Mr. Cole: "A particularly interesting form of sabotage is that by which work is done slowly but very well. The journal of the Building Trade, Le Travailleur du Bailment, recommends it to the workers in these words: 'Camarades sabotons bien les heures du travail, en faisant de I'art dans nos metiers respectifs' This appeal to commit sabotage against the jerrybuilder, 'by turning out art in their respective trades,' is one which, could it be organized, would be open to no complaints on social grounds. It, in fact, meets the complaint made by the the- orists of syndicalism, MM. Sorel and Berth, that most forms of sa- botage lower the morality of the workers." Perhaps Mr. Cole is a little too charitable here. Sabotage certainly always suffers, even in its most high- ly sublimated forms from the tinge of hatred in its motivation. My point here is simply that proletarian sabotage moves progressively towards truth, beauty, love; bourgeois sabotage moves towards the attempt to starve a whole nation because that nation is too sublime to leap from the Scylla of czarism into the Charybdis- maw of capitalism. It would appear that while the creativity of the "upper" class is being rapidly crushed by the dominance of possessive reactions, the creative [211] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS impulses of the workers who are snubbed as born in- feriors are rapidly ripening to save the human race from destroying itself and from following the long line of "nature's mistakes" about which Mr. Trotter has written with such gloomily foreboding eloquence. The "general strike" shows a similar progressive re- lease of humaneness, an increasingly rational control of force. The general strike, for our purposes, may be divided into two kinds: (i) the Universal General Strike with which the internationalized proletariat will, so the dream goes, take over without bloodshed the control of the society of the entire world; (2) the minor, local or national, recurrent general strikes or mass-actions, abrupt, seeking quick results for imme- diate practical purposes, and seeking more remotely as processes of gradual education to prepare for the dis- tant day when the proletariat will be sufficiently re- sourceful to undertake the construction of the United States of Humanity. At first the general strike was a Utopian dream. But, particularly in the last decade, the militant proletariat has been experimenting in many lands and it has only increased its faith in the reality of general strikes. Mass-actions in fairly homo- geneous nations are remarkable enough. But some phenomena in America seem little short of miraculous. At Wheatland, California, an abject mass of unskilled workmen assembled, under unspeakably filthy living [212] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY conditions, to gather hops for the rancher. In two days these "illiterates" had listened to addresses in seven languages and were organized for a non-resistant de- fiance that became violent only after the example was set by a sheriff's posse which represented the Law and the State. Twice now at Lawrence, Massachusetts, an even more extraordinary organization of an even more multi-lingual human chaos has belied all the hopes of American employers of stamping out unionism by the importation of ignorant immigrant hordes. Lawrence twice has sounded solemn warning to the grandsons of New England poets and patriots to think well lest they remain too long on the side of the Tories and the Cop- perheads of the twentieth century. It is true that these unskilled laborers were assisted by socialists and by other organizations and individuals momentarily aroused from their sectarianism. But this does not account for the sustained morale of these almost mys- tical outbursts, which in increasing numbers are be- wildering both radicals and conservatives. Crude as these mass-actions seem to the uninitiated, they are full of beauty to those who seek to understand. At Lawrence of late the half-starved Belgian workers collected money to give a picnic to their half-starved German fellow-workers in order to demonstrate the vast brotherhood of all workers. In the Swedish general strike the proletariat of the press refused to print lies [213] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS against other laborers and raised the defiant cry against editors and owners: "Either you print the truth or you'll print no paper at all." Just here arose the dawn of a momentous reform which to those of us who are heartsick over the utter degradation of the press is cer- tainly one of the greatest hopes for education, for democracy, for truth-seeking. The Swedish printers acted an Areopagltica which will take an honorable place in the history of freedom of thought along with Milton's book. If you will read the details of the Seattle general strike you will read of many instances of proletarian magnanimity and self-discipline, General strikes are just beginning to operate in such a way as to achieve for workmen that sense of the dig- nity, the creative implications of their work which they lost with modern capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. In other words general strikes are minis- tering successfully, if sporadically, to that social disease which Ruskin and Morris diagnosed, but could not cure because even they were not completely emancipated from that Victorian dissociation of the useful and the beautiful which overwhelmed even the poets of the period. The buoyant hope of general strikers, as they learn how to minister to the complex needs of a whole city for a few days contrasts dramatically with the wist- ful, psychasthenic medievalism of the half-reactionary Ruskin and Morris. The really awakened proletarian THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY never dreams, of course, of a sentimental equalitarian leveling down; he aims at democratic ownership which will give every co-operating worker at least a humble share and so restore his joy in work, his feeling that (even though he may not himself be finishing a crea- tion as medieval craftsmen did) he is a living part of a great creative movement whose policies in part he can direct, whose vast processes he can at least understand. Probably this spirit of creation with a spirit of identifi- cation with one's fellows, this creation of a work too grand for the capacities of an individual will prove to be far more inspiring than the medieval craftsman's half-possessive satisfaction in the completion of his own rather limited job, although the splendid co-operative work on the cathedrals certainly foreshadows the goal towards which the general strike moves today. No one has written more discerningly of American general strikers than Mr. Austin Lewis, a California lawyer, who for years has been their dauntless de- fender in the face of abuse that w r ould have crushed a dozen ordinary well-meaning men. He explodes a common superstition that the migratory general strikers of the Pacific Coast are social jetsam and elderly liquor sodden "bums." "On the contrary, this body of men consists for the most part of young bachelors in the full flower of youthful vigor. No others could do their work or endure the hardships which they daily face." THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS They are, as he notes elsewhere, the laborers who are transforming the majestic lineaments of California, which is changing so rapidly with its execution of epical industrial schemes. "It is the poorest sort of sophistry to speak of these men as passive and disinclined to rise. On the contrary, they form some of the very finest fighting material to be found anywhere and will go readily against odds, if once they have learned the trick of solidarity and or- ganized government." We have seen how with the strikers at Lawrence in- ternationalism is not a mere matter of dreaming vague- ly of a luxuriously remote league to enforce peace as one strolls, secluded from life's grimmest tragedies, under academic elms or frets and fumes in the closet of the politicians and editors and ministers. It is through the Russian general strikes that the ideal of no annexation, no idemnities was forced upon the atten- tion of an inert and despairing world. Mr. Austin Lewis gives us another example of this lyrical inter- nationalism as it transfigures into love the deluded race- hatreds that fill the Californian "upper" classes and the parochial craft-unionists of California with such fevers today. "During the agitation on the Durst hop-ranch the Japanese workers voluntarily threw in their lot with the rest of the workers. The spokesman for the Japanese stated, rather astutely, that it would probably not be for the advantage of the white workers for the Japa- THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY nese openly to espouse their cause and strike with them. By this he meant that the feeling of ... [the skilled craftsmen] against the Japanese was so general throughout the State that the association of the Japanese with the strikers would in all probability be detrimental to the latter. He said that in order not to embarass the situation for the projectors of the strike the Japanese would withdraw from the field in a body, which, as a matter of fact, they did. [This meant that they voluntarily accepted all the sacrifices and hardships that a strike involves but that at the same time they voluntarily renounced all the benefits that might accrue therefrom.] "This same spirit pervaded the entire mass of the employees on the Durst ranch, and according to the testimony of a gang-boss employed in superintending labor during the hop-picking season, no less than twenty-seven languages were spoken by the workers. Syrians, Porto Ricans, Mexicans, an heterogeneous collection of races and breeds left work simultaneously, and were a unit in support of the demands of the strikers. "This was no slight matter, for the majority of them were practi- cally penniless; they were far from the centres of population, and to leave work meant, in many cases, to go hungry. To them solidar- ity was an essential fact of life. "Being unskilled workers and not having any special craft, trade, or property on which they could depend, they were driven to rely upon mass action for life and for protection against the aggression of the employer. To them, therefore, 'solidarity' expressed not an ideal, not a distant goal, not a political achievement, as to the Socialist, but that mass-action to which they were necessarily driven and upon which they could alone rely. "Shall we say then that 'solidarity' is incomprehensible except to those workers to whom mass-action is imperative?" "Such an answer would be close to the facts, for the meaning of 'solidarity' can only be learned by experience." [217] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS We have often written here of the "mob, cultivated and uncultivated." The class-character of mobs dif- fers in different ages and environments. What a para- dox it would be if, in the future histories ot the twen- tieth century it should be recorded that the mass-acts of unskilled, illiterate workers groping towards indus- trial unions were the beautiful and orderly perform- ances and that the mobs of our day were composed of university men, journalists, policemen, clerks, evan- gelists, preachers, strike-breakers, conservative craft- unionists, soldiers and sailors! The average young bourgeois American, whose knowledge is limited by the morbid complexes which his grandfather developed after reading the newspaper legends about the Chicago Haymarket affair of the '8o's, would do well to read and ponder this profound piece of twentieth century social psychology by Austin Lewis : " 'Street-rows' are and have always been the mark of the unde- veloped labor movement, and have occurred most frequently in places where mass action of the modern type is quite unknown. In the ear- lier stages of the labor movement in all countries we find the same mob displays. The American labor movement in its infancy cul- minating in the Haymarket tragedy, showed many evidences of such turbulence, but none of these could be described as mass-action of the industrial proletariat. There were, on the contrary, for the most part demonstrations of the craft unionists who have much in com- mon with the small bourgeois and whose mode of fighting has many of the same characteristics. [2.8] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY "To this effect we may quote Eckstein, with whom for once we are pleased to be in substantial agreement. He says: ' 'The petty bourgeoisie, where it is rebellious, is closely attached to anarchism, not only as regards opposition to the state, but as against every kind of centralized power. In this respect it is differen- tiated markedly from the proletariat of the greater industry to whom the process of production itself declares the necessity of a centralized tendency. The proletariat is against government as the instrument of the will of the ruling class, but it is not against the systematic organization and control of production of which the petty bourgeois has no comprehension. The ideal of the latter is a free society of in- dependent small producers. . . . ' 'The petty bourgeois is naturally an individualist. Under the compulsion of necessity he can act with others of his kind for an im- mediate purpose, but he cannot create a permanent organization de- voted to continuous work