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The Economic Problem of the Present Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
I.
The establishment of such an economic order is demanded not only by external circumstances but also by a human need.
In almost all the industrial countries the wage labourer is thoroughly disaffected. For almost a century he has been fed on the doctrines of political liberalism. He has been taught to believe in democracy, in the equal citizenship of all, and it is not surprising that he should have come at last to demand the application of these theories to his daily life— that is to economic matters. Hence the determination of organised labour to acquire a fixed standard of life, secure from the fluctuations of the international market. Hence too its tendency to look for the satisfaction of these ideals to Socialism, which had its birth at the time when the prospects of the working classes seemed most desperate, and which has shown itself ready to step into the place of the old governments in the political disintegration of Europe that has followed the world war.
The Socialist doctrines, especially in their ‘Scientific’ Marxian form, in spite of being a conscious revolt against the prevailing economic theories, nevertheless took over from the older economists their materialistic outlook, and their faith in the operation of unmodifiable economic laws. They simply added to these fundamental conceptions a theory of historical evolution, by which they taught that the capitalist system was a necessary stage in the development of the individual handicrafts of the past into the scientific socialised industrialism of the future.
1 There is yet a fourth solution, Guild Socialism, according to which the means of production are owned by the State, but are administered by the organised industrial unions or guilds. I have not discussed this separately, since it is essentially a compromise representing the reaction of Socialists to cotoperative ideals. Some Guild Socialists remain true Socialists, others, like Mr. A. Penty, appear to be pure co-operativists.
2 Mill's Principles of Political Economy, 772–3.
3 Mill's Principles of Political Economy, 789–790 (ed. Ashley, 1909).
4 Goyau ‘Ketteler,’ pp. 203–210. This important passage from Die Arbeiter-Frage und das Christenthwn is unfortunately too long to quote in full.
5 This was advocated by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto and also, I believe, by Mr. Sidney Webb in the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission. The latter proposed to utilise the unemployable and industrially inefficient class in this way!
6 Cf. Fr. Plater, The Priest and Social Action.