Socialism and Democracy in Europe Part 30

II. FRANCE

1. NOTE ON THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT

Yves Guyot, the distinguished French publicist, told the writer that there was only one compact, disciplined political party in France, the United Socialists. Other than the Socialists, there is no well-organized group in the Chamber of Deputies. The Right, Center, and Left coalesce almost insensibly into each other. Party platforms and party loyalty are replaced by a political individualism that to an American politician would seem like political anarchy.

The Chamber of Deputies is supreme--the ministry stands or falls upon its majority's behest. This gives to the deputy a peculiar personal power. He is only loosely affiliated with his group, is a powerful factor in the government of the Republic, and is directly dependent upon his const.i.tuents for his tenure in office. The result is a personal, rather then a party, system of politics.

This remarkably decentralized system of representative governance is counterbalanced by a highly efficient and completely centralized system of administration, which is based on civil service, and outlives all the mutations of ministries and s.h.i.+fting of deputies. The ministry, naturally, has theoretical control over the administrative officials. During the campaign for reorganizing the army and navy, and the disestablishment of the Church, under the Radical-Socialist _bloc_, a few years ago, General Andre, acting for the ministry, resorted to a comprehensive system of espionage to ferret out the undesirable officers. Every commune has its official scrutinizer, who reports the doings of the employees to the government.

This, in turn, has created a clientilism. The deputy is needed by the ministry, the deputy needs the votes of his const.i.tuency, the local officials need the good will of the deputy. The result is a fawning favoritism that has taken the place of party servitude as we know it in America.

The Socialists have precipitated a serious problem in this relation of the government employee to the state: Can the state employees form a union? There are nearly 1,000,000 state employees. This includes not only all the functionaries, but all the workmen in the match factories, the mint, the national porcelain factory and tobacco plants, and the navy yards. In 1885 and again in 1902 the Court of Ca.s.sation decided that "the right of forming a union (_syndicat_) is confined to those who, whether as employers or as workmen or employed, are engaged in _industry, agriculture, or commerce_, to the exclusion of all other persons and all other occupations."

The government has, however, countenanced some infringements. A few syndicates of munic.i.p.al and departmental employees are allowed; but they are mostly workmen, not strictly functionaries. There are several syndicates of elementary school teachers. But they have not been allowed to federate their unions. At Lyons the teachers formed a union and, according to law, filed their rules and regulations with the proper official, who turned them over to the Minister of Justice, and after a cabinet consultation it was decided that the union was illegal, but would be ignored. They then joined the local _Bourse du Travail_ (federation of labor), and Briand, then Minister of Education, vetoed their action. Then a number of branches in the public service, including post-office and customs-house employees, teachers, etc., united in forming a committee "_pour la defense du droit syndical des salaries de l'etat, des departements et du commerce_." This "Committee of Defense" pet.i.tioned Clemenceau on the right to organize, and intimated that the great and only difference between the state and the private employer is that the former adds political to economic oppression. This is pure Syndicalism. Under the individual political jugglery that takes the place of the party system in France, the problem is not made any the easier.

2. PROGRAM OF THE LIBERAL WING OF THE FRENCH SOCIALISTS, ADOPTED AT TOURS, 1902, UNDER THE LEADERs.h.i.+P OF JAUReS

_I.--Declaration of Principles_

Socialism proceeds simultaneously from the movement of democracy and from the new forms of production. In history, from the very morrow of the French Revolution, the proletarians perceived that the Declaration of the Rights of Man would remain an illusion unless society transformed owners.h.i.+p.

How, indeed, could freedom, owners.h.i.+p, security, be guaranteed to all, in a society where millions of workers have no property but their muscles, and are obliged, in order to live, to sell their power of work to the propertied minority?

To extend, therefore, to every citizen the guarantees inscribed in the Declaration of Rights, our great Babeuf demanded owners.h.i.+p in common, as a guarantee of welfare in common. Communism was for the boldest proletarians the supreme expression of the Revolution.

Between the political regime, the outcome of the revolutionary movement, and the economic regime of society, there is an intolerable contradiction.