for a common interest.' "This passage might even have gone further and included the pure and simple trade unions as being almost at one with the small bourgeois in this respect. In fact the actions of the skilled artisans have generally tended to show that they have a closer psychological connection with the small middle class than with the industrial prole- tariat. "Actually the new mass- action movement has produced less disor- der, fewer street demonstrations and an insignificant amount of fric- tion with the police and the authorities as compared with former labor activities. "A reason for this may be found in a distinction overlooked by Eckstein in the above quotation. He says in effect that the rebellious small bourgeois is against government as such, but that the proletarian is against it only as expressing the will of the ruling class and as an instrument of that class. . . . ". . . The modern industrial proletarian seldom troubles his head [219] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS about government. The real Marxian idea of the government as being the mere mirror of the actual power, the economic and industrial con- trol, has completely entered into his consciousness and he knows that he has nothing to do with government until he has possession of the material power which lies at the base of all government. "This notion once in the mind of the masses, the field of industrial conflict is transferred at once from the streets, where it has no place, to the shop, the natural and unavoidable battle-field. Hence the fact that modern mass-action is neither tumultuous nor inclined to anti- governmental outbreaks. It is true that where organizations are weak and have entered on a fight for which they are not prepared, and where the position of the government is so secure that it feels able to use the police with impunity, violence may occur. But such examples are belated instances of a pre-organization period with which mass-action has no connection, seeing that mass-action is an altogether later development. "As long ago as 1905 Bebel said in the [Socialist] Party Con- gress at Jena: , "Situations are approaching which must of physical necessity lead to catastrophes, unless the working class develop so rapidly in power, numbers, culture and insight that the bourgeoisie lose the de- sire for catastrophes. We are not seeking a catastrophe, of what use would it be to us? Catastrophes are brought about by the ruling classes.' "The wanton employment of armed force against a peaceful dem- onstration would be the end of any existing government. Besides, the anti-militarist campaign is an essential concomitant of a real indus- trial movement. This may be seen in France and there are also plenty of evidences of it in England. Whatever may happen, the bourgeois regime will not die fighting in the streets. "The political speaker, engaged in making agitation and gathering [ 220 ] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY votes from a mass of unorganized people, is obliged to make constant appeals to a mob-psychology which he observes to be generally shifting and unreliable. "Hence he concludes that the mob is fickle, which is, indeed, true when it is lashed with a sudden emotion under the influence of an idea. But an organized mass moving to a material end has essential elements of stability, so that there does not seem to be any good reason why it should not be capable of a definite and even prolonged efliciency and cohesiveness. Indeed, such recent examples of mass- action as have come under our observation tend to show a resolu- tion and perseverance not surpassed by any of those organizations of too closely organized crafts which Kautsky appears to regard as models. It is true that it is impossible to maintain a protracted struggle in the form of mass-action but such considerations pertain rather to the technique of strikes than to the general question of the utility of mass action as a revolutionary weapon, and do not call for examination at this particular point. "Mass action is not 'action of the streets,' nor is it the turbulence of political mobs directed against established government and marked by rioting. It is the action of the organized working class." Let us allow our imaginations to play around this question of the sublimation of the general strike, build- ing from the basis of a contemporary situation a fanci- ful, but perfectly conceivable development that will further exemplify the potentialities of mass-action. Those who took part in the copper-mine strikes at Bisbee, Arizona, and Butte, Montana, were men whose lives are limited by the hideous conditions of their sub- terranean existence to five, or at most, ten years, pro- [221 ] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS vided they are not swept away even before by some ac- cident for which their ruthless employers are funda- mentally responsible. They struck for the usual ob- jectives and were met with the usual high-handed bru- tality that has given such a terrible vividness to the larger mining struggles in the West. But let us sup- pose that these workmen had struck not merely for shorter hours, but also for the establishment of a scien- tific institution for grappling with the problems of mortality in copper mines, that is for experimentation similar to that through which Humphrey Davy alleviated some of the horrors of mine gases in England long ago. The proletariat would thus take a step to- wards the role of stimulating scientific research, a very homely step to be sure and far from the interests of what we think of as the nobler, the freer, the more speculative science, but a step at least towards the as- sumption of a favorite practice of retired capitalists who are sometimes glad to patronize sciences which have no unpleasant implications for them. And if we remember the series of tragic experiences of great scientists under modern capitalism it will hardly seem credible that the workmen could be more stupid than their masters as the friends of research. Let the biog- raphies of Arkright and Watts, who made modern capi- talistic imperialism possible, testify to the infamy of those who profited. On the contrary, workmen, if [ 222 ] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY they used even a fair proportion of the fineness which they now often use (when well organized) in the class- war, would probably develop projects so creative that scientists would recognize them as closer kin than the bourgeois grown short-sighted through the influence of possessive reaction. Our discussion of the general strike has carried us well into our analysis of the "dictatorship of the pro- letariat." This unfortunately chosen phrase has en- abled superstitious journalists to pervert its meaning. It is, of course, a government of the rest of society by one of its parts. But it is unquestionably the nearest to majority government of any regime that has existed. And no type of government has ever been so frank in recognizing its own purely transitional character. Lenin is never tired of telling us this. The red armies of the proletarian dictators have actually come nearer to bringing love onto the battlefield itself than any other soldiers in history. Time and again they have surrounded regiments of interventionists and could have wiped them out, but they have preferred to let their enemies go with exhortations to leave Russia in peace, to remember that the workman of all nations are brothers. Thus fell Prussianism in Germany. No wonder the Prussians in other countries fill their press with terrified and hateful slanders. No wonder that violent plutocrats fear Russian propaganda far more [223] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS than they ever feared the new German engines of mur- der. The dictatorship of the proletariat is also marked by two very significant progressive features; it is regu- lated by a very flexible system of recall, and it is a government by the youth. In the light of Mr. Trotter's recent demonstration that the chief menace to man's endurance in nature is the government by the elderly, the "normal," a view proved by the great war and the "peace" council, we may look forward to a multiplica- tion of dictatorships of the proletariat with more legiti- mate hope than fear. The dictatorships of the prole- tariat in both Russia and Hungary have created re- markable practice which will doubtless contribute fun- damentally to the vexed problems of centralization and decentralization. Both these new governments are ap- parently to grow in a rhythm of alternate centralization and decentralization, sensitive to the flux (which we recognize everywhere in life today) and yet no longer willing to drift helplessly with the flux : first, the plural- istic activities of the Congress of scattered Soviets; then the concentrated but short-lived activities of a Com- mittee responsible to the last Congress and the coming Congress; then decentralization once more in a new Congress; then centralization once more in a new Com- mittee; thus on and on in an ordered rhythm. We may well leave to the Moscow correspondent of The Man- chester Guardian, Mr. Phillips Price, the task of de- [224] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY scribing the proletarian dictatorship at its reconstruc- tive work. A guiding hand was necessary and that was found in the Supreme Council of Public Economy. This body came in existence early in January, 1918. I well remember being present at its first meeting. A few workmen from the Petrograd and Moscow professional alli- ances and shop-stewards' committees, together with some trusted revo- lutionary leaders and a few technical advisers who were not sabotag- ing, met together on the Tuchkof Naberejnaya at Petrograd with the object of organizing the economic life of the republic in the interests of the toiling masses. The task before them seemed super- human. All around them was chaos, produced by the imperialist war and the orgy of capitalist profiteering. Famine, dearth of raw materials, sabotage of technical staffs, counter-revolutionary bands invading from the South, Prussian war lords threatening from the West, made the outlook apparently hopeless. Yet, nothing daunted, these brave workmen, with no experience except that derived from the hard school of wage-slavery and political oppression, set to work to reconstitute the economic life of a territory covering a large part of two continents. I saw them at that meeting draw up plans for the creation of public departments which should take over the pro- duction and distribution of the "key" industries, and the transport. Their field of vision ran from the forests of Lithuania to the oasis of Central Asia, from the fisheries of the White Sea to the oil fields of the Caucasus. As they discussed these schemes, one was forcibly reminded that many of these very places, for which they were pre- paring their plans to fight famine and re-establish peaceful industry, were at that moment threatened by counter-revolutionary forces and by the armed hosts of the European war lords, whose so-called "interests" demanded that famine, anarchy and misery should teach the workers and peasants of Russia not to dare to lift their hands [225] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS against the sacred "rights of property." And the wind howled 'round that cold stone building which looked over the frozen Neva, and the winter snows were driving down the dismal streets, but these men, fired with imagination and buoyed up by courage, did not waver. They were planting an acorn which they knew would one day grow into an oak. I saw them five months later at a big conference in Moscow. The Supreme Council of Public Economy had now become a great state institution and was holding its first All-Russian Conference. In every province in Central Russia and in many parts of the outer marches local branches had been formed and had sent their repre- sentatives. The first organ in the world for carrying out in prac- tice the theory that each citizen is part of a great human family and has rights in that family, in so far as he performs duties to it, was being visibly created before my eyes in Russia. In the midst of the clash of arms, the roar of the imperialist slaughter on the battle-fields of France, the savagery of the civil war with Krasnoff on the Don and with the Czecho-Slovaks on the Volga, the Supreme Council of Public Economy was silently becoming the center of the new economic life of the republic. It had been created while the more prominent political body, the Soviet, was struggling to pre- serve the existence of the republic from enemies within and without. The Supreme Council of Public Economy was the tool designed to create the new order in Russia; the Soviet was only the temporary weapon to protect the hands that worked that tool. In tackling its problems not the least difficult was the economic separatism of the provinces and the conflict of interests between craft and industry. These problems hamper the labor movement in every country to a greater or less degree. How often in England has the multiplication of craft unions in the same industry or public service retarded the efforts of British labor to unite in a common policy for its emancipation ! Yet in Russia, the inexperienced, untried [226] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY proletarian, freed from the traditions and encumbrances