So much for what is sound and valid in the various one-sided programs for reform. But if their attitude towards the past performances of industrialism was sound, their gesture towards the future, and their attitude towards the whole milieu, was little less than indifferent. There were to be certain gains in money wages, in political control, in the distribution of products, and so forth; but the realization of these gains was never projected in any very vivid way—a vague fellowship in peace and plenty under gay red banners was all that was left over when the current efforts to “educate the masses,” “revise the constitution,” or “organize the revolution” were taken for granted.
In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels made a plea for a realistic method of thought, which limited itself to a here and now, as against what he derided as the utopian method, the attempt on the part of a single thinker to give a detailed picture of the society of the future. Yet at the present time it is easy to see that if the utopian socialism of Owen has been ineffective, the realistic socialism of Marx has been equally ineffective; for while Owen’s kind of socialism has been partly fulfilled in the cooperative movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat rests upon very shaky foundations, and such success as it has had is due perhaps as much to Marx’s literary picture of what it would be like as to anything else. I do not doubt that the partisan movements have achieved many specific gains; consumer’s cooperation alone has in England measurably lightened the physical burden of existence for a great many people. Their weakness consists in the fact that they have not altered the contents of the modern social order, even when they have altered the method of distribution; and in addition, a good many of these partisan utopias, for lack of any definite and coherent scheme of values, crumble away as soon as they meet the opposition of such powerful collective utopias as Coketown or the Country House. In America, particularly, the labor movement is paralyzed by this perpetual movement into the bourgeoisie—concretely speaking, into Suburbia and the Country House—and in Great Britain much the same sort of dereliction can be observed within the narrower group from which the leaders of the trades unions and the Labor Party are drawn.
Hence also the less interesting problem of the Tired Radical, which Mr. Walter Weyl suggestively outlined. There is indeed a pertinent criticism of the paper environment of Megalopolis, in the tenacious way in which people continue to cling to abstract programs and to movements which never approach perceptibly nearer their fulfillment. The marvel is that the concrete utopia of the Country House has not exercised a more potent influence than it actually does. When one compares the vast amount of agitation during the last century—the Chartist Movement, the Socialist Movement, the International Peace Movement—with the actual results in the reconstruction of work, place, and people, or with the actual effects any reconstruction has had upon our polity, our culture, our art—it is surprising that these movements have had any effective claim upon our allegiance. Men will indeed work for an idea—the notion that they will not is a superstition—but sooner or later the spirit must be made manifest in the flesh, and if it never comes to birth, or at best is an abortion, the idea is bound to wither away.
How long would the parliamentary clatter of socialism have mechanically kept on—had it not been for the dislocation of war? How long could its abstract programs have remained in the air, before coming down to specifications? I obviously cannot answer these questions; but it seems plain enough that our radical programs have had simply a sentimental interest: they moved people without giving them a specific task, they stirred them emotionally without giving them an outlet, and so, at best, they are but partial utopias of escape, using the powers of organization, collective meetings, and pronunciamentos to take the place of the emotional stimuli which the avowed utopia of escape, like News from Nowhere, supplies by introducing a beautiful girl. In this aspect, the Socialist Party, with its revolutionary demands, did not differ in its psychological performance from the Republican Party, which specialized in the rhetorical device of the full dinner pail; nor did it differ in any fundamental way from the defunct Progressive Party, which for a time believed in a new heaven and earth to follow the initiative, referendum, and recall with an intensity
