"Failure on failure may seem to defeat us; ultimate failure is impossible.

Seeing what is to be done then, seeing what the reward is,

Seeing what the terms are,--are you willing to join us? Will you lend us the aid of your voice, your money, your sympathy?

May we take you by the hand and call you 'Comrade'?"

FOOTNOTE:

[3] The expansion policy also acts as a safety-valve by promoting the emigration of the discontented and by providing employment abroad for the educated proletarians who would, no doubt, become "dangerous and incendiary Socialist agitators" in their native lands.

MARXISM AND ETHICS

(Wilshire's Magazine, November, 1905).

What are "wrong," "right," "vice," "virtue," "bad" and "good"?

Mere whips to scourge the backs that naked bear The burden of the world--bent backs that dare Not rise erect, defy the tyrant, "Should,"

And freely, boldly do the things they would.

In living's joy they rarely have a share; They look beyond the grave, and hope that there They'll be repaid, poor fools, for being good.

To serve thy master, that is virtue, Slave; To do thy will, enjoy sweet life, is vice.

Poor duty-ridden serf, rebel, forget Thy master-taught morality; be brave Enough to make this earth a Paradise Whereon the Sun of Joy shall never set!

Thanks to modern science--the child of the machine process--the universality of the law of cause and effect is now a.s.sumed on all hands.

In Labriola's strong words, "Nothing happens by chance." The Marxist believes this in all its fulness. To him systems of religion, codes of ethics and schools of art are, in the last a.n.a.lysis, just as much products of material causes as are boots or sausages. There are some intellectual Socialists whose mode of life has shielded them from the discipline of the Machine Process--the inexorable inculcator of causation--who attempt to place religion and ethics and other ideological phenomena in a separate category not to be accounted for by the materialistic conception of history. These may turn to Marx and weary their auditors by their iteration of "Lord! Lord!" but verily they know not the mind of the Master.

With Marx matter always comes first, thought second. The dialectic materialism of the Socialist is an all-inclusive philosophy, accounting for _all_ phenomena--as fully for those called spiritual as for the most grossly material.

The man who narrows this dialectic materialism down to economic determinism and then defines the latter as meaning that the economic factor has been the "dominant" factor--among many independent factors--in producing the civilization of to-day, may be a sincere Socialist, but he is no Marxist.

The work of the theoretical Marxist will not be done till the origin and development of all religions, philosophies, and systems of ethics have been explained and accounted for by reference to material and economic causes. To understand history the primary requisite is to understand the processes by which the material means of life have been produced and distributed.

"The ruling ideas of every age have ever been the ideas of its ruling cla.s.s." This applies of ideas of right and wrong--of what is commonly known as morality--as fully as to ideas of any other kind.

Conduct that has tended to perpetuate the power of the economically dominant cla.s.s--since the increase of wealth has divided society into cla.s.ses--has ever been accounted moral conduct; conduct that has tended to weaken or subvert the power of the ruling cla.s.s has always been branded as immoral. There you have the key to all the varying codes of ethics the world has seen. For it must never be forgotten that ideas of right and wrong are not absolute, but relative; not fixed, but fluid, changing with the changes in our modes of producing food, clothes and shelter. Morality varies not only with time, but with social alt.i.tude.

What was accounted a virtue in a bold baron of the feudal days was a crime in that same baron's serf. The pipe-line hand who regulates his daily life by the same moral ideas which have made John D. Rockefeller a shining example of piety will find himself behind prison bars.

Ethics simply register the decrees by which the ruling cla.s.s stamps with approval or brands with censure human conduct solely with reference to the effect of that conduct upon the welfare of their cla.s.s. This does not mean that any ruling cla.s.s has ever had the wit to devise _ab initio_ a code of ethics perfectly adapted to further their interests.

Far from it. The process has seldom, if ever, been a conscious one. By a process akin to natural selection in the organic world, the ruling cla.s.s learns by experience what conduct is helpful and what hurtful to it, and blesses in the one case and d.a.m.ns in the other. And as the ruling cla.s.s has always controlled all the avenues by which ideas reach the so-called lower cla.s.ses, they have heretofore been able to impose upon the subject cla.s.ses just those morals which were best adapted to prolong their subjection. Even to-day in America the majority of the working cla.s.s get their ideas--like their clothes--ready-made.