of an older, more archaic social system succeeded in a few weeks in rinding means to reconcile craft with industry. The first Councils of Public Economy in the provinces constituted themselves out of delegates sent by the professional alliances, to represent the economic interests of the workers organized in crafts, and an equal number of dele- gates from the shop-stewards' committees to represent the interests of the workers organized in industries. To them were also added delegates from the local Soviets to represent the general political interests of the district, members of the local Soviet executives, which included numerous departments, such as transport, produce, agricul- ture, commercial exchange, and also members of the workers' co-opera- tive societies and technical experts. The Supreme Council of Public Economy, also in Moscow, was formed from the same elements in their All-Russian capacity, drawn from the All-Russian Union of Professional Alliances, the All-Russian Shop-Stewards' Union, the Central Soviet Executive and the People's Commissariats. Thus the machinery was created which enabled the interests of craft and industry to see common interests in reorganizing the productive capacity of the country as a whole. But more important even than the machinery, the spirit was there which kept the newly formed professional alliances from pressing craft claims, conflicting with general public interests, and which also prevented the shop-stewards' movement from running those industries no longer needed by the community. The remarkable degree of co-operation observed between these two types of labor organizations after the October revolution, a degree of co-operation not hitherto seen in any country, can of course be attributed to the youth, one might almost say the immaturity, of the Russian industrial system. For the country has only just developed from a peasant-serf state, in which no traditions of craft unions have accumulated through the centuries. Thus the removal of trade union restrictions on production [227] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS and of the anti-social power of separate crafts, which in Western and Central Europe has required an imperialist war and the consequent flooding of the factories with unskilled labor, has been accomplished in Russia by a much simpler process. TJbere the industries from the first have been largely supplied with the labor of peasants, just released from serfdom, and consequently untrained in any craft, except per- haps in some small domestic industry, say the textile or engineering trade, in such a way as to prevent each union from being split up into a number of smaller conflicting craft unions. The Professional Alliances in the course of 1918 in fact began to organize themselves on the basis of industries, leaving the shop-stewards' committees as a sort of local autonomous units of these industries, working in close contact with them. In addition to creating machinery for organizing labor the Supreme Council of Public Economy during the summer of 1918 began to tackle the problems of finance and distribution. It would take too long to enlarge upon these schemes fully, but I would point out that the general idea was to introduce a system of paying the worker partly in cash and partly in coupons, which he could exchange for food. This gradually affected the state finances by reducing the need for further currency issues, and it also made possible the intro- duction of a system of direct exchange. In order, therefore, to regu- late exchange of produce between town and country, the whole urban proletariat and a considerable part of the rural population by the autumn of 1918 were classified into categories according to the amount and the intensity of the labor which each individual performed. Each individual then received food varying in amount according to these categories. The machinery created for all this was only very gradually formed, r.nd the chief hindrance to its effective working was the disorders created by the German government and by other governments, whose agents on the Don, the Volga, in Archangel and Siberia financed [228] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY counter-revolutionary rebellions, blew up railway bridges, cut off food supplies and raw materials and thereby created an anarchy, which caused infinite suffering and privations to the workers and peasants of Central Russia throughout the greater part of 1918. Nevertheless the Soviet Government of the Russian Republic, thanks to the discipline and political consciousness of its workers, after removing social parasitism and economic wage slavery, set up the economic apparatus of the first Socialist State that has yet been created in the world. Its economic organs, elected by the workers, classed industrially and in technical groups, will one day become the supreme authority in the Socialist state. It will be the economic nerve center of public life, and is destined to replace parliaments, elected on territorial bases without any qualifications to deal with problems of industry, transport, foreign trade, finance, etc. Parlia- ments become the easy prey to permanent executive departments, con- trolled by the propertied classes. The Supreme Council of Public Economy on the other hand is a Socialist state which is free from the need of defending itself from enemies without, combines legis- lative and executive functions, and concentrates under its control the whole industrial and scientific apparatus of a modern state. It now remains to be seen how the Soviet Government dealt with the third great problem of the revolution the land. Measures for stopping the war had been taken the next day after the October revo- lution. Shortly after that the skilled urban workers and the half- proletariat began to work their way up through workers' control of industry to the creation of a great state apparatus for the public control of production and distribution. Now came the turn of the peasant. The decree on the land which was issued on October 28th, handed over the great estates of the landlords, the former Imperial family, the cabinet ministers and the Church, to provincial land com- mittees. The latter now came back to the rights which the Kerensky Government in the later days of its existence had robbed them of. [229] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS It was necessary to act speedily. The peasants of Central Russia, exasperated at the delays in dealing with the land problem and know- ing that intrigues were being carried on in Petrograd to prevent the land from getting out of the hands of the landlords and the big banks, to which much of the land had been mortgaged, had begun to take the law into their own hands. In several provinces the landlords' mansions were burned, the owners forced to flee, and the agrarian dis- orders threatened to ruin much agricultural stock of public value. The decree on land, issued by the Bolshevik Council of the People's Commissaries, instantly quieted the peasants. They knew that the land would indeed be theirs if the land committees, which they con- trolled, had the handling of it. But that did not solve the problem. The peasants themselves had no plan in their minds of how to deal with the land when they got it. Emancipated slaves, who had only just cast off their chains, many of them had not yet learned to act as men brought up in the atmosphere of freedom. The older generation of peasants and that part of the rural population which had never been in close contact with the half-proletariat or with the urban skilled workers, could not think beyond the boundaries of the parish. To them it seemed that as in the days of Tsarism, some beneficient power from above had given them the land. All they wanted therefore was to divide up the domain lands and add the portions of it to their allotments; to take the valuable live stock from the seigneur's home-farm and divide it equally among their families. It did not occur to them that by so doing they might ruin the great dairy industry, or might reduce the yield of cereals in the country by breaking up cultivation on an intensive scale. They did not see that to grab all the landlords' latifundia (the second-rate land far away from the mansions) would also prevent other more needy peasants in provinces, where land was scarce, from improving their condition by emigration. All these facts were clear to the Bolshevik revolutionary leaders however, for they [230] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY at once took steps to deal with these elemental anarchist tendencies of the less politically conscious part of the Russian peasantry, and when the third All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in January, 1918, at once the representatives of the rural district formed themselves into a special committee for working out a fundamental land law for the republic. For several weeks this commission sat in the Smolny Insti- tute and at last produced the law, which was passed by the Central Soviet Executive on January 22nd, 1918. The essential feature of the land law, which was the keystone to the new agrarian order, was contained in Articles i and 2, which read as follows: "All private property in land, minerals, water, forests and the forces of Nature within the limits of the Republic are abolished forever," and "the land without any compensation to the owners (open or hidden) becomes the property of the whole people to be used for objects of common utility." Thus at one blow the monopoly rights of those, who held the source of all wealth, was swept away and the Russian people acquired on those fateful days of January, 1918, what no other working population has acquired in the world before free access to the land. Moreover, the process was extremely simple. It was only necessary to declare all land public property, and at once all the latifundia of the landlords, Imperial family, ministers and Church were automatically added to the miserable allotments which the peasants had received on emancipation; while the territorially small but economically important lands of the intensively cultivated domains were easily picked out, withheld from distribution among the peasants and reserved for public development schemes. The Russian land law of January, 1918, realized in practice what Mr. Lloyd George in England, in the years just preceding the war, tinkered at, but had not the courage to carry out. For by the Russian method there was no undeveloped land tax and unearned increment tax at a modest one to ten per cent. The Soviet Government took the bull by the horns and by a simple hundred per cent, tax put an end to all profit- [231 ] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS making in land at the public expense. Thus the Russian peasants were freed from the luxury of maintaining landlords, even in a form tamed and chastened by taxation. In other words, landlords as a social and economic factor simply ceased to exist. Nor had the landlords any reason to be anything but thankful to the Bolsheviks, since all through the summer of 1917, while Kerensky's government was vacillating, they were being threatened with pogroms and massacre by the morose and sullen peasantry. The land law enabled them quietly to disappear from the scene in an orderly legal manner. Nor were they cruelly treated by the law. They had the right to apply through the provincial land committees of the Peasants' Soviets for that amount of their former land, which they were capable of working with their own labor. If any landlord was old, infirm, or unable for any reason to work, he was under Article 8, Section I, given the right "to receive a pension on the scale of that granted to a disabled soldier." Thus the libels, circulated outside Russia that the Soviet Government threw out the landlords from their mansions to starve, is seen on examination of the facts to be false. In those places where outrages did occur, they were due to peasantry, who, as a result of excessive exasperation, had got out of hand and dis- obeyed the Bolshevik government authorities, or else they were due to provocative acts on the part of the landlords themselves. Now, what was the system, which the new land law established for the distribution of land among the peasants? It was easy to break up estates but difficult to create a new agrarian system, which would not lower agricultural productivity and thus intensify the famine. Under Section 2 of the land law a scheme was drawn up which provided for the order, in which land allotments should be made. First in the scale came the state land departments, local and central, and public organizations working under their control. They were to be the first to have the right to withhold land from distri- bution among the peasants, in order to open experimental stations, [232] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY intensive cultivation farms, or to run the domain homesteads for purposes of general public utility. Next in order came private societies and associations, and here preference was given to the "labor com- mune," i. e., to groups of peasants or urban workers' families who should agree to work with common live stock and by common labor a given tract of land, to divide the products for their families and the profits from their sales in common. These new forms of com- munes were really large farms, organized on a co-operative basis, both for