Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Socialism and Politics (1903).djvu/5

Rh workers' freedom, and limiting the powers of Capital in every direction. Of course, everyone was passionately interested, too, in widening political liberties, and this is why the International was frankly anti-Imperialist. But it was also something else.

It undertook, above all, the spreading of those ideas and the conquest of those rights which neither the old type trade unions nor the political Radicals sufficiently cared for. The labour party, thirty years ago, had its own special functions, in addition to Trade-unionism and Radicalism, and these were Socialism—the preparation of the Social Revolution. But where is this now? All gone! What is now described as Socialism—all of them are Socialists now!—is the most incoherent mixture of Trade-unionism, which trusts no more to itself. an looks for a John Gorst to make its business, with Toryism (the paternal State to whom you must look for every improvement of your conditions), with State capitalism (State monopoly of railways, of banks, of the sale of spirits, of education, etc., is preached and fought for by the Socialist party of free Switzerland), with Fabianism—nay, even occasionally with Imperialism, when Socialists declare in the German Reichstag that let the State only wage a war, they will all fight as well as the Junkers!

Add to this all sorts of theories built up with bits of metaphysics for persuading the workers that a Social Revolution is bosh: that Socialism is only good for a hundred years hence, and those who talk about it now are dangerous Utopians: that all capitals must first be concentrated in a few hands—which every intelligent man sees they never will—and that the peasant-owners must disappear, and all become even more miserable than they are now, before Socialism becomes possible. This is what has now taken the place of the distinctly expressed idea: "The land, the mines, the factories, everything that is wanted for living, must return to the community, which by local action and free agreement, must organise free communistic life and free communistic production."—Is this progress?

If the working men of Europe and America had only the so