THE
THREEFOLD SOCIAL ORDER
CHAPTER I
THE
NATURE OF THE SOCIAL QUESTION
IN THE LIFE OF MODERN MAN
The
great catastrophe of the War (World War I) reveals how
inadequate was men's thinking concerning the social problem.
They imagined that they understood what the worker really
wants. The demands of the workers, formerly suppressed, are
coming to the surface as the powers instrumental in their
suppression are now in part destroyed. In many parts of the
world, leaders have failed completely to understand the
indestructible nature of these human impulses.
The
greatest illusions existed among certain key people who, in
1914, could have checked the rush into this war. These persons
actually believed that a military victory for their side
would hush the mutterings of impending social storm. They have
since recognized that it was their own attitude and its
consequences that first brought these tendencies to life.
During these last fateful years, these leading
individuals and the leading classes have been obliged to attune
their behavior to the demands of the Socialists. If they could
have disregarded this group, they would often have been glad to
act differently. The effects of all this are seen in the
form events are taking today.
The
facts are now before us, fully ripe, and yet the thoughts that
accompanied their development are no match for them. While
hoping that current happenings could serve the social ideals
people had in mind, men have found themselves practically
powerless to solve the problems.
The
opinion of those under the delusion that it would be
possible to retain the old scheme of things in the face
of the demands of the workers must be dismissed. When we look
at the aims of those who want to remodel social life, we have
to admit that party programs are drifting about among us
like the dried corpses of now dead creeds. The facts call for
decisions for which the creeds of the old parties are
altogether unprepared. The parties certainly did evolve along
with the facts, but they and their habits of thought have not
kept pace with events.
The
tragedy revealed in all the attempts to solve the social
question arises because the real meaning of the
working-class struggle has been misunderstood. Men by no means
always read their own purposes correctly.
What is the real meaning of the modern working-class
movement? What is its will? Does the usual thinking about
the “social problem” reveal that question in its
true form? Or is an altogether different line of thought
needed?
Such questions cannot be approached impartially unless one has
had the opportunity of coming into intimate relationship with
the modern worker's soul, his feeling-life. Much has been said
and written about how the developments of recent economic life
have led to the current demands of the workers. True enough,
these have been evolved during the growth period of modern
science and capitalism. But recognition of this fact gives no
clue at all to the impulses behind these demands. The fact is
that, although the demands are economic, the underlying
impulses are of a purely human character. One must arrive at
the cause of these impulses if one would understand the true
form of the social question.
There is a word of striking significance frequently used by the
modern worker: he has become “class-conscious.” He
no longer follows, more or less unconsciously, the lead of the
other classes. He knows he is a member of a class apart and is
determined that the relation established between his class and
the other classes shall be turned to good account for his own
interests.
The
way this word, “class-conscious,” is used by the
worker standing in the midst of modern technical industry and
capitalism, gives an important clue to his view of life. His
soul has been impressed and fired by scientific teachings
about economic life and its bearing on the destinies of men,
and the idea that the “uneducated” working man has
had his head turned by Marxism and by later labor writers of
the Marxist school will not help towards the necessary
understanding of the true facts.
The
scientific evolution of recent times is responsible for the
concepts that fill the consciousness of the working man.
In the demands put forward by the workers today, whether
moderates or radicals, we have the expression, not of
economic life somehow metamorphosed into human impulse, but of
economic science by which the working-class consciousness is
possessed. This stands out clearly in the literature of the
labor movement, with its scientific flavor and journalistic
style.
The
individual, working at his machine, may be a complete stranger
to “science.” Yet those who enlighten him as to his
own position borrow their method from this same
“science.”
Everything said about modern economic life, the machine age and
capitalism, may throw an instructive light on the underlying
facts of the modern working class movement. But the decisive
light on the present social situation does not come directly
from the fact that the worker has been placed at the machine
and harnessed to the capitalist scheme of things. This light
comes from the different fact that his class consciousness has
been filled with a definite kind of thought, shaped at the
machine under the influence of the capitalist economy.
Many people may look at the stress laid on this factor as a
mere dialectic play upon terms, but anyone who wants to
understand the working-class movement must start by knowing how
the worker thinks. For the working-class movement, all the way
from its moderate efforts at reform to its most
devastating excesses, is not created by “forces outside
man,” that is to say “economic impulses.”
This movement is created by human beings, their mental
conceptions and the impulses of their will. These human ideas
and impulses do not lie in what capitalism and the machine have
implanted in the worker's consciousness. The labor movement
turned to modern science for the sources of its thought because
capitalism and the machine could give to the soul of the
worker no nourishment worthy of a human being.
The
medieval craftsman did not feel this lack. He got such inner
substance from his craft that his humanity was enhanced by his
work. Tending a machine under the capitalist scheme of things,
the man was thrown back upon himself, his own inner life. As a
result, the worker's class consciousness turned towards the
scientific type of thought.
