Socialism 101

by Kathleen Sears

  Morris envisioned an alternative society in which everyone had equal opportunities for education. The division of labor that stands at the heart of factory work would be restricted so that the work of artists and craftsmen would be valued. He emphasized the importance of returning to small artisanal production and the right of all members of society to find joy and self-expression in work.

  Morris and Organized Socialism

  Morris came to organized socialism late. In the 1870s he became increasingly disturbed by what he believed were the related issues of Britain’s class divisions and apathy toward art. He tackled the question of art first, cofounding an early conservation group, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and giving hundreds of public lectures on the relationship between a country’s aesthetic standards and its social conditions.

  In 1883, at the age of forty-nine, Morris joined the Social Democratic Federation, a revolutionary socialist party with Marxist roots. The Federation soon divided over the question of involvement in parliamentary politics. In 1884 Morris found himself the unwilling leader of the Socialist League, a breakaway group that stood against political action.

  Morris remained active in the socialist movement until the 1890s, when his health began to fail and internal dissentions divided the Socialist League.

  The New Age

  Morris’s work profoundly influenced a group of architects, artists, and intellectuals associated with the progressive newspaper The New Age, between 1907 and 1920. Under the leadership of Alfred Richard Orage, The New Age was the early twentieth-century paper for alternative thinkers. Dissatisfied with Fabian socialism, Orage searched instead for a basic “re-evaluation of values.” Demanding political and economic rights for man was only the first step. As far as Orage himself was concerned, the search for new values meant an “ethical and spiritual rejection of capitalism and its vision of progress,” based on his reading of Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Marx.

  Seeking a third path between capitalism and socialism, the paper published attacks on modern industrial society from both the right and the left: anarchists, Jacobites, medieval revivalists, and land reformers. The magazine’s best-known contributors were Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Ezra Pound.

  THE FABIAN SOCIETY

  Economist and historian Sidney Webb coined the phrase “the inevitability of gradualness” to describe the Fabian Society’s approach to socialism. Founded in 1884, the Fabian Society believed that the transformation of British society from capitalism to socialism could be best achieved through what Sidney Webb described as “permeation” of the nation’s intellectual and political life. Although they agreed with Marx that this transformation was inevitable, they disagreed about the process. The Fabians believed that the transformation of society would be gradual and experimental, the result of parliamentary reforms rather than revolution.

  The Delayer

  * * *

  The Fabian Society took its name from Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator, who earned the nickname “Fabius the Delayer” during the Punic Wars, when his tactics of avoiding pitched battles allowed him to wear down, and ultimately defeat, the stronger Carthaginian forces.

  * * *

  The ultimate goal for society, outlined by Beatrice Webb in the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission (1909), was a democratically elected, centralized socialist state that would guarantee its citizens a “national minimum standard of civilized life.” The Fabians envisioned the establishment of public enterprises at the local, regional, and state levels, which would be financed by taxes on rent, as defined by David Ricardo. Since these public enterprises would be funded through taxes, they would not be burdened with some of the expenses common to private enterprises and could therefore offer better wages and working conditions. The Fabians also proposed that public utilities, common carriers, and businesses that were already under the control of private monopolies should be nationalized.

  For the most part the Fabians were middle-class intellectuals, led by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and playwright George Bernard Shaw. The society’s membership was never large: only 8,400 at its height in 1946.

  The LSE

  * * *

  The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) was founded in 1895 by the Fabian Society for the purpose of creating a better society through the study of poverty issues. In the early twentieth century the school became a training ground for leaders of the underdeveloped world.

  * * *

  Rather than founding a political party, the Fabians preferred to influence existing parties. In 1900 the Fabians helped organize the Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906.

  THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY

  A Party of Its Own

  Scottish socialist Keir Hardie (1856–1915) became a symbol of the working class in Victorian England, his famous cloth cap the antithesis of the top hat worn by members of the privileged classes. Born James Kerr, Hardie was the illegitimate son of a farm maidservant and a ship’s carpenter. His father was an early trade unionist.

  Hardie went to work when he was seven or eight. When he was eleven, he took a job in the local mines as a trapper, working the airshaft traps that ventilated the mines. He worked as a coal miner for the next eleven years.

  Hardie’s Education

  * * *

  Like many working-class radicals, Hardie was largely self-taught. With little formal education, he was well read in history and literature. Later in life he claimed he was particularly influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s satirical novel Sartor Resartus (first published serially in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833 and 1834). In addition to reading widely, he taught himself to write Pitman’s shorthand.

