【英文读物】Socialism and the family.docx

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1、【英文读物】Socialism and the familychapter 1In this paper I am anxious to define and discuss the relationship between three distinct things:(1) Socialism, i.e. a large, a slowly elaborating conception of a sane and organized state and moral culture to replace our present chaotic way of living,(2) the Soc

2、ialist movement, and(3) the Middle Classes.The first is to me a very great thing indeed, the form and substance of my ideal life, and all the religion I possess. Let me make 6my confession plain and clear. I am, by a sort of predestination, a Socialist. I perceive, I cannot help talking and writing

3、about Socialism, and shaping and forwarding Socialism. I am one of a successionone of a growing multitude of witnesses, who will continue. It does notin the larger sensematter how many generations of us must toil and testify. It does not matter, except as our individual concern, how individually we

4、succeed or fail, what blunders we make, what thwartings we encounter, what follies and inadequacies darken our private hopes and level our personal imaginations to the dust. We have the light. We know what we are for, and that the light that now glimmers so dimly through us must in the end prevail.

5、To us Socialism is no piece of political strategy, no economic opposition of class to class; it is a plan for the reconstruction of human life, for the replacement of a disorder by order, for the making of a state in which mankind shall live bravely and beautifully beyond our present imagining.7So,

6、largely, I conceive of Socialism. But Socialism and the Socialist movement are two very different things. The Socialist movement is an item in an altogether different scale.I must confess that the organized Socialist movement, all the Socialist societies and leagues and federations and parties toget

7、her in England, seem to me no more than the rustling hem of the garment of advancing Socialism. For some years the whole organized Socialist movement seemed to me so unimportant, so irrelevant to that progressive development and realization of a great system of ideas which is Socialism, that, like v

8、ery many other Socialists, I did not trouble to connect myself with any section of it. I dont believe that the Socialist idea is as yet nearly enough thought out and elaborated for very much of it to be realized of set intention now. Socialism is still essentially education, is study, is a renewal,

9、a profound change in the circle of human thought and motive. The institutions which will express this changed circle of thought are important indeed, 8but with a secondary importance. Socialism is the still incomplete, the still sketchy and sketchily indicative plan of a new life for the world, a ne

10、w and better way of living, a change of spirit and substance from the narrow selfishness and immediacy and cowardly formalism, the chaotic life individual accident that is human life to-day, a life that dooms itself and all of us to thwartings and misery. Socialism, therefore, is to be served by tho

11、ught and expression, in art, in literature, in scientific statement and life, in discussion and the quickening exercise of propaganda; but the Socialist movement, as one finds it, is too often no more than a hasty attempt to secure a premature realization of some fragmentary suggestion of this great

12、, still plastic design, to the neglect of all other of its aspects. As my own sense of Socialism has enlarged and intensified, I have become more and more impressed by the imperfect Socialism of almost every Socialist movement that is going on; by its necessarily partial and limited projection from

13、the clotted 9cants and habituations of things as they are. Some Socialists quarrel with the Liberal Party and with the Socialist section of the Liberal Party because it does not go far enough, because it does not embody a Socialism uncompromising and complete, because it has not definitely cut itsel

14、f off from the old traditions, the discredited formulæ, that served before the coming of our great idea. They are blind to the fact that there is no organized Socialism at present, uncompromising and complete, and the Socialists who flatter themselves they represent as much are merely those wh

15、o have either never grasped or who have forgotten the full implications of Socialism. They are just a little step further, a very little step further in their departure from existing prejudices, in their subservience to existing institutions and existing imperatives.Take, for example, the Socialism

16、that is popular in New York and Chicago and Germany, and that finds its exponents here typically in the inferior ranks of the Social 10Democratic Federationthe crude Marxite teaching. It still awaits permeation by true Socialist conceptions. It is a version of life adapted essentially to the imagina