This change occurred at the time the leading classes were
working towards a scientific mode of thought which,
however, was lacking in spiritual force. The old views of
the universe gave man his place as a soul in the total
spiritual complex, but modern science viewed him as a natural
object set in a purely natural order of things. The old
conceptions withdrew from the everyday world and lived on full
of things that meant nothing to the souls of the
workers.
The
leading classes did not look for new substance for their
consciousness, because they were able to hold on to the
old that had been handed down to them. But the modern worker
was torn out of his old setting. His life had been put on a
totally new basis. For him there disappeared all possibility of
drawing from the old spiritual springs.
Therefore the faith of the modern worker turned to the modern
scientific conception of the world. Here he sought the new
content that he needed for his inner consciousness. For the
ruling classes the concept of a natural order of things leading
up from the lowest animals to man remained purely theoretical,
without an emotional content.
The
worker took the scientific outlook in earnest and from it drew
his own practical conclusions for life. It was the only thing
left to him that had the power to awaken faith. Some may smile
at this, but it is a fact of modern life on which the fate of
the future turns. The educated man has made a pigeonhole for
science in the recesses of his soul, but it is the
circumstances of actual life that give the direction to his
feelings.
The
worker may be far from what others call scientific, yet his
life's course is charted by such scientific lines of
conception. For him science is turned into a creed of life,
even though it be science filtered down to its last shallows
and driblets of thought.
Now
what scientific thought has not brought down from the old order
is the consciousness of being rooted, as a spiritual type, in a
spiritual world. For a member of the leading classes this
presented no difficulty. Life, to him, was filled by the old
traditions. But it was different for the worker. His new
situation drove the old traditions from his soul. He took
over from the leading classes a scientific mode of
thought — a spiritual life that denied its spiritual
origin.
I
know very well how these thoughts will affect a lot of people.
Believing they have a practical acquaintance with life, they
look at the view expressed here as something remote from
realities. But the language of actual facts, as voiced by the
state of the world, will increasingly prove such a view as
theirs to be a delusion.
I
know, too, how someone professing working-class views will
react to what has been said. I can hear him saying, “Just
like the rest of them. Trying to shunt the real gist of the
social question off onto lines that promise to be smooth for
the bourgeois.” He is unable to see that he himself
lives as a working man but thinks as a bourgeois, using a type
of thought inherited from them.
The
scientific mode of conception will only become life-sustaining
when, in its own fashion, it evolves an inner content. In its
transition to the new age, the old spiritual life has turned
into something which, for the working class, is ideology.
The worker feels that this inner life does not come to him from
a spiritual world of its own.
An
important factor in the modern labor movement is this belief
that spiritual life is ideology. It affects the worker's mood
of soul as expressed in current social demands. Anyone who says
that this idea exists only in the minds of the workers' leaders
does not know what has been going on. The influence of this
concept ties in with the demands of the Socialist and extends
even to the deeds of those who “hatch revolution”
out of the blind promptings of their inner life.
The
non-worker listens with dismay to the worker saying,
“Nothing short of socializing the means of production
will make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human
being.” But the non-worker is unable to form the faintest
notion of how his own class, in the period of transition, not
only summoned the worker to labor at means of production that
were not his, but even failed to give him anything to satisfy
and sustain the soul in his labor.
Worker and non-worker may both insist that the soul does not
come into the picture, but such insistence does not touch the
essence of the social question nor reveal its true form.
For if the working population had inherited from the leading
classes a genuine spiritual substance they would have had
a different consciousness within their souls and would
have voiced their social demands in a different fashion.
The
unhappiness of the workers over the ideological character of
spiritual life, even though they are not definitely conscious
of it, makes them suffer acutely. In its significance for the
social question today, it far outweighs all demands for an
improvement in external conditions, justifiable as some of
these demands may be.
The
modern proletarian movement has sprung out of thoughts. I did
not come to this conclusion as a result of lengthy pondering,
but from years of actual experience and observation, when I was
a lecturer at a workers' institute, giving instruction in a
wide variety of subjects. And I have had occasion to go further
and follow up the tendencies at work in the various unions and
different occupational groups.
It
is hard for members of the middle class today to put
themselves into the soul of the worker or understand how
the worker's still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened up to
receive a work such as that of Karl Marx. I am not proposing to
discuss the substance of the Marxian system. This is not
the significant thing. What seems to me significant above all
else is the fact that the most powerful impulse at work in the
labor world today is a thought system.
No
practical movement, making the most matter-of-fact
demands, has ever rested almost entirely on a basis of
thought alone. Indeed it is in a way the first movement of its
kind based completely on a scientific approach. But this must
be seen in its proper light. Of main importance is the fact
that thoughts have become the determining factor of the
worker's attitude toward life while in other classes thoughts
affect only the activity in the intellectual sphere.
Thus, what has become an inward reality in the worker is a
reality that he cannot acknowledge because thought life
has been handed down to him as an ideology. He really builds up
his life upon thoughts, yet he feels thoughts to be unreal
ideology. This inner contradiction, with all that it involves,
must be clearly recognized. Otherwise, it is impossible
to understand the workers' views of life and the way those who
hold these views set about realizing them in practice.