But there is an ever-growing portion of the working cla.s.s whom the ever-increasing severity of the discipline of the machine process is teaching more and more to think solely in terms of material cause and effect. To them, just as much as to the scholar who has learned by study the relativity of ethics, current morality has ceased to appeal. It is idle to talk of the will of G.o.d, or of abstract, absolute ideas of right and wrong to the sociological scholar and the proletarian of the factory alike.

George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to "Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant,"

says: "I have no respect for popular morality." A few weeks since, a workingman, who had been listening to a stereotyped sentimental harangue emitted by one of our amiable Utopian comrades, showed me the palms of his hands, which were thickly studded with callouses, and asked me, "What the h.e.l.l has a fellow with a pair of mits like those to do with morality? What I want is the goods." Shaw meant just what he wrote; yet the critics will continue to treat his utterance as one of Bernard Shaw's "delightfully witty paradoxes." My friend meant just what he said; yet Salvation Armyists and other good Christians will continue to preach to him and his kind a religion and a morality which have become meaningless to them.

Organized government, with its power to make laws and levy taxes--in other words, the State--only came into existence with the division of society into cla.s.ses. The State is, in its very essence, a cla.s.s instrument--an agency in the hands of the ruling cla.s.s to keep the ma.s.ses in subjection. Hence the name, "State," cannot fitly be applied to the social organization of a society in which there are no cla.s.ses, whether that society be the primitive communist group of savagery or the co-operative commonwealth of the future.

The word "capital," cannot be applied to the machinery and means of production in any and every society. They only become capital when they are used as means to exploit (rob) a subject cla.s.s of workers, and when they shall cease to be so used they will cease to be capital. The word "wages," necessarily implies the extraction of surplus-value (profits) from the workers by a parasitic cla.s.s; hence, that share of the social product which the workers of the future will devote to individual consumption cannot be correctly spoken of as "wages."

In the same way, morality is, in its very essence, a cla.s.s inst.i.tution--a set of rules of conduct enforced or inculcated for the benefit of a cla.s.s. Hence, to speak of the morality of the future, when one refers to the cla.s.sless society to which Socialists look forward, is the height or the depth of absurdity. In the free fellowship of the future there will be no morality. This is not saying that there will be no criteria by which conduct will be praised or deplored; it is simply saying that with the abolition of cla.s.ses, morality, like the State, capital and wages, being a product of cla.s.s-divisions, will cease to exist.

While the revolutionary proletariat have no respect for current morality, it is none the less true that they have in process of growth a morality of their own--a morality that has already emerged from the embryonic stage. The proletariat are to be the active agents in bringing to pa.s.s the social revolution which is to put a period to Capitalism and usher in the new order. During this transition period and until the change is fully accomplished, they will be a distinct cla.s.s with special cla.s.s interests of their own. As fast as they become cla.s.s-conscious they will recognize and praise as moral all conduct that tends to hasten the social revolution--the triumph of their cla.s.s, and they will condemn as unhesitatingly as immoral all conduct that tends to prolong the dominance of the capitalist cla.s.s. Already we can note manifestations of this new proletarian morality in that sense of cla.s.s solidarity exhibited by the workers in the many acts of kindness and a.s.sistance of the employed to the unemployed, and more especially in the detestation in which the scab is held.

The revolutionary workingman, be he avowed Socialist or not, who repudiates the current or capitalist morality, does not abandon himself to unbridled license, but is straightway bound by the obligations of the adolescent proletarian morality which is enforced with ever greater vigor by the public opinion of his cla.s.s as his cla.s.s grows in cla.s.s-consciousness.

Does the new morality condemn what the old branded as "crimes against property?" It must be confessed that the revolutionary worker has absolutely no respect for natural rights--including the right of property--as such. Hence, as the act of an individual in appropriating the goods of another is not likely either to help or to injure his cla.s.s, he neither approves or condemns it on moral grounds; but knowing, as he does, that his cla.s.s enemies, the capitalists, own not only "the goods," but also the courts and the police, he condemns theft by a workingman as suicidal folly.