17、tion of the working wage earner, and limited by his limitations. It is the vision of poor souls perennially reminded each Monday morning of the shadow and irksomeness of life, perpetually recalled each Saturday pay time to a watery gleam of all that life might be. One of the numberless relationships

18、 of life, the relationship of capital or the employer to the employed, is made to overshadow all other relations. Get that put right, “expropriate the idle rich,” transfer all capital to the State, make the State the humane, amenable, universal employerthat, to innumerable, Socialist working men, is

19、 the horizon. The rest he sees in the forms of the life to which he is accustomed. A little home, a trifle larger and brighter than his present one, a more abounding table, a cheerful missus released from factory work and unhealthy competition with men, a bright and healthy 11family going to and fro

20、 to the public free schools, free medical attendance, universal State insurance for old age, free trams to Burnham Beeches, shorter hours of work and higher wages, no dismissals, no hunting for work that eludes one. All the wide world of collateral consequences that will follow from the cessation of

21、 the system of employment under conditions of individualist competition, he does not seem to apprehend. Such phrases as the citizenship and economic independence of women leave him cold. That Socialism has anything to say about the economic basis of the family, about the social aspects of marriage,

22、about the rights of the parent, doesnt, I think, at first occur to him at all. Nor does he realize for a long time that for Socialism and under Socialist institutions will there be needed any system of self-discipline, any rules of conduct further than the natural impulses and the native goodness of

23、 man. He takes just that aspect of Socialism that appeals to him, and that alone, and it is only exceptionally at present, and very slowly, 12as a process of slow habituation and enlargement, that he comes to any wider conceptions. And, as a consequence, directly we pass to any social type to which

24、weekly or monthly wages is not the dominating fact of life, and a simple unthinking faith in Yes or No decisions its dominant habit, the phrasings, the formulæ, the statements and the discreet omissions of the leaders of working-class Socialism fail to appeal.Socialism commends itself to a con

25、siderable proportion of the working class simply as a beneficial change in the conditions of work and employment; to other sections of the community it presents itself through equally limited aspects. Certain ways of living it seems to condemn root and branch. To the stockbroker and many other sorts

26、 of trader, to the usurer, to the company promoter, to the retired butler who has invested his money in “weekly property,” for example, it stands for the dissolution of all comprehensible social order. It simply repudiates the way of living to which they have committed themselves. 13And to great num

27、bers of agreeable unintelligent people who live upon rent and interest it is a projected severing of every bond that holds man and man, that keeps servants respectful, tradespeople in order, railways and hotels available, and the whole procedure of life going. They class Socialism and Anarchism toge

28、ther in a way that is as logically unjust as it is from their point of view justifiable. Both cults have this in common, that they threaten to wipe out the whole world of the villa resident. And this sense of a threatened profound disturbance in their way of living pervades the attitude of nearly al

29、l the comfortable classes towards Socialism.When we discuss the attitude of the middle classes to Socialism we must always bear this keener sense of disconcerting changes in mind. It is a part of the queer composition of the human animal that its desire for happenings is balanced by an instinctive d

30、read of real changes of condition. People, especially fully adult people, are creatures who have grown accustomed to a certain method 14of costume, a certain system of meals, a certain dietary, certain apparatus, a certain routine. They know their way about in life as it is. They would be lost in Ut

31、opia. Quite little alterations “put them out,” as they saycreate a distressing feeling of inadequacy, make them “feel odd.” Whatever little enlargements they may contemplate in reverie, in practice they know they want nothing except, perhaps, a little more of all the things they like. Thats the way

32、with most of us, anyhow. To make a fairly complete intimation of the nature of Socialism to an average, decent, middle-aged, middle-class person would be to arouse emotions of unspeakable terror, if the whole project didnt also naturally clothe itself in a quality of incredibility. And you will find

33、, as a matter of fact, that your middle-class Socialists belong to two classes; either they are amiable people who dont understand a bit what Socialism isand some of the most ardent and serviceable workers for Socialism are of this typeor they are people so unhappily 15situated and so unfortunate, o