One
cannot expect a spiritual life that one feels as mere ideology
to provide deliverance from a social situation one has resolved
to endure no longer. The scientific cast of the modern
worker's thought has turned not only science but also religion,
art, morality and legal rights into so many constituent parts
of human ideology. He fails to see behind these branches of the
spiritual life the workings of an actual reality that exists in
his own life and could contribute something to material
existence. To him the intellectual sphere is only the mirror
image of the material life. He is convinced that anything that
will lead to the removal of social difficulties can arise only
out of the sphere of the material processes themselves.
In
fact the impotence of the spiritual life is an article of faith
with a large part of the working class, and is openly stressed
in Marxism and similar creeds. Yet the man obliged to lead the
life of a worker today needs a spiritual life from which inner
strength can come, strength to give him the sense of his own
human dignity. The discovery of a path out of the maze of
confusion into which social affairs have fallen depends
on a right insight into this fact. The path has been blocked by
the social system that has arisen, under the influence of the
leading classes, with the new form of industrial economy. The
strength to open it must be achieved.
In
a human community where spiritual life plays a merely
ideological role, the general social life lacks one of
the forces that can make and keep it a living organism. The
impotence of the spiritual life in modern man is what is ailing
the body social today, and the disease is made worse by the
reluctance to acknowledge its existence. Once this fact
is acknowledged, there will be a basis on which to develop the
kind of thinking needed for the social movement.
At
present the worker thinks he has come in contact with a major
force in his soul when he talks about his “class
consciousness.” The truth is that ever since he was
caught up into the capitalistic economic machine he has
been searching for a spiritual life that would sustain his soul
and give him a consciousness of his human dignity. Yet there is
no possibility of this with a spiritual life which he feels to
be an ideology.
This human consciousness was what he was seeking. He could not
find it, so he replaced it with “class
consciousness” born of the economic life. His eyes are
riveted on the economic life alone, as though some overpowering
influence held them there. He no longer believes that anywhere
in the spirit or in the soul can there be a latent force
capable of supplying the impulse needed for the social
movement. All he has faith in is that the evolution of the
economic life, devoid of spirit and soul, can bring about the
state of things he feels to be worthy of man. So he is driven
to seek his welfare in a transformation of the economic life
alone.
He
has been forced to the conviction that with this mere
transformation of the economic, all the social ills would
disappear. He feels these ills were brought on through private
enterprise, through the egoism of the individual employer, and
also through the individual employer's powerlessness to
do justice to the employee's claims of human self-respect. So
he was led to believe that the only welfare for the body social
lay in converting all private ownership of the means of
production into a communal concern or into actual communal
property. This conviction is due to people's eyes having, as it
were, been removed from everything belonging to soul and spirit
and fixed exclusively on the purely economic process.
Hence the paradox in the working-class movement. The modern
worker believes that the economic life itself will, of
necessity, develop everything that will ultimately give
him his rights as man, the rights for which he is fighting. Yet
in the heart of the fight something different makes its
appearance, something which never could be an outcome of the
economic life alone.
The
fact is that this element lies in the direct line of evolution,
through the old slave system, through the serfdom of the feudal
age, to the modern proletariat of labor. This is what provides
the fundamental force actuating the social purpose of the
modern worker. It is related to the fact that the modern
capitalistic system of economy recognizes basically nothing but
commodities. In its processes something has been turned into a
commodity which the worker feels must not and cannot be a
commodity: the labor of the worker. If only the loathing that
he feels at this were recognized as the fundamental force that
it is!
Once people become aware of what this loathing means, they will
have discovered the second of the two impulses making the
current social question so urgent. The first, as was indicated
earlier, is that spiritual life is felt as an ideology.
The
fact that labor is still stamped with the character of a
commodity has not remained unnoticed, but in studying it,
people keep their attention fixed entirely on economic life.
They see how the economic life gave the commodity character to
human labor. What they do not see is that it is a necessity
inherent in economic life that everything incorporated in it
becomes a commodity.
Economic life consists in the production and useful consumption
of commodities. One cannot divest human labor of its commodity
character unless one finds a way of separating it from the
economic process and bringing it under social forces that will
do away with its commodity character. Any other form of
industrial economy will only make labor a commodity in some
other manner.
The
labor question cannot take its place in its true form within
the social question until it is recognized that the
considerations of economic life (which determine the laws
governing the circulation, exchange and consumption of
commodities) are not considerations which should govern human
labor.
Modern thinking has not learned to distinguish the totally
different fashions in which the two things enter into
economic life. On the one hand there is labor, which is
intimately bound up with the human being himself. On the other
hand there are those things that proceed from another source
and are dissociated from the human being. The latter circulate
along the paths that all commodities must take from their
production to consumption. Sound thinking along these lines can
show both the true form of the labor question as well as the
proper place of economic life in a healthy society.
Thus we see that the “social question” divides
itself into three distinct parts. The first is the question of
a healthy form of spiritual life within the body social. The
second is the consideration of labor, and the right way to
incorporate it into the life of the community. Third is
the correct deduction as to the proper place and function of
economic life in today's society.
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