A Critical Examination of Socialism

Since the educated socialists of to-day admit that in the modern world wealth is produced by two functionally different classes--a majority who labour and a minority by whom thi...

Christian socialism, as a doctrine which is preached to-day, might, for anything that its name can tell us to the contrary, be as different from ordinary socialism as is Christi...

If we reconsider what we have seen in the last chapter, we shall realise that the moral or theoretical attack on interest, as income which is unjustifiable because it has not be...

I was constantly asked by socialists in America whether I really believed that society, as it is, is perfect, and that there are no evils and defects in it which are crying alou...

Having now dealt with two of those three ideas or conceptions which, though not necessarily connected with the specific doctrines of socialism, owe much of their present diffusi...

The essential feature of interest, as distinct from the income due to active ability, is that while the latter ceases as soon as the able man ceases to exert himself, the former...

When socialism, says Mr. Sidney Webb, shall have abolished all other monopolies, there will still remain to be dealt with the most formidable monopoly of all--namely, "the natur...

For the moment, then, we will waive the problem of motive altogether; we will assume that a society which denied to its able men any pecuniary reward proportionate to the magnit...

The ascription of imaginary powers to the so-called "sovereign" democracy, which are really beyond the reach of any kind of government whatsoever, is, as I have said, a fallacy...

The fact that the speculative arguments which we have just now been discussing are not only irrelevant to the problem of the able man and his motives, but are tacitly abandoned...

In saying that, up to the point which our argument has thus far reached, the more thoughtful among the socialists to-day concede and even assert its truth, I have evidence in vi...

The reader will remember how, having first elucidated the part which exceptional mental faculties, concentrated on the direction of labour, and here called ability, play in mode...

In approaching the opinions of another, from whom we are about to differ, we gain much in clearness if at starting we can find some point of agreement with him. In the case of M...

All radical revolutions which are advocated in the interests of the people are commended to the people, and the people are invited to accomplish them, on the ground that majorit...

The human activities and faculties, then, which are involved in the production of modern wealth, are not, as Marx says--and as the orthodox economists said, whom he rightly call...

Socialism, whatever may be its more exact definition, stands for an organisation of society, and more especially for an economic organisation, radically opposed to, and differin...

Modern socialists admit that of the wealth produced to-day labour does not produce the whole, but that some part is produced by directive ability. But they contend that labour p...

Christian socialism teaches, he says, that the abler men should make themselves equal to ordinary men by surrendering to them the products of their own ability, or else by absta...

By capturing natural forces, one man of genius may add more to the wealth of the world in a year than an ordinary man could add to it in a hundred lifetimes.

What the treatment of capital as income would mean, if the practice were made universal. It would mean the gradual loss of all the added productive forces with which individual...

The fusion of all private capitals into a single state capital would make this solution impossible, and would provide no other. The only machinery by which the more efficient di...

The more educated socialists of to-day, besides virtually accepting the argument of the preceding chapters with regard to labour, virtually accept the argument set forth in them...

They abandon their sociological ineptitudes altogether, and betake themselves to a psychology which they declare to be scientific, but which is based on no analysis of facts, an...

These founded on a specific confusion of thought, which vitiated the evolutionary sociology of that second half of the nineteenth century. Illustrations from Herbert Spencer, Ma...

His theory of capital as consisting of implements of production, which are embodiments of past labour, and his theory of modern capitalism as representing nothing but a gradual...

The word "labour" being appropriated by common custom to the manual task-work of the majority, some other technical word must be found to designate the directive faculties as ap...

The theory of Marx analysed. It is true as applied to primitive communities, where the amount of wealth produced is very small, but it utterly fails to account for the increased...

This book, though consisting of negative criticism and analysis of facts, and not trenching on the domain of practical policy and constructive suggestion, aims at facilitating a...

The more educated socialists of to-day, when the matter is put plainly before them, admit that the argument of the preceding chapters is correct, and repudiate the doctrine of M...

Being of no general interest except as a nucleus of some general movement, we must identify it as a theory which has united large numbers of men in a common demand for change.