Page:Eden Paul and Cedar Paul - Communism (1921).pdf/18

 will you sail a ship in a socialist condition? How? Why with a captain and mates and sailing master and engineer (if it be a steamer) and A.B.s and stokers and so on and so on. Only there will be no first, second, and third class among the passengers; the sailors and stokers will be as well fed and lodged as the captain and passengers; and the captain and the stoker will have the same pay."

The economic side of the revolution is in reality far more important than are the political perturbations, the strikes and lock-outs, the gun-shots and the bayonet thrusts, the hunger, the suffering, and the discomfort, that will attend the passing of the old order and the coming of the new. It is from the economic outlook that Marxists have been proclaiming for more than two generations that the revolution is at once an administrative and a technical necessity. And at the present pass, in the extant duel between communism and imperialism, the revolution is the only thing that will save civilisation from foundering in the shipwreck of capitalism.

The revolution in Russia has been essentially an economic process. It was the economic collapse which rendered the revolution possible; just as the economic collapse of Western and Central Europe, following upon the war and upon the peace conditions imposed at Versailles, seems likely to speed the coming of the world revolution. In Russia, complete communism is far from having been achieved, for the necessities of continued defence against foreign and internal foes have greatly hindered progress. Nevertheless, the inherent contradiction of capitalism has been solved. Production for use has replaced production for profit; a product economy has been substituted for a monetary economy.

Alfons Goldschmidt, a German economist who recently visited Soviet Russia, declares that centralist absolutism, enforced by the necessities of the transition stage and by the peculiarities of the world situation, will yield, nay, is already yielding, to control from beneath. For some sociologists, the distinction between socialism and communism lies in the difference between the fields of production and distribution. A socialist commonwealth is one in which production is socialised; a communist commonwealth is one in which distribution is communalised. For others, the distinction lies in political forms. Socialism is democratic, whereas communism is ergatocratic. For Goldschmidt, socialism is the inevitable stage of highly centralised organisation; communism is the decentralised world-order in which socialism will culminate. However that may be, here and now communism is a political method based upon the dictatorship of the proletariat, the soviet system, and a belief in the imminent necessity of the world revolution. It is on account of the last-named article of faith that critics of bolshevist theory compare the communists to the chiliasts or millenarians, to those who eagerly expect that Christ will come again to reign on earth for a thousand years.