The Limits of Pure Democracy by William Hurrell Mallock

Author:William Hurrell Mallock [Mallock, William Hurrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, History & Theory, Essays
ISBN: 9781410211330
Google: 8m5GPgAACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 964785
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2004-01-15T10:43:04+00:00

Chapter II

Socialist Experiments

IF a detached spectator—a tourist from some other planet—were to visit the earth to-day, and give his attention to the socialist or social democratic movement, what would probably strike him as its strangest feature is this, that those who take part in it are willing, on behalf of their principles, to do everything in the way of activity except to show that they are practicable by putting them into experimental practice. He would have heard orators at a thousand Trade Union meetings who proclaimed that all the difficulties of the modern world would be solved if only the labourers were masters of their own capital, and secured for their own class the entire product of their exertions. He might have heard them declaring that " the employers have never done anything for labour which we, the labourers, could not any day do for ourselves." But although—to take, for example, the case of the United Kingdom—the wage-earning classes at the beginning of the twentieth century owned a collective capital of a thousand million pounds, our tourist might have failed to discover that any serious attempts were being made by them to employ this capital themselves under their own corporate direction. If of this capital they would venture but one hundredth part, ten socialist businesses, each with a capital of a million, might, as modest experiments, be set going to-morrow; and if socialism is correct in principle, the success of these could not fail to be such that others would soon follow, till the employers of to-day were eliminated, not by violence but by competition, and all who now work for wages would presently be the employers of themselves. Why, then, our tourist might ask, does nothing of this kind happen? The socialists, he might say, were like the prisoner who, according to the story told by an American humourist, had been locked up for ten years in a cell, " when one day a thought struck him. He opened the window and got out."

But to this fear on their part of testing their principles by experiment there have been many memorable exceptions. Experiments have been made of the precise kind in question, which, curiously few as they are in comparison with what might reasonably have been expected, are quite sufficiently numerous, sufficiently different in some respects, and sufficiently like in others, to constitute a body of evidence astonishingly coherent and illuminating.

Many of them, In respect of their origin, have been British or European; the latest and largest was Australian; but the actual scene of most of them has been naturally in the New World, where land is acquired more easily than in the Old, and where life is less encumbered by old habits and traditions. Records of some eighty have been collected by Macdonald, Noyes and Nordhoff. the Australian experiment being the-subject of a volume devoted to itself. They cover a period of a hundred and thirty years, and are separable into two groups—namely, those which were animated by

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