Some Objections To Socialism: From "The Atheistic Platform", Twelve Lectures — John Shaqi
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
The Socialists claim that there shall be "collective ownership of land,
capital, machinery and credit by the complete ownership of the people,"
and yet they object that they are misrepresented when told that
they want to take the private economies of millions of industrious
wage-earners in this kingdom for the benefit of those who may have
neither been thrifty nor industrious. The truth is that, if language
is to have any meaning, the definitions must stand given by me and
unchallenged by my opponent in the St. James's Hall debate, viz.: (1)
"Socialism denies all individual private property, and affirms that
society, organised as the state, should own all wealth, direct all
labor, and compel the equal distribution of all produce." (2) "A
Socialistic State would be a State in which everything would be held
in common, in which the labor of each individual would be directed
and controlled by the State, to which would belong all results of such
labor." The realisation of a Socialistic State in this country would, as
I then urged, require (1) a physical force revolution, in which all the
present property owners unwilling to surrender their private properties
to the common fund would be forcibly dispossessed. This revolution would
be in the highest degree difficult, if not impossible, for property
holders are the enormous majority.
Mr. Joynes, in an article published in _Our Corner_, does challenge my
definition, and says that the immediate aim of Socialism "is not the
abolition of private property, but its establishment by means of the
emancipation of labor on the only sound basis. It is private capital
we attack, the power to hire laborers at starvation wages, and not
the independent enjoyment of the fruits of labor by the individual who
produces them." And he refers me to a paragraph previously dealt with
by me as an illustration of contradictory statement, in which he and his
cosignatories write: "Do any say we attack private property? We deny it.
We only attack that private property for a few thousand loiterers and
slave-drivers, which renders all property in the fruits of their own
labor impossible for millions. We challenge that private property which
renders poverty at once a necessity and a crime." But surely this
flatly contradicts the declaration by Mr. Hyndman in the debate, of
"the collective ownership of land, capital, machinery, and credit." I
am afraid that Mr. Joynes has in his mind some other unexplained meaning
for the words "capital" and "property." To me it seems impossible that
if everything be owned collectively, anything can be owned individually,
separately, and privately.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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