In the political order democracy is realized: all citizens share equally, at least by right, in the sovereignty; universal suffrage is communism in political power.

In the economic order, on the other hand, a minority is sovereign. It is the oligarchy of capital which possesses, directs, administers, and exploits.

Proletarians are acknowledged fit as citizens to manage the milliards of the national and communal budgets; as laborers, in the workshop, they are only a pa.s.sive mult.i.tude, which has no share in the direction of enterprises, and they endure the domination of a cla.s.s which makes them pay dearly for a tutelage whose utility ceases and whose prolongation is arbitrary.

The irresistible tendency of the proletarians, therefore, is to transfer into the economic order the democracy partially realized in the political order. Just as all the citizens have and handle in common, democratically, the political power, so they must have and handle in common the economic power, the means of production.

They must themselves appoint the heads of work in the workshops, as they appoint the heads of government in the city, and reserve for those who work, for the community, the whole product of work.

This tendency of political democracy to enlarge itself into social democracy has been strengthened and defined by the whole economic evolution.

In proportion as the capitalistic regime developed its effects, the proletariat became conscious of the irreducible opposition between its essential interests and the interests of the cla.s.s dominant in society, and to the bourgeois form of democracy it opposed more and more the complete and thorough communistic democracy.

All hope of universalizing owners.h.i.+p and independence by multiplying small autonomous producers has disappeared. The great industry is more and more the rule in modern production.

By the enlargement of the world's markets, by the growing facility of transport, by the division of labor, by the increasing application of machinery, by the concentration of capitals, immense concentrated production is gradually ruining or subordinating the small or middling producers.

Even where the number of small craftsmen, small traders, small peasant proprietors, does not diminish, their relative importance in the totality of production grows less unceasingly. They fall under the sway of the great capitalists.

Even the peasant proprietors, who seem to have retained a little independence, are more and more exposed to the crus.h.i.+ng forces of the universal market, which capitalism directs without their concurrence and against their interests.

For the sale of their wheat, wine, beetroot, and milk, they are more and more at the mercy of great middlemen or great industries of milling, distilling, and sugar-refining, which dominate and despoil peasant labor.

The industrial proletarians, having lost nearly all chance of individually rising to be employers, and being thus doomed to eternal dependence, are further subject to incessant crises of unemployment and misery, let loose by the unregulated compet.i.tion of the great capitalist forces.

The immense progress of production and wealth, largely usurped by parasitic cla.s.ses, has not led to an equivalent progress in well-being and security for the workers, the proletarians. Whole categories of wage-earners are abruptly thrown into extreme misery by the constant introduction of new mechanisms and by the abrupt movements and transformations of industry.

Capitalism itself admits the disorder of the present regime of production, since it tries to regulate it for its gain by capitalistic syndicates, by trusts.

Even if it succeeded in actually disciplining all the forces of production, it would only do so while consummating the domination and the monopoly of capital.

There is only one way of a.s.suring the continued order and progress of production, the freedom of every individual, and the growing well-being of the workers; it is to transfer to the collectivity, to the social community, the owners.h.i.+p of the capitalistic means of production.

The proletariat, daily more numerous, ever better prepared for combined action by the great industry itself, understands that in collectiveness or communism lie the necessary means of salvation for it.

As an oppressed and exploited cla.s.s, it opposes all the forces of oppression and exploitation, the whole system of owners.h.i.+p, which debases it to be a mere instrument. It does not expect its emanc.i.p.ation from the good will of rulers or the spontaneous generosity of the propertied cla.s.ses, but from the continual and methodical pressure which it exerts upon the privileged cla.s.s and the government.

It sets before itself as its final aim, not a partial amelioration, but the total transformation of society. And since it acknowledges no right as belonging to capitalistic owners.h.i.+p, it feels bound to it by no contract. It is determined to fight it, thoroughly, and to the end; and it is in this sense that the proletariat, even while using the legal means which democracy puts into its hands, is and must remain a revolutionary cla.s.s.