  * * *

  In 1878 Hardie left the mines to become active in the trade union movement. At first he opened a small shop in Glasgow and wrote articles for a paper there. Beginning in 1881 he was involved in the effort to organize a miners’ union, moving from county to county as he established local chapters. For several years he cobbled together a living, supplementing his salary as corresponding secretary for different union chapters with various part-time jobs.

  In 1886, with the Ayrshire Union stable enough to pay him a full-time salary, Hardie began to shift his interest to politics and socialism. He threw himself into politics with the same fervor he showed as a union organizer. He founded two monthly journals, the short-lived The Miner, which advocated a Scottish miner’s federation, and the more widely based The Labor Leader; served as operating secretary for the short-lived Glasgow Labour Party; and attended the inaugural congress of the Second International in Paris in 1889, educating himself by attending both Marxist and non-Marxist sessions.

  In 1888 Hardie ran for Parliament for the first time as an independent labor candidate. He received only 617 votes but caught the attention of the Liberal political machine. In 1891 the Liberal Party offered him the candidacy for West Ham South in London, a working-class neighborhood with a heavy union presence.

  Hardie’s first term in Parliament was not a success. He lost his seat in the 1895 elections. He ran again, without success, in 1896 and 1900.

  Parliamentary Elections

  * * *

  In Great Britain parliamentary elections are not held on a fixed cycle. Sessions of Parliament cannot last more than five years, but the sovereign may dissolve a session of Parliament at any time after consulting with the prime minister. Sessions are dissolved for a variety of reasons, including the inability to maintain a working coalition in the House of Commons.

  * * *

  Even though he was losing at the polls, Hardie was building a strong political foundation for the future. Rather than relying on loose alliances with the Liberal Party, he founded the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893, with the basic strategy of creating an alliance between the trade unions and the socialist societies. In 1894 he began to publish The Labor Leader every week rather than once a month, giving himself a platform
for his positions.

  A NEW PARTY

  In February 1900 Hardie’s Independent Labour Party joined with other labor and socialist groups, including the Trades Union Congress and the Fabian Society, to form the Labour Representation Committee (LRC). A forerunner of the Labour Party, the LRC was organized to promote the election of working-class candidates to Parliament. In 1906 the LRC turned itself into the Labour Party and won twenty-nine seats in Parliament in the general election. Hardie was elected member of Parliament for Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales.

  By the end of World War I the Labour Party had a solid membership base, thanks to two important changes in the political climate:

  • A substantial growth in the number of trade union members.

  • The Representation of the People Act of 1918, which extended the vote to all men over twenty-one and gave the vote for the first time to women over thirty who met a property qualification.

  In 1918 the Labour Party officially proclaimed itself a socialist party and unveiled a new reform program, Labour and the New Social Order, drafted by Fabian Society leaders Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The party’s new goals included full employment with a minimum wage and a maximum workweek, public ownership of industry, progressive taxation, and the expansion of education and social service.

  By 1922 the Labour Party had replaced the Liberals as the official opposition party. In 1924 Britain elected its first Labour government.

  CREATION OF THE WELFARE STATE

  British Social Engineers

  The one-two punch of the Great Depression and World War II left Western Europe ready for a change. Economies and societies needed to be rebuilt. In an overwhelming rejection of the free-market economy and the parties that supported it, Western Europe voted Left. Britain, Norway, and Sweden elected socialist governments. Socialist parties helped form coalition governments in Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and France. For the first time socialist parties were in power in virtually all of Western Europe.

  THE ROOTS OF THE WELFARE STATE

  The Russian Revolution left a clear divide between parties that described themselves as socialist and those that described themselves as communist. In 1945 Western Europe’s socialist parties were the heirs of Eduard Bernstein and the Fabians, not those of Marx and Lenin. Although they retained an ideological commitment to the creation of a socialist state, they abandoned revolution in favor of reform before they took power. Elected to office with a clear mandate for change, Europe’s socialist parties developed variations of “welfare socialism,” all of which included a range of social welfare programs and a reformed capitalist structure regulated by the state.

  In fact, post-war socialist parties weren’t the first to set up social welfare programs. In a move intended to win the allegiance of the working classes away from the socialists, Chancellor Otto van Bismarck set up the first compulsory national social insurance programs in Germany, including a health insurance plan in 1893, workers’ compensation in 1894, and general pensions for the elderly and the disabled in 1889. Austria and Hungary soon followed Germany’s example. Conscious of the new Labour Party breathing down its neck, Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government instituted a similar series of reforms in Britain in 1911, including Britain’s first health and unemployment insurance plans, old-age pensions, a national network of labor exchanges, and trade boards with the power to set minimum wages for their industries.

