Some Objections To Socialism: From "The Atheistic Platform", Twelve LecturesBradlaugh, Charles
History
Some Objections To Socialism: From "The Atheistic Platform", Twelve Lectures
Bradlaugh, Charles
Socialism -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
These Socialists declare that there must be "organisation of
agricultural and industrial armies under State control," and that the
exchange of all production must be controlled by the workers; but they
decline to explain how this control is to be exercised, and on what
principles. We agree that there are often too many concerned in the
distribution of the necessaries of life, and that the cost to the
consumer is often outrageously augmented; but we suggest that this may
be reformed gradually and in detail by individual effort through local
societies, and that it ought not to be any part of the work of the
State. We point to the fact that there are now in Great Britain--all
established during the present reign--nearly one thousand distributive
co-operative societies, with more than half a million members, with over
seventeen and three-quarter millions of pounds of yearly sales, with two
and a half millions of stock-in-trade, with five and a quarter millions
of working capital, and dividing one and a half millions of annual
profit; and that these societies, each keeping its own property,
still further co-operate with one another to reduce loss in exchange by
havings a wholesale co-operative society in England, with sales in
1882 exceeding three and a half millions sterling, and another similar
wholesale society in Scotland, with transactions in the same year
to nearly one million sterling. We say the way to render the cost of
exchange of products less onerous to the laborer is by the extension and
perfection of this organisation of co-operative distribution, and that
this may be and is being done successfully and usefully, ameliorating
gradually the condition and developing the self-reliance of the
individual workers who take part in such co-operative stores, and thus
inciting and inducing other individuals to join the societies already
founded, or to establish others, and so educating individual after
individual to better habits of exchange. We say that this is more
useful than to denounce as idlers and robbers "the shopkeepers and their
hangers on," as is done by the present teachers of Socialism. We object
that the organisation of all industry under State control must paralyse
industrial energy and discourage and neutralise individual effort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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