production and consumption. They were admirably suited for the work of taking over the landlords' domains and the home farms and for providing, under control of the state food department, the necessary agricultural produce for the urban population. Next in order came the old Russian peasant commune, which could, after the former categories had been satisfied, receive additions to the old allotments, which had been parcelled out in 1861. This old type of commune represents a much more archaic system of husbandry a sys- tem under which the land is divided equally, but each family main- tains its separate stock and farms independent of its neighbors. It has the disadvantage of splitting up the land into small isolated patches with the object of preventing any member of the commune from obtaining advantage over another member. It has none of the advan- tages of a common system of husbandry. The new land law thus did everything to encourage the new type of commune and to dis- courage the old. During the course of the summer of 1918 many hundreds of the new type were created in the central provinces by soldiers and sailors discharged from the old army, by skilled urban workers who, as a result of the famine in industrial raw products, had been thrown out of work, and by the half-peasant-half-proletarian, who had insufficient land allotments and who, during the war, had lost his live stock and the means to cultivate on his own. From the first, therefore, it was clear to the leaders of the revo- lution that a change in the system of land tenure must be accom- [233] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS panied by a complete change in the system of husbandry. In the years before the war the average yield of a dessatine of land in Russia was 52 poods for wheat and 61 poods for oats. In Germany the same area of land yielded 137 poods of wheat and 141 poods of oats. The average productive capacity of one Russian rural inhabi- tant was many times lower than that of an urban inhabitant. The latter numbering 4 millions at the commencement of 1915 produced annually between 7 and 8 milliard roubles' worth of industrial prod- ucts, i. e., each urban inhabitant produced 3,000 roubles' worth. The 130 million rural workers, on the other hand, produced annually 10 milliard roubles' worth of produce, i. e., 125 roubles' worth each. The most intensive production was carried out on the domains of the great estates and from them a large portion of the produce was exported abroad, did not reach the Russian consumer, and the profits on its sale went into the hands of a small aristocratic clique. The young Russian Republic of Labor coming into possession of these domains, and being faced with the necessity of increasing produc- tion, determined to accomplish this end by encouraging the new form of labor commune among the peasantry and half-proletariat. Again the problem of carrying through the agrarian revolution was greatly assisted by the peculiar conditions of Russian society. In the absence of highly developed farming and of a system of agricultural capi- talism, it was not necessary first to break down, as it is in Western and Central Europe, the thousands of private interests, yeoman free- holders, and the interests of private land development syndicates. It was only necessary to remove the effete agrarian aristocracy and then to keep within bounds the anarchical instincts of the less edu- cated peasantry. In this task the leaders of the revolution were assisted by the fact that in Russian society there exists, as I have mentioned above, a numerous element of unskilled workers, who have not lost touch with the village and who thus become the link between town and country. This half-peasant-half-proletarian became the [234] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY advance guard of the revolutionary army, educating the backward peasantry in the remote rural districts during the summer of 1918. But the conditions under which this task was attempted seemed almost hopeless. When the Germans and General Krasnoff had cut off the food supplies from the Don and the Ukraine, when the Czecho-Slovaks had cut the great commercial artery of the Volga, and the "Allies" had closed the window to the west at Murman, when in fact the economic outlook of Soviet Russia, surrounded by imperialist enemies on every side, seemed blackest, the Central Soviet Executive, nothing daunted, began the work of slowly, laboriously building up, the new social order in the villages. I was present in June at a conference of the Central Soviet Executive and the All- Russian Professional Alliances in Moscow just at the darkest hour, when all seemed lost. It would have almost seemed better to those, who had not the heart of lions, to confess that the revolution was a failure and to let the proletariat of Russia put back its neck beneath the yoke of the agrarian aristocracy, of "financial capital" and the foreign concessionaries. But the workingmen of Moscow and Petrograd had indeed the heart of lions. They were already isolated by the Governments of the whole world and now at the risk of arousing against them their own peasantry, who did not understand the meaning of the agrarian revolution, they decided to create in each rural district "committees of the poorer peasantry," which should stop the more well-to-do elements of the rural popu- lation from anarchically breaking up the great estates among them- selves and from plundering the domain farms ; which should organize the new type of communes and should teach the peasantry in the hard school of discipline that they had responsibilities to the revolu- tion as well as privileges. At first these committees of the poorer peasantry met with resistance in the villages. Rebellions against the Republic broke out in many districts and were fomented by the agents of the German government and other governments, as the documents [235] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS published by the Extraordinary Commission for the Fight with the Counter-revolution proves. Just as the Vendee and the Champagne revolted against the proletariat and the small bourgeoisie of Paris in the French Revolution and were aided by a British naval expedition, which blockaded the French coast in the interests of the "real France," so now the wealthy and ignorant part of the Russian peasantry struck against the urban workers and the half-proletariat and were assisted by the ruling classes of England, who proved true once more to their traditions as suppressors of all movements for freedom in Europe, by conspiring to overthrow the popular movement in Russia. But the peasant revolts in the central provinces were put down by the Soviet Government. Stern revolutionary discipline was enforced and the saying of Mirabeau was confirmed: "Angels are not made out of butter in time of revolution." What were the Committees of the Poorer Peasantry? They consisted for the most part of that social element, referred to above, the half-proletarian, half-peasant class. This class had suffered very severely from the war. Having been employed in unskilled work in towns for part of the year and having had no special qualifications, which enabled them to find work in the rear, they were driven by thousands into the Tsar's army at the crack of the gendarmes' whip. Those, who returned, found industries requiring only the half num- ber of hands that were employed before, while in the villages the allotments, which they cultivated every spring and summer, had for four years either been left untouched and had gone to waste or else had been taken by someone else, who could not now be ousted. The position of most of them was very tragic, but they readily accepted the idea of forming labor communes to re-establish their ruined hus- bandry on the land. To this element, therefore, the revolutionary leaders now turned to organize the "committees of the poorer peasantry." Little by little during the summer of 1918 these com- mittees grew in the western and central provinces. They got their [236] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY members elected to the local Soviets, removed speculators and the rich farmer element, that had crept into them, took over the admin- istration of the corn requisitioning and began to establish the new labor communes. This work soon began to bear fruit. By September requisitioned food began to come to the starving towns, and nearly 500 of the new communes were registered with the Commissariat of Agriculture. It was found that a slow but radical improvement in the system of husbandry and in the productivity of the land was beginning. In one place in the Tula province figures were worked out, which showed that under the old form of commune 50 persons, cultivating a hundred dessatines of land, working independently of each other, required 40 horses and twelve ploughs. Under the new form of commune, in which each individual worked as a mem- ber of the whole, only twenty horses and five ploughs were needed. Thus the saving of time and expense enabled more capital to be laid out in improvements, which in turn increased productivity. It is possible to go on describing without end the new social perspectives that have opened out before the rural and urban popu- lation of Russia as the result of the land and industrial laws, passed by the government of the Soviet Republic. All this constructive social work, the greatest and most daring of its kind, ever yet attempted in the history of the world, requires to be written not in a pamphlet but in a book nay, in many books. And, let it be remembered, all this is going on now, as I write these lines, in spite of the thunder of the revolutionary war, in which the Red Army of the Russian workmen and peasants is defending its Labor Republic against the attacks upon it from without by the armed hirelings of the London, Berlin, Paris and New York stock exchanges. But enough has been written to show that what is going on in Russia today is not the work of a mob of madmen or of a gang of robbers. The robbers are they, who have been for years under Tsarism sucking the life-blood of the Russian working class and the peasantry, con- [237] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS verting them into slaves to maintain the exploitation profits of syndi- cates in the "City" and Wall Street. The madmen are they, who think that they can, by overthrowing the government of the Soviet Republic through punitive expeditions, reimpose the yoke of financial capital upon the Russian workers and peasants. Madmen, I say, for is it likely, even if these expeditions should succeed, that the Russian people can be permanently reduced to slavery once more? Slavery means that the subjected person must either by superior force or by cajolery be made to obey and work for his master. Can this force be permanently applied to hold down 180 million people? Can they be cajoled to put their necks under the yoke again ? The Russian workman and peasant has known for the first time in his history what it is to be a free man and he can say: "I am no longer a slave, civis Romanus sum." Those who have experimented with a "dictatorship of the proletariat" are the nearest of all to that ideal which Doctor Ananda Coomaraswamy has so beauti- fully articulated in The Dance of Siva, the ideal of the Utopian anarchist, far distant, it is to be admitted, but so much purer than any other ideal and so inevitably the goal of all men that we cannot do better than to close our whole discussion of economic and politics with his words. When one learns of the meager salaries on which the Russian and Hungarian leaders insist on liv- ing, when one sees in general their spirit of self-efface- ment, when one reads of their readiness to give way be- fore each really creative autonomous manifestation by the most provincial Soviets or the lowliest individual, one sees how profoundly the proletarian leaders of the [238] THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FRATERNITY new society govern by renouncing that feverish will to govern which has corrupted practically all other states- men past and present. After gathering in a spacious synthetic vision elements from Nietzsche and Shakes- peare, from the dances, the poetry, the painting, the love-lore of ancient India, from the Indian guild sys- tem, from French syndicalism and British guild social- ism, Doctor Coomaraswamy concludes with some pro- found remarks on the "will to govern." He finds the rule of one person tyrannous. And he finds the rule of the majority tyrannous. He brands "the anarchy ap- proached by self-assertion" as "chaos." He reposes in the following invincible truth : "The anarchy approached by renunciation is ... an anarchy of spontaneity: only the renunciation of the will to govern could create a stable equilibrium. . . . The 'will to govern' must not be confused with the 'will to power.' The will to govern men is the will to gov- ern others : the will to power is the will to govern one's self. Those who would be free should have the will to power without the will to govern." [239] VIII. EDUCATION; A PROGRAM FOR THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY We may now sum up our long analysis of the rela- tions between the facts of the class struggle and the facts which point towards fraternity. Dynamic psychology, with its emphasis on the total behavior of the individ- ual and with its insistence that the difference