The Marxist absolutely denies the freedom of the will.[4] Every human action is inevitable. "Nothing happens by chance." Every thing is because it cannot but be. How then can we consistently praise or blame any conduct? If one cares to make hair-splitting distinctions, it may be replied that we cannot, but none the less we can rejoice at some actions and deplore others. And the love of praise, with its obverse, the fear of blame, has ever been one of the strongest motives to human conduct.

It is not necessarily the applause of the thoughtless mult.i.tude that one seeks; but in writing this paper, which I know will be misunderstood or condemned by the majority of those who read it, undoubtedly one of my motives is to win the approbation of the discerning few for whose good opinion I deeply care.

The pa.s.sengers whose train has come to a standstill on a steep up-grade owing to the inefficiency of the engine, will not fail to greet with a hearty cheer the approach of a more powerful locomotive. In the same way, Socialist workingmen, though they know that no human act deserves either praise or blame, though they know, in the words of the wise old Frenchman, that "_comprendre tout, c'est pardonner tout_," or, better yet, that to understand all is to understand that there is nothing to pardon, will not be chary of their cheers to him who is able to advance their cause, nor of their curses upon him who betrays it. And in so doing they will not be inconsistent, but will be acting in strict accordance with that law of cause and effect which is the very fundament of all proletarian reasoning; for those cheers and curses will be potent factors in causing such conduct as will speed the social revolution.

While we have no respect for current morality, we must not fall into the error of supposing that there are no criteria by which to judge conduct, that there are, so to say, no valid distinctions between the acts of a hero and those of a blackguard. By referring to the ethic inspiring the actor we can always p.r.o.nounce some conduct to be fine and other acts base. It is this power of a fine or n.o.ble action to thrill the human heart that makes the triumphs of dramatic art possible. The dramatists, like Shakespeare, whose characters accept the current moral code, appeal to a wide audience--to nearly all. But those dramatists, such as Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck, and above all, Sudermann, whose heroes and heroines attempt to put into practice the ideals of to-morrow in the environment of to-day, are misunderstood and disliked by the majority, and understood and appreciated only by the few who, like themselves, have rejected the current code and adopted the criteria of to-morrow. But those of us who call Sudermann the first of living dramatists, do so on account of the extreme n.o.bility of his heroines' conduct judged by the criteria of the future.

While there will be no morality in Socialist society; while in the perfect solidarity of a cla.s.sless society there can be no conflict of individual with social interests; there will nevertheless be certain actions exceptionally fitted to increase the welfare and augment the happiness of the community, and the men and women who perform these acts will undoubtedly be rewarded by the plaudits and the love of their comrades. Indeed, we with our debased standards are incapable of conceiving how dear to them this reward will be. It is because I believe that this love of one's fellows under Socialism will be a joy far exceeding in intensity any pleasure known to us, that I look for dramatic art to reach under Socialism a perfection and influence to-day inconceivable.

The most striking phenomenon in the field of ethics to-day is the rapid growth of the new proletarian morality; and one of the princ.i.p.al functions of the Socialist agitator and propagandist is to facilitate and further this growth. He is the teacher of a new morality and, if one accepted Matthew Arnold's definition of religion as "morality touched with emotion," he might be called the preacher of a new religion. Let who will call this sentimentalism, it is none the less hard fact. For, after all, this new proletarian ethic is nothing else than cla.s.s-consciousness under a new name. And what Socialist will deny that the chief function of the militant Socialist is to develop cla.s.s-consciousness in the workers? The one hope of the world to-day is in the victory of the proletariat--aye, it is more than a hope, it is a certainty; but this victory can only be won by a proletariat permeated with the sense of solidarity; and the workingman imbued with this sense of proletarian solidarity will be a living incarnation of the new morality.