  Social Market Economy

  * * *

  The German Social Democratic Party, reconstructed after its demise at the hands of the Nazis, dropped its commitment to Marxism in its 1959 Bad Godesberg program. The party replaced Marxism with the pursuit of a “social market economy” that would include “as much competition as possible—as much planning as necessary.”

  * * *

  CLEMENT ATTLEE AND THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY

  At the end of World War II the British people were eager for a change. The Conservative Party had been in power since 1931. During his years as prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965) had led Britain to victory, but Britain no longer felt the need for war leadership.

  The Conservative Party’s prewar record did not match its wartime success. The Conservatives were slow to enact measures to overcome the miseries of the Great Depression. Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was not only a failure but also a disgrace. The Conservative Party’s further failure to begin rearmament left Britain scrambling to catch up in the face of Nazi aggression.

  The Labour Party, by contrast, had no embarrassing prewar record to overcome. Moreover, Labour was a highly visible and effective coalition partner in Churchill’s wartime government. In fact, Labour MP (member of Parliament) Clement Attlee served as Churchill’s deputy prime minister.

  Clement Attlee

  Clement Attlee (1883–1967) was an unlikely labor leader. He was small, painfully shy, and handicapped by family money. After three years at Oxford he became a lawyer but took very few cases. Instead, he lived on an annual allowance from his father and spent what he later described as “a good deal of time practicing billiards.”

  In 1905 his brother Laurence convinced him to visit a boys’ club in the Limehouse district of East London. He soon became a regular volunteer. In 1906 he became the club’s resident manager.

  Attlee had found his purpose in life. The poverty that he saw every day outraged him. The “abundant instances of kindness and much quiet heroism in these mean streets” inspired him to embrace socialism.

  His first stop was the Fabian Society, where he was intimidated and uncomfortable. He found his home in Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party, where he worked his way up through the ranks, doing the odd jobs that no one else had the time or inclination to do.

  Churchill and Attlee on the Campaign Trail

  When the election was announced in 1944, Attlee and Churchill hit the campaign trail. Churchill traveled in a motorcade. Attlee traveled in his own car, driven erratically by his wife. Churchill preached on the dangers of socialism. Attlee’s mild-mannered presence refuted Churchill’s rhetoric.

  Attlee’s platform was simple:

  If in war, in spite of the diversion of energies to the making instruments of destruction and in spite of the shortage of supply, it was possible to provide food, clothing, and employment for all the people, it was not impossible to do the same in peace, provided the Government had the will and the power to act.

  There was little doubt in the minds of the British public that they could expect more social reform from Labor than from the Conservatives. In July 1945, a month before Japan’s surrender, the British electorate celebrated the end of the war by voting out Winston Churchill’s war government.

  The Labour Party was elected with a mandate for change. With a majority of 146 seats in the House of Commons, Clement Attlee formed a Labour government that became known for the scope of its reforms.

  The Beveridge Report

  In 1941 Winston Churchill commissioned William Beveridge (1879–1963) to create a report on how Britain should be rebuilt after the war. The resulting Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942), also known as The Beveridge Report, was adopted by Clement Attlee’s Labour government as a blueprint for Britain’s post–World War II welfare state.

  A protégée of Beatrice Webb, Beveridge was an obvious choice to write the report. His lifelong interest in solutions for unemployment began in 1908 when he served as the sub-warden of a London settlement house. His first book, Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), led to him being asked to advise Asquith’s Liberal government on the formation of their national insurance and pension legislation.

  The Settlement Movement

  * * *

  The settlement movement, popular from the 1880s to the 1920s, held that poverty could be alleviated if the rich and poor lived together in interdependent communities. The movement built settlement houses in poor urban areas, where middle-class, volunteer “settlement workers” lived and provided educat
ion and services to their neighbors. The best-known settlement house in America was Chicago’s Hull House.

  * * *

  In Social Insurance and Allied Services Beveridge laid out three guiding principles for the government to follow in combating what he called the “five giants on the road of reconstruction”: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness.

  “Sectional interests” formed in the past should not limit proposals for the future: “A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.”

  Social insurance should be only part of a “comprehensive package of social progress.”

  Policies of social security should be achieved through cooperation between the state and the individual. The state “should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.”

  The proposals that followed included a free National Health Service that would prevent medical bills from becoming a source of poverty and a commitment to full employment to ensure that wages were there to help fund benefits.

  Beveridge opposed means-tested benefits, arguing that they created a poverty trap for their recipients, making them unable to afford to make small improvements to their situations for fear of losing their safety nets. Instead, he proposed a flat-rate contribution from everyone and a flat-rate benefit for everyone. This principle of universality became one of the defining characteristics of welfare socialism.