between the "sane" and the "insane" is merely one of degree, has revolutionized economics and politics for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The "self-interest psychology" is no longer tenable, and with its fall con- servative economics and monistic politics are absolutely destroyed. But Marxian economics can survive with a leaven of anarchist utopianism. For recent behav- ioristic and psychoanalytic investigations restore a good portion of the utopist's belief that the most fundamental feature of man's original nature is his wish to love his fellows, that fear, hate, and the possessive impulses are vicarious, and that therefore the fundamental forces in a successful revolution must always be the love of our fellows and a sense of growing freedom. Now, while Marx often appears to put all the emphasis on the [240] EDUCATION determining influence of the tool of production, on the self-interest of the individual and on class-hatred, his intuition was sounder than his dialectic. For again and again he appealed to men's growing sense of freedom, their generous impulses and their feeling of universal brotherhood. Orthodox economists have used this in- consistency to condemn him for confusing economics and ethics. But modern psychology, the study of the behavior of the individual as a whole, and the most recent logic of science have demonstrated that you can- not separate economics and ethics. Marx, therefore, survives while orthodox economics falls through its complete dependence on that delusive influence which psychoanalysts call the ego-complex. Marxian empha- sis on the right of all men to the "surplus value" is really an emphasis on the "human valuation" which modern psychology forces upon us. And the militant proletariat goes with Marx and with contemporary radical intellectuals in placing the sanctity of human life above the sanctity of property. Radical laborers are therefore more contemporaneously scientific than capitalists. And labor unions are the vast laboratories of the first really vital sociology. In the field of poli- tics militant laborers and radical intellectuals alike are reconceiving the State as properly nothing but an asso- ciation of consumers no more powerful by right than a congress of organized producers. In the light of mod- [240 THE .INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS ern psychology our political theory must be pluralistic and political institutions, like all institutions, must be judged by their consequences in contrast to human per- sonalities whom we can understand completely only through a knowledge of their motives. We must work towards a delicate balance of governmental powers which will elevate the autonomy of the individual above the power of the State or any other institution. Sound sovereignty can rest on nothing but consent. At pres- ent, in the class struggle which is being waged for the complete release of love, honest intellectuals and syndi- calistic workers alike find that economic power pre- cedes political power. And always it will be true that really spiritual politics can rest only on healthy eco- nomics. In the class-struggle it also becomes increas- ingly apparent that the proletariat grows ever more humane, the bourgeoisie more brutal. The bourgeoisie or "segregated class" is so blinded by its property-com- plexes that its wish to love is overwhelmed by a vicar- ious fear and hate. Capitalistic sabotage begins with the hoarding and destruction of productions and reaches a climax in the present unspeakable attempt to starve Central Europe into an acceptance of a dying plutoc- racy. Proletarian sabotage begins with injury to ma- chinery and reaches a climax in truth-telling, artistic workmanship and obedience to laws. General strikes abound in sublime instances of the release of love and [242] EDUCATION magnanimity. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the first type of government honest enough to admit itself to be transitional and not eternal. It is the first govern- ment in which the leaders are generally notable for their spirit of renunciation. Never before has the world seen such a galaxy of self-effacing statesmen as Lenine and Trotsky, Tchicherin, Lunartcharsky, Kol- lontay and many more. The dictatorship of the prole- tariat is the first government thoroughly sensitive to the rhythm of centralization and decentralization which is a rhythm of life but which other governments try to coerce and to fix artificially in one mould or the other. It is a government of healthy young men not of elderly paranoiacs. Thus radical intellectuals and militant proletarians come together in the recognition that "the will to power is the will to govern one's self" and that progress is sure only when its force is our fundamental wish to love. This is not to sentimentalize. For we discover and set free our wish to love only by facing unflinchingly our innumerable vicarious uglinesses and pettinesses which are branded deeply into us. It is such relentless self-scrutiny that makes illustrious the Rus- sian novelists and the psychoanalysts. It is such re- lentless self-scrutiny that is beginning to set free many other intellectuals and the proletariat of the plutocratic countries. We may perfect our transition to our final topic, [243] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS education, particularly that conceivable American uni- versity education which might perfect the entente of intellectuals and wage-workers, by supplementing Doctor Coomaraswamy's political reflections with some beautifully congruous educational reflections by John Henry Newman: "Taking Influence and Law to be the two great principles of Gov- ernment, it is plain that, historically speaking, Influence comes first, and then Law. Thus Orpheus preceded Lycurgus and Solon. Thus Deioces the Mede laid the foundations of his power in his personal reputation for justice, and then established it in the seven walls by which he surrounded himself in Ecbatana. First we have the Virum pietatc gravem' whose word rules th? spirits and soothes tha breasts' of the multitude; or the warriors; or the mythologist and bard; then follow at length the dynasty and constitution. Such is the history of society: it begins in the poet, and ends in the policeman." The faint irony of the last sentence adumbrates the half-troubled favoritism which Cardinal Newman, in his long meditation on the world-old antinomy of dis- cipline (law) and influence (interest) lent to the latter. The problem arouses some of the most enriching con- troversy today. In contemporary education we may survey it thus: interest has made real strides under the guidance of a Rousseau, a Froebel, a Charles William Eliot, a Francisco Ferrer; it is not so much that we have an excess of interest as that we have a twentieth century interest coupled with occasional spasmodic and moribund revivals or reactions of a discipline tainted [244] EDUCATION with fear, discipline that calls upon the teacher to be a special dispensating Providence, discipline that com- pels the teaching of a history perversely idealized to confirm an uncritical allegiance to the present ruling class and a blind idolatory of the nation into which you happen to be born, discipline which has so mishandled the ancient classics that they must lie fallow till new loving guardians can devise new ways of fitting them into a curriculum based on genuinely democratic as- pirations, discipline which in the present growth of militarism, imperialism, and bureaucracy menaces the progress of the world for generations. But all this is not worthy of the name of discipline; it is pseudo-dis- cipline as we shall see. We can define a liberal education for our day only by freeing ourselves first from an unholy alliance con- sisting of philosophical idealists of the more exotic type (who believe in philosophy for philosophy's sake), from certain educational advocates of the classics (who believe in education for education's sake) from the esthetic parasites (who believe in "art" for "art's" sake, i.e., in art for luxury's sake), from degenerate descendants of the Puritans (who believe in drudgery for drudgery's sake), and from the imperialistic capi- talists (who believe in business-power for business- power's sake). It may sound absurd, at first blush, to group these together. We owe many blessings to [245] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS philosophical idealists and to classical educationalists. And certainly these two groups are inclined, in a pure- ly theoretical way, to express their abhorrence of esthetic parasites and imperialistic capitalists. There are undoubtedly logical incongruities which make perfect harmony impossible in the unholy alliance. Philosophical idealists, for instance, are often found with the petit bourgeoisie rather than with the larger capitalists and they like to dub themselves "liberals," "progressives," or even "socialists" (of the Fabian variety) but the net result is that they are timid weathercocks who flutter alternately to the strong north- easters of the revolutionists and the blasting siroccos of the reactionaries. And it is a historical fact of our period that those who believe in philosophy for philosophy's sake, those who believe in education for education's sake, those who believed in drudgery for drudgery's sake, and those who believe in business- power for business-power's sake are actually working in concert on some of the most momentous issues of today. The purpose of the education of "culture" today is to create in the universities and colleges a small group of men euphemistically denominated "leaders in service," whose "canons" of living are, as Professor Veblen has shown us, "conspicuous leisure" and "con- spicuous waste" and, far too often, "pecuniary emula- tion." There is no need to dwell here on the sinister EDUCATION influence of endowments upon universities. Nor need we dwell on the analogous situation of the artist. To little purpose, as yet, did Doctor Johnson say: "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?" What, then, is a really contemporaneous and pro- gressive "liberal education"? Assuredly we cannot say that it is a sovereignty of Latin and Greek poetry and prose and then avow ourselves to be disciples of Plato. For Plato, the supreme subjects were mathematics and philosophy and he banished poets (at least some poets) from his Republic. But no Platonist today would re- ject poetry in education and few would insist upon a pedagogical hegemony of mathematics and philosophy. Obviously we are all agreed, from Plato to Professor Paul Shorey, that a liberal education is one which gives us a synoptic view. But in order to define liberal edu- cation for our age we must ask the question: how today are we to acquire and disseminate a synoptic view? It is just here that the humanistic and idealistic abstractions prove as little help to us as the fading grin of the Cheshire cat. The choice of studies which will give the synoptic view depends upon the period in the world's history, the particular environment in which we find ourselves and the complexes which the students have (assuming the teacher, as all teachers in due time [247] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS will want to be, has been psychoanalyzed) . The studies must be chosen by a careful experimental procedure co- operatively conducted by teacher and pupil because human beings are individuals and not types and it is quite impossible to speak of any studies as the best studies for everybody. Our liberal education will not fear play. Play is the essence of religion and art. It is one of history's most recent ironies that while self-styled humanists have been accusing various pioneer educationalists of utili- tarianism these "utilitarians" have been achieving the marriage of education and play. Work, properly con- ceived, is not the antithesis of play; work, as Mr. Joseph Lee has shown, is the fulfillment of play. It is the failure to perceive this that trapped the educational reactionaries into sterilizing the classics for a genera- tion because they thought that the dignity of Greek and Latin literatures required what they called discipline and because by discipline they meant little beyond drudgery. It is the failure to perceive that work is the fulfillment of play which keeps the art for art's sake practitioner in the category of minor poet since he al- ways persists in playing an infantile game and in re- fusing to work or to believe work and joy compatible. Business men have learned to look with suspicion upon exponents of the older humanities in education because business-men are proponents of that logically [ 248 ] . EDUCATION and psychologically meaningless doctrine, "Deeds, not words." But the teachers of the older humanities have taught words so pedantically hot-housed from deeds, and their education towards gentlemanly leisure has in- volved so much drudgery in its process that the pupils have allied themselves with the business-men. By contrast with both conservative educationalists and efficiency-made business-men those who tend to advocate an adaptation to a remote end by the use of a great variety of means rationally chosen are the liberal educators who give play its fulfillment in work. Such an education is almost unknown among university teachers. But it has been worked out elaborately for children in various places, in the Gary 'Schools, for example, which