And what is this cla.s.s-consciousness which it is our business to preach in season and out of season? There is probably no term in the whole technical vocabulary of Socialism which grates so unpleasantly on the ear of the _pet.i.t bourgeois_ who "is coming our way" as this one of "cla.s.s-consciousness." To say cla.s.s-consciousness is not to say cla.s.s hatred; though cla.s.s-consciousness ofttimes develops into cla.s.s hatred and does not thereby become the less effective. The Socialist recognizes in the words of Edmund Burke that "Man acts not from metaphysical considerations, but from motives relative to his interests," and hence, he regards it as his first duty to show his fellow-workers that their economic interests are in direct conflict with those of the master-cla.s.s. He does not create this conflict by pointing it out; he merely shows the working cla.s.s "where they are at."

But besides pointing out this conflict of material interests, the Socialist propagandist shows the workers that it is their high destiny to accomplish a revolution far more glorious and pregnant with blessings for humanity than any of those recorded in the history of the past. This consciousness of the great part that he and his cla.s.s are called to play on the world's stage is the most uplifting and enn.o.bling influence that can enter the life of a workingman. There can be no doubt that the sentiment expressed by the words, _n.o.blesse oblige_, has had an influence on the lives of the more worthy of the aristocrats. Similar in its nature is the influence here under consideration, and that this influence is not less potent is well known to every one acquainted with the men and women who form what is known as the Socialist Movement. The non-Socialist, who wishes to see the effect of this influence, has but to read even in the files of the capitalist press the accounts of the high and n.o.ble bearing of the martyrs of the Paris Commune who faced death with calm and cheerful courage, though they were buoyed up by no hope of a hereafter.

While we continue devoting our whole energies to arousing in our fellow-workers a keen and clear consciousness of the hideous cla.s.s-struggle now waging in all its brutal bitterness, let us keep our courage high and our hope bright by keeping our eyes ever fixed upon the glorious future, upon the "wonderful days a-coming when all shall be better than well!"

FOOTNOTE:

[4] It will be seen that the text treats the long-debated question of the "freedom of the will" as _res adjudicata_. It may be that some readers will want to know where to turn for fuller discussions of this famous question. As a full bibliography of the literature on this subject would more than fill this volume, I must content myself with telling them that a very helpful discussion of it may be found in Huxley's Life of Hume, and a clear and succinct statement of the conclusions of the modern school of psychology in Ferri's "The Positive School of Criminology." Both of these are to be had in cheap form.

INSTEAD OF A FOOTNOTE[5]

A photograph of a Fifth Avenue mansion, taken from the part.i.tion wall in the back-yard, might be a perfectly accurate picture and yet give a very inadequate idea of the house as a whole. This article on "Marxism and Ethics" is, in a sense, just such a picture. In writing it, s.p.a.ce limitations compelled me to confine myself wholly to impressing upon the reader the relative and transitory character of moral codes. But in the popular concept of morality there are elements that are relatively permanent. Darwin in his "Descent of Man" showed that the gregarious and social traits that make a.s.sociated life possible antedate, not only the division of society into cla.s.ses, but even antedate humanity itself, since they plainly appear in the so-called lower animals.

So that my contention that morality only came into being with the division of society into cla.s.ses and will pa.s.s away when cla.s.s divisions are abolished, becomes a question of definition. If we include in our definition of morality the almost universal and relatively permanent gregarious traits of men and beasts, then morality has existed longer than humanity itself, and will continue to exist under Socialism. But it cannot be denied that moral codes were not formulated until after cla.s.s-divisions had arisen. Every moral code of which we have any knowledge has been moulded by the cultural discipline of a society based on cla.s.s-divisions. In every one of them there is implied the relation of status, of a superior, natural or supernatural, with the right or power to formulate "commandments," and of an inferior cla.s.s whose lot it is to obey. We find this implication of status in even the n.o.blest expressions of current ethical aspirations. Wordsworth's immortal Ode to Duty begins, "Stern Daughter of the Voice of G.o.d!"

Since then morality as a word through the force of immemorial habit unavoidably suggests to the mind the relation of status, it appears to me that its use to describe truly social conduct in a society of equals can lead to nothing but confusion. What we really need is the right word to apply to the highest conduct in a cla.s.sless society; and, I am inclined to think that a generation to whom the idea of status will have become wholly alien will find the word "social" entirely adequate for this purpose, though I frankly confess it is not adequate for us