Already by winning universal suffrage, by winning and exercising the right of combining to strike and of forming trade-unions, by the first laws regulating labor and causing society to insure its members, the proletariat has begun to react against the fatal effects of capitalism; it will continue this great and unceasing effort, but it will only end the struggle when all capitalist property has been reabsorbed by the community, and when the antagonism of cla.s.ses has been ended by the disappearance of the cla.s.ses themselves, reconciled, or rather made one, in common production and common owners.h.i.+p.

How will be accomplished the supreme transformation of the capitalist regime into the collectivist or communist? The human mind cannot determine beforehand the mode in which history will be accomplished.

The democratic and bourgeois revolution, which originated in the great movement of France in 1789, has come about in different countries in the most different ways. The old feudal system has yielded in one case to force, in another to peaceful and slow evolution. The revolutionary bourgeoisie has at one place and time proceeded to brutal expropriation without compensation, at another to the buying out of feudal servitudes.

No one can know in what way the capitalist servitude will be abolished. The essential thing is that the proletariat should be always ready for the most vigorous and effective action. It would be dangerous to dismiss the possibility of revolutionary events occasioned either by the resistance or by the criminal aggression of the privileged cla.s.s.

It would be fatal, trusting in the one word revolution, to neglect the great forces which the conscious, organized proletariat can employ within democracy.

These legal means, often won by revolution, represent an acc.u.mulation of revolutionary force, a revolutionary capital, of which it would be madness not to take advantage.

Too often the workers neglect to profit by the means of action which democracy and the Republic put into their hands. They do not demand from trade-unionist action, co-operative action, or universal suffrage, all that those forms of action can give.

No formula, no machinery, can enable the working-cla.s.s to dispense with the constant effort of organization and education.

The idea of the general strike, of general strikes, is invincibly suggested to proletarians by the growing magnitude of working-cla.s.s organization. They do not desire violence, which is very often the result of an insufficient organization and a rudimentary education of the proletariat; but they would make a great mistake if they did not employ the powerful means of action, which co-ordinates working-cla.s.s forces to subserve the great interests of the workers or of society; they must group and organize themselves to be in a position to make the privileged cla.s.s more and more emphatically aware of the gulf which may suddenly be cleft open in the economic life of societies by the abrupt stoppage of the worn-out and interminably exploited workers. They can thereby s.n.a.t.c.h from the selfishness of the privileged cla.s.s great reforms interesting the working-cla.s.s in general, and hasten the complete transformation of an unjust society.

But the formula of the general strike, like the partial strike, like political action, is only valuable through the progress of the education, the thought, and the will of the working-cla.s.s.

The Socialist party defends the Republic as a necessary means of liberation and education. Socialism is essentially republican. It might be even said to be the Republic itself, since it is the extension of the Republic to the regime of property and labor.

The Socialist party needs, to organize the new world, free minds, emanc.i.p.ated from superst.i.tions and prejudices. It asks for and guarantees every human being, every individual, absolute freedom of thinking, and writing, and affirming their beliefs. Over against all religions, dogmas, and churches, as well as over against the cla.s.s conception of the bourgeoisie, it sets the unlimited right of free thought, the scientific conception of the universe, and a system of public education based exclusively on science and reason.

Thus accustomed to free thought and reflection, citizens will be protected against the sophistries of the capitalistic and clerical reaction. The small craftsmen, small traders, and small peasant proprietors will cease to think that it is Socialism which wishes to expropriate them. The Socialist party will hasten the hour when these small peasant proprietors, ruined by the underselling of their produce, riddled with mortgage debts, and always liable to judicial expropriation, will eventually understand the advantages of generalized and systematized a.s.sociation, and will claim themselves, as a benefit, the socialization of their plots of land.

But it would be useless to prepare inside each nation an organization of justice and peace, if the relations of the nations to one another remained exposed to every enterprise of force, every suggestion of capitalist greed.

The Socialist party desires peace among nations; it condemns every policy of aggression and war, whether continental or colonial. It constantly keeps on the order of the day for civilized countries simultaneous disarmament. While waiting for the day of definite peace among nations, it combats the militarist spirit by doing its utmost to approximate the system of permanent armies to that of national militias. It wishes to protect the territory and the independence of the nation against any surprise; but every offensive policy and offensive weapon is utterly condemned by it.