Mr. Randolphe Bourne so charmingly described, with their "class-rooms, . . . playgrounds and gardens, gymnasiums and swimming pools, special drawing and music studios, scientific laboratories, machine shops and intimate and constant contact with supplementary community activities outside the school," making "the playground the very centre of its life, 'eager' to absorb the museums and galleries" since "the artistic sense can be cultivated only by bring- ing children into contact daily and almost unconscious- ly with beautiful things" and since pictures and objects of art and criticism become unreal and artificial when immured in isolated museums which can be visited only [249] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS at spare times and with effort, "schools where the chil- dren are busy all day long" in healthy cycles of play- study-work, play-study-work like the religion-crit- icism-science-art of our psychological and logical anal- ysis of life in this book. These schools are living ex- amples of an essentially liberal education in our period triumphing in the face of the opposition of business- men of the Steel Corporation at Gary, who see in these children, not those who will be "disciplined" into a servile "duty" which will make them the docile suc- cessors of the "cheap labor" of today, but who see in these children rather those who will rise to protest against a society wherein the few exploit the many. A few weeks ago I visited a Montessori School at the moment when some of the children of six years of age were waiting on others at lunch. One child was carry- ing out his task wrongly. He frowned. I watched with interest. Would the frown deepen into stubborn pride when his fellows gently assisted him to a recogni- tion of his awkwardness? Under similar circumstances adults certainly grow stubborn and sullen. But no, the frown changed quickly into a smile of delighted recog- nition of the right way, of a re-established identity with his comrades. When that child first entered the school he tried to possess his fellow-pupils and teachers by jumping up and down and screaming. "This is what I do when I want anything at home," said he blandly. [250] EDUCATION Now he grows daily more serene and so much more interested in living than in possessing other people's lives that when he grows up he will find it all but im- possible to understand why his father was a capitalist except by a feat of historical imagination. But wherever there is an adaptation to a remote end by the use of meager educational means (study to pro- duce the traditionalistic pseudo-broadmindedness of the "gentleman" or the neo-aristocratic "leader," the training in the "humanities" in the old sense) forced upon students in the sacred name of "discipline," then we have an illiberal education, based on the "idols of the tribe," in which youth is prepared by a long period of hot-housing from contemporary currents of life. Self-control for a great purpose is a matter of self- discipline, not of irrational, unconvinced servility to co- ercive influences miscalled discipline. Self-discipline, however, requires as its source of inspiration a teacher who will lead out a student before sweeping vistas at times and at times will confront him with multitudes of practical dilemmas which will stir him to loyalty in Royce's fine sense of the term, "a willing and thorough- going devotion to a cause," a "practical" devotion to a cause which is "superpersonal" as well as personal. People will retort wearily that this requires teachers of genius and that teachers of genius are as rare as great poets. But we shall endeavor presently to show that THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS an educational organization is possible in which any teacher who has health and a modicum of industry could develop a great variety of means to encourage the student to use a great variety of means. In America Charles William Eliot did take some steps towards a truly democratic education when he established the "elective system." But his scheme did not provide for the principle of self-discipline because it was naively empirical rather than experimental. Doctor Eliot gave us an uncriticized religious vision. But he left his students to the trial and error method of the animals. It was only an opposite extreme to the method which gave the student little or no choice. In consequence certain revisionists have produced a "group elective system." Prof. H. H. Home lauds this last as a synthesis of all that is best in the required and the elective modes. But Professor Home is misled by a rather artificial Hegelian way of thinking. The group elective system is, indeed, a "synthesis," but it is a synthesis of all that is worst in the earlier methods. The advocates of the required course made and make the mistake of supposing that no autonomous act or choice by an adolescent can be sound. The champions of free election slighted, on the other hand, the neces- sity of a sort of psychoanalytical co-operation between teacher and student because, in their eagerness to de- stroy the old pedagogical absolutism, their eyes were [252] EDUCATION not open to the experimental method of science and they were intoxicated with an eighteenth century politi- cal philosophy as it was swaggeringly worked out in English and American industrialism. Now the group elective system does allow the student to do some choos- ing and does encourage half-heartedly a system of facul- ty-advisors. But this apparent synthesis of the best is but a false dawn. The student does not choose experimen- tally a study or a few studies, feeling his way with logi- cal caution and emotional sincerity and intimacy in close comradeship with a professor who has a synoptic view of the value of courses and a psychological insight into personalities. On the contrary, the student commits himself almost immediately to the momentous and hopelessly a priori choice of a college and a life career. He is now almost as rigorously condemned to his a priori as students in the old universities were con- demned to requirements which, if somewhat narrow and very inflexible, were at least thoughtfully selected by one of the parties of the contract. But under the group elective system the student discovers usually, at the end of two or three years that he has chosen un- wisely. Helplessly he looks around and finds that brazen doors have closed behind his forced and prema- ture confession of a life-purpose. Readjustment is a most difficult matter in what he now discovers to be a prison condemning him to useless, galling, stunting [253] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS labor. Thus the ghost of the old "humanistic" educa- tion, a perversion of it far worse than the system itself when it really flourished, has slunk back with the reac- tionaries to check the natural improvements which might rationally have been made in the bold if some- what sentimental scheme of Doctor Eliot. We cannot commit ourselves to a definition of lib- eral education which will be precisely applicable in any age or comfortably absolute even for an hour. We may say abstractly that its essential nature implies a reconciliation of discipline and interest, culture and utility, play and work. But the definition, to be really specific and vital, must be formulated over again in every period, though with all possible respect for the formulations of earlier times and other races. It must be, like all other laws, a working-hypothesis. To learn how to reformulate our definition or law for this age, those of us who are in universities had best get over our academic Olympianism and go very humbly to certain enlightened teachers of children who (perhaps because they have lived near those whose artistic move- ments and religious imagination is purer than ours and more vigorous) seem to have been taught by their pu- pils many methods which (after due critical purifica- tion) they have used to initiate a genuine liberal and liberating education. This is to converge towards that other great recognition on the part of forward-looking [254] EDUCATION intellectuals that the new society must be reconstructed from the bottom up just as the syndicalists say, that the intellectual must content himself with giving sym- phonic structure to the proletarian melodies of truth, life. In precisely this spirit the schools of Mr. Wirt at Gary are fundamentally conceived, as Randolph Bourne noted, to be "as much as possible a self-sustain- ing child community" since " 'all other child-welfare agencies do not occupy the time of all the children for more than an average of ten minutes a day' " and since children are generally debauched by one of two repres- sive influences: " 'irksome child labor and demoraliz- ing child idleness.' ' Thus the Gary Schools serve many purposes lost when the Industrial Revolution shattered the homes of the proletariat and (more subtly) of the well-to-do. These pioneer schools are "not only a 'preparation for life' " but " 'a life itself,' ' a public-school "in the same broad sense that streets and parks are public" where "the child would not 'graduate,' 'complete his or her education,' but would tend to drift back constantly to school to get the help he or she needed in profession or occupation or to keep enjoying the facilities which even the wealthy private home would not be able to afford," thus "making the public schools veritable 'schools for the public.' " Here the child participates, co-operates, discovers his auton- omy quite soberly just as the proletariat is discovering THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS its autonomy, learns to fear no longer his wish to love as the proletariat learns to fear no longer its wish to love. We cannot reconcile drudgery, play, and work, cul- ture and utility, discipline, influence, and interest, the beautiful and the lovely and the ugly with absolute cer- tainty for all time. But we may define a liberal educa- tion for our own age as the rational verification, by a great variety of means, of purposes both immediate and remote in a process in which the individual stu- dent and teacher co-operate, in which the teacher aids the student and the student teaches the teacher, in which the student, through that self-discipline which flowers with the discovery of his autonomy, elects ra- tionally and pursues rationally his own course, a proc- ess of election which is co-extensive with his life, in which play finds its fulfillment or sublimation in work, in which the fundamental wish to love is made free. Enlightened by the militant proletariat and by the teachers of children, those of us who teach in American universities may develop the experimental spirit in three directions as far as the immediate future is con- cerned: (i) towards a freer intercourse between mem- bers of the faculties leading to a transformation of the present possessive compartments into genuine creative departments and a consequent revolution of the me- thodological principles which underly many of the studies; (2) a rejection of the required, elective, and [256] EDUCATION group elective systems for one of very elaborate psy- choanalytical co-operation between each student and certain cultured and psychologically expert faculty ad- visors who do nothing else and who equal in numbers fully a third of the regular faculty in any well-manned university; (3) a thoroughgoing rejection of both the recitation and the lecture system (as commonly prac- tised) for the method of discussion and of communal production which the proletarians are at present per- fecting wherever they are allowed to have strictly self-supporting forums to a point beyond that attained to by the ancient Greeks. We may now consider in some detail how simple and practical the beginnings of such activities may be, how far-reaching are their potentialities. Members of faculties could begin their efforts to- wards a better mutual understanding and towards re- vised methodologies very simply by visiting each other's courses. The old tradition, based on a senti- mental, laissez-faire conception of "academic free- dom," that every professor's class-room should be a sanctum sanctorum to which no colleague should be admitted, is happily waning. And the adventurous col- lege teacher will be amazed, if he will but try, to dis- cover how hospitably many of his colleagues will reply to a frank personal appeal. But that will be only the first of a series of delightful surprises. If our adventur- [257] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS ous professor is sensible enough to choose for his first visits a course in some subject not too obviously close to his own and yet not too remote, if he attends regu- larly and does a fair part of the class-vvork he will be amazed to find his colleague's problems in philosophy or economics or comparative psychology are sometimes precisely his own in literature. He will be delight- fully disillusioned of his fatalistic belief that university professors are hopelessly committed to a situation like those who were stricken at the Tower of Babel. He will begin to discuss these common problems eagerly in his literary jargon and his host will reply with equal gusto in the jargon of biology or of metaphysics. He will find that he can well spare for this a good deal of the time that he was giving to far less salubrious forms of recreation. He will prevail upon his indul- gent host to become his own guest