Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/189

 Rh mation, or the like. Its cost must cover the purchase of both. Mr. Mallock gets into his bog of difficulties by forgetting what a book is, not by applying a critical mind to the Socialist state. Now, the payment for the second aspect of a book can be determined in a variety of ways. The writer could be put on a civil list, he could be subsidised by his patron coterie—but this is the point, there is nothing in Socialist theory preventing his being rewarded in the simplest of all fashions, from the sales of his book. If the cost of composing and otherwise producing and publishing the book is x and it is sold at x + y to cover remuneration for the author, I have yet to learn that such a transaction violates any canon of Socialist economics.

So, under Socialism, we may have the poet, and he may have his public, his publisher and his remuneration.

And I have taken the poet to represent the intellectual worker of every kind who would be treated mutatis mutandis in a similar way.

There is not much fear of intellectual stagnation in the Socialist state.

The difficulty of the poet is generally but a preliminary to what is meant to be the still greater difficulty of an opposition between the powers that be and the critical newspaper, which must lead to the suppression of the latter. If Socialism were a divinely ordered society