34、r else of such exceptional imaginative force or training (which is itself, perhaps, from the practical point of view, a misfortune), as to be capable of a discontent with life as it is, so passionate as to outweigh instinctive timidities and discretions. Rest assured that to make any large section o

35、f the comfortable upper middle class Socialists, you must either misrepresent, and more particularly under-represent Socialism, or you must quicken their imaginations far beyond the present state of affairs.Some of the most ardent and serviceable of Socialist workers, I have said, are of the former

36、type. For the most part they are philanthropic people, or women and men of the managing temperament shocked into a sort of Socialism by the more glaring and melodramatic cruelties of our universally cruel social system. They are the district visitors of Socialism. They do not realize that Socialism

37、demands any change in themselves or in their way of living, they perceive in it simply a way of hope from the 16failures of vulgar charity. Chiefly they assail the bad conditions of life of the lower classes. They dont for a moment envisage a time when there will be no lower classesthat is beyond th

38、em altogether. Much less can they conceive of a time when there will be no governing class distinctively in possession of means. They exact respect from inferiors; no touch of Socialist warmth or light qualifies their arrogant manners. Perhaps they, too, broaden their conception of Socialism as time

39、 goes on, but so it begins with them. Now to make Socialists of this type the appeal is a very different one from the talk of class war and expropriation, and the abolition of the idle rich, which is so serviceable with a roomful of sweated workers. These people are moved partly by pity, and the bes

40、t of them by a hatred for the squalor and waste of the present rgime. Talk of the expropriated rich simply raises in their minds painful and disconcerting images of distressed gentlewomen. But one necessary aspect of the Socialists vision that sends the coldest 17shiver down the spine of the working

41、 class Socialist is extraordinarily alluring and congenial to them, namely, the official and organized side. They love to think of houses and factories open to competent inspection, of municipal milk, sealed and certificated for every cottagers baby, of old age pensions and a high and rising minimum

42、 standard of life. They have an admirable sense of sanitation. They are the philanthropic and administrative Socialists as distinguished from the economic revolutionaries.This class of Socialist passes insensibly into the merely Socialistic philanthropist of the wealthy middle class to whom we owe s

43、o much helpful expenditure upon experiments in housing, in museum and school construction, in educational endowment, and so forth. Their activities are not for one moment to be despised; they are a constant demonstration to dull and sceptical persons that things may be different, better, prettier, k

44、indlier and more orderly. Many people impervious to tracts can be set thinking by 18a model village or a model factory. However petty much of what they achieve may be, there it is achievedin legislation, in bricks and mortar. Among other things, these administrative Socialists serve to correct the v

45、ery perceptible tendency of most working men Socialists to sentimental anarchism in regard to questions of control and conduct, a tendency due entirely to their social and administrative inexperience.For more thorough-going Socialism among the middle classes one must look to those strata and section

46、s in which quickened imaginations and unsettling influences are to be found. The artist should be extraordinarily attracted by Socialism. A mind habitually directed to beauty as an end must necessarily be exceptionally awake to the ugly congestions of our contemporary civilisation, to the prolific f

47、utile production of gawky, ill-mannered, jostling new things, to the shabby profit-seeking that ousts beauty from life and poisons every enterprise of man. And not only artistic work, but the better sort of 19scientific investigation, the better sort of literary work, and every occupation that invol

48、ves the persistent free use of thought, must bring the mind more and more towards the definite recognition of our social incoherence and waste. But this by no means exhausts the professions that ought to have a distinct bias for Socialism. The engineer, the architect, the mechanical inventor, the in

49、dustrial organizer, and every sort of maker must be at one in their desire for emancipation from servitude to the promoter, the trader, the lawyer, and the forestaller, from the perpetually recurring obstruction of the claim of the private proprietor to every large and hopeful enterprise, and ready to respond to the immense creative element in the Socialist idea. Only it is that creative element which has so far found least expression in Socialist literature, which appears neither in th