and discuss with his own pupils the relations of certain problems in liter- ary criticism to the question of instinct and intelligence or the similarity in the logical implications of a "ju- dicial critic" like Addison and a "continental rational- ist" like Leibnitz. Then, of a sudden, he will discover some day that a problem with which he had grappled for years in vain, about which he had lamely apolo- gized to his classes for years, becomes clear in some happy moment when, with his mind apparently far from Taine's History of English Literature, he listens [258] EDUCATION to some comrade discussing with a class in ethnology the habits of Negritos. Often, too, he will find, when he sits down of an evening, after a long day of teaching and visiting courses, to prepare his own work for the morrow, that his work is already almost prepared, that the things which he heard in his colleagues' courses are absolutely apropos immediately, that the time which he thought was sacrificed to extra toil and remote pros- pects was really a wisely spent part of the day's work for which he is paid, that he is not only prepared but far more freshly prepared than he would have been had he spaded and ploughed as usual in his old field, sub- jected as it is by long and rather unintelligent tilling to the law of decreasing returns. With a fraternity of college professors visiting freely each other's courses, entering into class discussions, eager for the real symposium, universities should take the first humble but momentous step towards becoming self-sustaining communities and showing the reaction- aries of the world a better life than that prescribed by intranational paternalism and inter-national imperial- ism. In days when "efficiency" has a malevolent as well as a benignant meaning we must keep Randolph Bourne's sentences in mind every minute: "There is a danger that we shall create capable administrators fas- ter than we create imaginative educators. It is so easy to forget that this tightening of the machinery is only THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS that the product may be finer and richer." With such contingencies in view professors should pass from their informal visitings and discussions to more formal or- ganization, not on the pattern of the moribund associa- tion of American professors which is too much like the more snobbish and timorous craft unions, but on the pattern of the industrial unions which the syndicalistic spirit is expanding, unions which would include the teachers in high-schools and the teachers of smaller children (the most creative of all of us) on a basis of rational equality, unions which would thus attack, the problem of education not with a vague paternalistic radiation downward from olympian, academic heights but from the bottom up, unions which would safeguard schools from the tyrannous interference of the State and the invertebrate public, unions which would make trustees and regents practically unnecessary, unions which would insist that college presidents and high- school principals and superintendents should be some- thing other than business-men and politicians in the degraded American sense of the term. These unions should recognize immediately their productive affilia- tions with all other labor-unions. It is most hearten- ing to see the more aggressive high-school teachers affil- iating with the American Federation of Labor. And the University of Illinois will some day be very proud of the fact that its teachers set an example to the irreso- [260] EDUCATION lute academicians. The reciprocal influence of the loose and very variant American trade-unions and the forward-looking teachers who recognize their own status as producers ought to develop rapidly into the most brilliantly reconstructive tendency in twentieth century American life. We may make a transition from the association of teachers to the teacher-pupil relation by a brief glance at some of the new correlations of courses which would naturally arise from the activities already suggested for teachers. Many philosophers, for example, say arro- gantly that scientists should come to them for criticism. The scientists have done so repeatedly but have, until lately, been fed with apples of ashes. Philosophers could remedy this if, as a few of them have already done, they all would see to it, without crude coercion, that their own major and graduate students we're so distributed in their classes that there would be individ- uals minoring not merely in psychology Cthe tradi- tional minor) but also in chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, biology, ethnology, economics, and ready to contribute facts and specific problems from all these subjects for philosophical analysis and synthesis. Many students if allowed to choose in accordance with that experimental co-operation with a faculty advisor which I here advocate, would prefer one of these subjects to psychology and would therefore contribute to a more THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS varied elaboration of their other favorite subject. Phi- losophers could then bring them together in a seminar in the logic of science conducted, if possible, by two in- structors who entertain different views and who could present these views in open discussion and debate. This seminar should be the keystone of the upper division and graduate courses in philosophy. Let us take an- other example. If philology must be correlated with literature (and this is a highly debatable question) stu- dents of a special literature and language should be advised (though not required) to approach it through a course in general ethnology, the history of cultures and of the instrumental force of language in cultures, or, if they preferred, a general course in psychology, the study of associations, imagination, emotions, reason, those reactions to which literary men and philologians are forever referring loosely without knowing what they themselves mean. Students of psychology and stu- dents of ethnology would then be requested to exchange their information in the interpretation of the data which they would be collecting in an intensive study of a special language and literature. At the present time our ethnologists in America are teaching philology with far more perspective than are the philologians. Again, no student of political science is likely to de- serve honors as a senior or to deserve a post graduate degree unless he has attended classes where teachers [262] EDUCATION and students brought in and discussed contributions from philosophy, from general ethnology, from com- parative and social psychology, and from the rigorous criticism and comparison of historical methods. To get a good course in historical method is, at present, almost impossible since, as we saw in an earlier chapter, most historians are afraid to reflect at all severely about their troublesome presuppositions. But good courses in historical method would grow rapidly out of the visits and discussions we have urged between members of the faculty just as Professor Teggart's memorable book on history grew out of years of research in the fields of ethnology, biology, psychology, and the logic of science. Again, no advanced students in economics should leave the university without having heard much about the general philosophy and psychology of values. And today our teachers should see to it that those who enter upon their first course in strict theory of econom- ics should come with contributions from courses pre- viously taken, according to their own election, in ethics, introductory psychology, zoology, and general evolu- tionary theory. With what pleasure would the students find themselves actually using the things they learn! All these and many other reforms of this sort could be put through immediately by any departments not ob- sessed in seeking aggrandizement under a system of laissez-faire competition. [263] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS Even the most mildly imaginative teachers may deepen the ties between colleagues and pupils in a thou- sand ways. Let us confine ourselves to two examples. Suppose a teacher with a small class of juniors or sen- iors which he has trained for one semester in the prob- lems of literary criticism: Impressionism versus judic- ial criticism, "scientific" or "historical" criticism and its relation to "valuation," the controversy between the literary utilitarians or propagandists and the advocates of art for art's sake, the meanings of "realism" and "romanticism" in literature and in metaphysics. At the beginning of the second semester the instructor could announce a thesis to be constructed carefully by elaborate prevision and through frequent conferences with all or most of the student's teachers, a thesis pri- marily literary but one which would make use of ma- terials obtained in other courses taken during the same semester, a thesis which would focus the student's en- tire work. It is not at all difficult to assist a student to a free choice of a subject fulfilling all these require- ments. One student might, for instance, go to work on Ruskin trying to straighten out the economic and esthe- tic tangles in his prophecies, holding conferences with the teacher of literature, the teacher of economic the- ory, and the teacher of philosophy in many a delightful symposium most enlightening to all concerned. In the general class-discussions the instructor should con- [264] EDUCATION stantly encourage an approach to literature through the medium of other subjects. A mere perusal of a chapter or two of Professor Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, of the articles on "Art, Ornament, and Decoration" and on "Magic, Religion, and Myth" in Professor Thomas's Source Book of Social Origins will with deep relevancy throw into sudden and vast per- spectives the problems which would arise in, let us say, the contrast of dramas by Maeterlinck and by Ibsen or by Yeats and by Shaw. Suppose, for our second ex- ample, an ordinary course in freshman English com- position. This should never be, as it so often is, a course in rules about writing or in crossing t's and dotting i's or in books about books abstracted from life; it should be a course in the practical creation of literature am- bitious or humble. At the same time it can be made a course in general university orientation. Each semester, the class may choose a rather large topic about which to focus all themes, oral and written, all books read, all informal class-discussions. Let the topic be, for in- stance, "progress." Let the students first attempt a theme on progress in the United States during the last generation, thus somewhat limiting the choice of sub- ject but encouraging them with suggestions to choose any one of innumerable variations within the broad theme. Let the teacher then demolish the absurdly op- timistic and sentimental sketches that are handed in. [265] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS Let the many meanings of progress and the profound dangers to progress then emerge in reports and read- ings. Students may be delegated, as individuals, to consult instructors in helpful subjects like biology, eth- nology, the philosophy of history. In a time of presi- dential campaign a collective attempt by the student to formulate by a semester's research and writing an in- telligible definition of "Americanism" will keep every individual on tiptoe and involve some delightful read- ing extending from Emerson's "American Scholar" to William James' "Gospel of Relaxation." This sub- ject has, indeed, been made the basis for some text- books in composition. But with characteristic "sanity" the editors have anthologized as though such a thing as the labor movement never existed. "Education" is always a valuable subject itself and a rich prelude for an entire college course. "The Labor Movement" is the most valuable and successful of all that I have tried out. But always the students should be given one topic to be sustained an entire semester so that they may ac- cumulate something to write about instead of drawing from a vacuum. In such a course as the one prescribed it is impossible for them to depend on the eleventh hour inspiration to dash off a thoughtless essay in impeccable or faulty but always empty rhetoric; in such a course they are bound to have thought about most of their [266] EDUCATION themes for weeks and to have exchanged ideas in free co-operation with fellow-students and teachers. It is perfectly possible that relations between faculty and students could be made more rich and loving by an imaginative contribution to the out-of-doors drama which is becoming so popular in America. Such a production as the "Partheneia" at the University of California could readily be expanded to include stu- dents of both sexes and members of the faculty. It is quite astounding to those who have had practical ex- perience with these activities to see how quickly a large number of people will have contributed to the creation of these spectacles, how blurred becomes the sense of what I wrote or did and what you wrote or did, of who first thought of this entrance and who first suggested that color-combination. The days of communal-com- position are not irrevocable. Indeed, in an age so grimly communalized by machinery, the only way in which we can make machines our slaves instead of our masters is by suffusing all the processes with a new