Socialism: A Summary And Interpretation Of Socialist Principles
John Spargo
13 chapters
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13 chapters
JOHN SPARGO
JOHN SPARGO
Copyright 1906, 1909, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1906. Reprinted November, 1906; December 1908. New and revised edition, February, 1909; January, 1910; May 1912; March, 1913. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A....
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PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
A new edition of this little volume having been rendered necessary, I have availed myself of the opportunity thus afforded me by the publishers to revise it. Some slight revision was necessary to correct one or two errors which crept unavoidably into the earlier edition. By an oversight, an important typographical blunder went uncorrected into the former edition, making the date of the first use of the word "Socialism" 1835 instead of 1833. That error, I regret to say, has been subsequently copi
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
It is not a long time since the kindest estimate of Socialism by the average man was that expressed by Ebenezer Elliott, "the Corn-Law Rhymer," in the once familiar cynical doggerel:— There was another view, brutally unjust and unkind, expressed in blood-curdling cartoons representing the Socialist as a bomb-throwing assassin. According to the one view, Socialists were all sordid, envious creatures, yearning for the while the other view represented them as ready to enforce this selfish demand by
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
As a background to modern, or scientific, Socialism there is the Socialism of the Utopians, which the authors of the Manifesto so severely criticised. It is impossible to understand the modern Socialist movement, the Socialism which is rapidly becoming the dominant issue in the thought and politics of the world, without distinguishing sharply between it and the Utopian visions which preceded it. Failure to make this distinction is responsible for the complete misunderstanding of the Socialism of
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
The Communist Manifesto has been called the birth-cry of the modern scientific Socialist movement. When it was written, at the end of 1847, little remained of those great movements which in the early part of the century had inspired millions with high hopes of social regeneration and rekindled the beacon fires of faith in the world. The Saint-Simonians had, as an organized body, disappeared; the Fourierists were a dwindling sect, discouraged by the failure of the one great trial of their system,
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CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
Socialism, then, in the modern, scientific sense, is a theory of social evolution. Its hopes for the future rest, not upon the genius of some Utopia-builder, but upon the inherent forces of historical development. The Socialist state will never be realized except as the result of economic necessity, the culmination of successive epochs of industrial evolution. Thus the existing social system appears to the Socialist of to-day, not as it appeared to the Utopians and as it still must appear to mer
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CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
Such was the mode of the development of capitalistic production in its first stage. In this stage a permanent wage-working class was formed, new markets were developed, many of them by colonial expansion and territorial conquest, and production for sale and profit became the rule, instead of the exception as formerly when men produced primarily for use and sold only their surplus products. A new form of class division thus arose out of this economic soil. Instead of being bound to the land as th
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CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
No part of the theory of modern Socialism has called forth so much criticism and opposition as the doctrine of the class struggle. Many who are otherwise sympathetic to Socialism denounce this doctrine as narrow, brutal, and productive of antisocialistic feelings of class hatred. Upon all hands the doctrine is condemned as an un-American appeal to passion and a wicked exaggeration of social conditions. When President Roosevelt attacks the preachers of the doctrine, and wrathfully condemns class-
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CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
The first approach to a comprehensive treatment by Marx of the materialistic conception of history appeared in 1847, several months before the publication of the Communist Manifesto , in "La Misère de la Philosophie," [137] the famous polemic with which Marx assailed J. P. Proudhon's La Philosophie de la Misère . Marx had worked out his theory at least two years before, so Engels tells us, and in his writings of that period there are several evidences of the fact. In "La Misère de la Philosophie
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CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
The geist of social and political evolution is economic, according to the Socialist philosophy. This view of the importance of man's economic relations involves some very radical changes in the methods and terminology of political economy. The philosophical view of social and political evolution as a world-process, through revolutions formed in the matrices of economic conditions, at once limits and expands the scope of political economy. It destroys on the one hand the idea of the eternality of
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CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
Many persons who have thought of Socialism as a scheme, the plan of a new social edifice, have been disappointed not to find in all the voluminous writings of Marx any detailed description of such a plan, any forecast of the future. But when they have grasped the fundamental principles of the Marxian system of thought, they realize that it would be absurd to attempt to give detailed specifications of the Socialist state. As the Socialist movement has outgrown the influence of the early Utopians,
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
You ask me how the goal I have described is to be attained: "The picture," you say, "is attractive, but we would like to know how we are to reach the Promised Land which it pictures. Show us the way!" The question is a fair one, and I shall try to answer it with candor, as it deserves. But I cannot promise to tell how the change will be brought about, to describe the exact process by which social property will supplant capitalist private property. The only conditions under which any honest think
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ADVERTISEMENTS
ADVERTISEMENTS
Introduction by Robert Hunter Illustrated, cloth, 12mo, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62 "The book will live and will set hundreds of teachers and social workers and philanthropists to work in villages and cities throughout the country.... Whatever our feeling as to the remedy for starved and half-starved children, we are grateful for the vivid, scholarly way in which this book marshals the experience of two continents in awaking to the physical needs of the children who are compelled to be in school t
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