communal artistry. These university masques and pageants might well become apprentice training in that sort of reconstruction. And if we are careful to avoid artificial rituals in pale imitation of some primitive or medieval performance, if we purge ourselves of senti- mental patriotism, these affairs may assume the pro- portions of very serious and very joyous out-of-door and [267] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS in-door music-dramas with huge panoramic effects and long perspectives that would fulfill Wagner's most ecs- tatic dream of the wedding of the arts. Perhaps, too, acting would be rid of its present gravely psychopatho- logical defects when we all learned to act. Every university and college should have a very elaborate advisor-faculty, as we have noted, composed of men trained with a synoptic view of the values of various studies and with an expert psychological knowledge of human individuals. These men, we sug- gested, should be equal in number to at least a third of the present faculties. Their duties should be con- fined to personal conferences of one hour once a week with students as individuals for every semester of the four years. The method of the conference should be psychoanalytical in the sense that the work should be done almost entirely by the student, that the advisor should restrict himself to certain bits of information (when these are asked for) and to revealing to the stu- dent his compromises, his acts untrue to his own nature, without prescribing at all the acts which might seem to the advisor to be true to the student's essential per- sonality. This psychoanalytical advisorship should be then a course in general university orientation and in the discovery by the student of his autonomy. It would involve a most intimate confession by the student of his own life and milieu and aspirations and fears and com- [268] EDUCATION pulsions. The advisor and his young comrades would proceed experimentally. If there appeared to be on the student's part a definite distaste for a subject he had chosen, if his views of his aims changed vitally, the ex- perimenting advisor and student would have to retrace their steps exactly as a scientist does when a hypothesis is not working. Far less time would be wasted in this apparently indulgent way than in the present crudely empirical and crudely a priori methods. With such in- timate comradeship of advisor and pupil the elaborate documents, the administrative armies, the morasses of "laws," the sordid organization of "units" and "grades" would be largely unnecessary and a considerable sum of money could be rescued for the employment of ad- visors which is now poured into the amorphous lap of a god called "Efficiency." As Professor Dewey has it, the old education "is in the teacher, the text-book, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activi- ties of the child himself. . . . Now the change which is coming into our education is the shifting of the center of gravity. It is a change, a revolution, not unlike that introduced by Copernicus when the astronomical cen- ter shifted from the earth to the sun. In this case the child becomes the center about which the appliances of education revolve; he is the center about which they are organized." There will be a Copernican revolu- [269] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS tion of our conception of the State as we saw in the last chapter. Hitherto government of the people, by the people, for the people has not been a reality except in the vision of a single individual like Lincoln whose wish to love had been almost completely released from the repressions which strove to hide it and the compen- sations which strove to divert it into vicarious activities. But Lincoln's ideal is something for which the whole world now dares hope, Europe even more than Amer- ica. This democracy has been partially realized by proletarian pioneers and in some child rens' schools. To make similar progress by patient and humble experi- ment in the universities will be to help enormously in the extension of our Copernican revolution outward and upward to the State itself. Two powerful currents we find converging and in their convergence we foresee a society far more noble than any which the world has yet known or even dreamed of clearly. The wage-workers are becoming less and less willing to accept social inequality as their lot. At the same time the radical scientists of human nature are finding an increasing justification in science for the growing hope of the wage-workers. Our primal wish proves to be the wish to love, to share, to identify ourselves with all men and women and children, to re- joice that we are all alike made of the same marvellous germ-plasm upon which "nature" has been patiently at [270] EDUCATION work for millions of years. Those who feel most stead- fastly this truth and order their lives in accordance, whether they be "workers with the hand" or "workers with the brain," should be proud to consider themselves of the proletariat, full of a revolutionary mission. They are mostly warmly infused with the essence of religion. For religion is not in the churches nor is it pulsing strongly in the hearts of our conservatives. Religion is the attitude of facing the unknown with exultant but humble courage, with the faith that "all is not vanity in the universe," with the joyous confidence that "every- thing natural" has a potential "ideal development." Real proletarians will not allow this religious elan to blind us to the fact that we can destroy ourselves if we are perverse enough. They will winnow their religion constantly with criticism which will save them from the extremes alike of cynicism and of sentimentalism. They will remember that each one is religious visionary, critic, scientist and artist (for these are not subject-mat- ters or vocations but stages in every healthy cycle of thought and action) and they will try to neglect none of these although they may become especially skilfull in one. They will realize that the war between nations and the war between classes has precipitated on the largest scale yet dreamed of that "release" which always marks the advancement of men beyond the complexes or superstitions which lock them in a living death. [271 ] THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE WAGE WORKERS They will find that the feeling of freedom which ebbs and flows in all of us is at a crescendo now. They will recognize the kinship between the inner conflict in each mind and the class-conflict outside and so they will dis- cover that liberty can be conferred upon a person only by himself and that this liberty is non-resistance to his own law even though all his vicarious passions and whims and all the institutions of society conspire to roar it down. Radical intellectuals are compelled by modern psychology to fuse economics with ethics, to realize that economics cannot exist independently of justice, to realize that "self-interest" is not our funda- mental impulse. But radical intellectuals are also learning to revise their concept of sovereignty so as to avoid both the extremes of self-interest and centralized tyranny in favor of a pluralistic politics which is most reverent of the autonomy of the individual. At the same time the wage-workers are fulfilling these new ideas in life and, by a marvellous paradox, are over- whelming their opponents' increasing fear and hate with an increasing love. Let the intellectuals hasten the inevitable convergence with the wage-workers by the most thorough reconstruction of educational meth- ods. Every teacher should be psychoanalyzed, for psychoanalysis is the science par excellence which gives content to the sublime doctrine of the autonomy of the individual. Educators must get over their morbid fear [272] EDUCATION of play and their morbid idolatry of drudgery and recognize that in the new society work will be the ful- fillment of play as it already tends to be for the fortu- nate children who are taught in "the schools of to-mor- row." In the American universities we must work to- wards a freer intercourse between members of the fac- ulty including the constant visiting of the courses of colleagues and the constant collaboration of different departments. We must work towards a psychoanalyti- cal co-operation between each student and certain ex- pert faculty advisers for the purpose of the experimen- tal organization of courses and the organization of these courses into the student's life with all its conflicts. We must work towards a rejection of recitation and lecture in favor of something more like the proletarian forum. Let all teachers form industrial unions and affiliate with the wage-workers to signalize the identity of the Copernican revolution in education with that in the labor-movement. [273] MARY MOWBRAY-CLARKE HAROLD A. LOEB MADGE JENISON MARJORIE CONTENT LOEB THE SUNWISE TURN, INC. YALE CLUB BUILDING 51 EAST 44th STREET, NEW YORK Telephone Murray Hill 2590 PUBLICATIONS THE hope of our enterprise has been to help in the discovery of all printed stimulus to creative effort and to further that synthesizing process which is modern criticism so that the connections amongst the arts and sciences, and their basis in reality may be increasingly seen. "THE DANCE OF SIVA," Fourteen Indian Essays, by Ananda Coomaraswamy, $3.00 while written about Indian subjects, is a book of idealism which interests pragmatists for its realistic basis; interests people of no philosophical knowledge for its richness in information; interests artists for its finely written theory of beauty and its 28 plates; interests cooperators and guilds- men for its simple statements of autonomy, individuality and function in new relations to government; and in the deluxe edition, interests book- collectors for its intrinsic worth as a handbound book on handmade paper. "RODIN," An Essay, by Rawer Maria Rilke. $1.50 (Uniform with Poems by the same author) Rilke, the young romantic poet, lived close to Rodin in every sense, and in a period in which criticism of sculpture is nearly non-existent, this in- terpretation should stimulate to some development a new interest in that branch of art which fares worst amongst us. Rodin, the great revealer of the vitality in every inch of surface on the human body, has a relation to the psychologists who contend that every atom of the body demands to live. Everywhere we see these connections amongst creative people in all fields of research. Rodin wrought his visual understandings into great entities. Rilke feels passionately their existence as personalities and reacts to them separately with full consciousness of their background, but giving us each to look at on its own merits. The translation by Jessie Lemont is admirable. PLAYS The Neighborhood Playhouse Series Nos. 1 and 2 "A NIGHT AT AN INN." Lord Dunsany. One of the best one-act plays in English. "GUIBOUR," A Miracle Play of Our Lady, translated by Anna Sprague MacDonald $1.00 from a 14th Century M.S. Originally acted in the cathedrals of Northern France; produced for three months in 1919 by Yvette Guilbert. A delight- ful picture of the time with its confiding belief in the human qualities and nearness of divine personages, and, curiously enough, of interest now to ttie psychoanalyst. "POT-BOILERS," Cliye Bell $1..75 Brilliant essays on subjects ranging from Peacock to Ibsen, and including drastic comments on the present real indifference to art in the world. The entire output of literature on the Guilds ideas now interesting England is collected by us for presentation in American discussion. We especially import the two books of Arthur J. Penty, a practising architect p.nd craftsman who is responsible for the revival of the use of the term Guild, and largely for the check to the too materialistic trend of Collectivist Socialism in England. "OLD WORLDS FOR NEW," and $1.75 "GUILDS AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS," by Arthur J. Penty, $1.00 both make eloquent demand that the accent in reconstruction-planning be laid on quality in life, and that the examination of large scale production should cease to be made on a basis of utility for profit, but rather on a basis of its relation to human possibilities of growth. Thus he challenges industrialism itself, not merely capitalism, showing that an entirely social- ized world would still contain as many warped and stunted beings as ours does if industrialism were accepted with its almost microbic paralysis of t!ie creative will. We import many interesting works of the smaller crafts presses in England, and shall have, after our removal, similar examples of fine press- work from France and Italy. We have now "WHERE THE GREAT CITY STANDS," by C. R. Ashbee $8.00 a study, finely illustrated, of the new civics, printed at Essex House Press, "VEGETABLE DYES," by Ethel Mairet, $3.50 "AN ESSAY ON CRAFTS AND OBEDIENCE," by Ethel and P. A. Mairet and $1.00 "AN ESSAY ON SCULPTURE," by Eric Gill, $1.00 winch issue from the press of St. Dominic at Ditchling in Essex. We have in stock all the books referred to by Dr. Cory in "The In- tellectuals and the Wage Workers," "Processes of History." by F. J. Teggart, Books on Psychoanalysis, Etc., the works of Wallas, Hobson, Cole, Orage, Bourne, MacDougal, Price, Veblen, Burrow, Russell, Trotter, etc. In ordering, postage must always be included. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 000978153 5 University o CI39