A Socialist Describes Her Own Political Journey

Beatrice Webb (1858–1943) was a cofounder of the London School of Economics. In the course of research into the urban poor of London, she met her future husband, Sidney, with whom she would engage in a range of social reform efforts. From 1905 to 1909, she worked on the Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws and recommended the social safety net of a welfare state. Webb and her husband also wrote several works on socialism, trade unions, and other topics, and she is credited with inventing the term collective bargaining. Webb’s meditations on becoming a Socialist highlight not only a sense of social crisis, but her firm belief that socialism would provide an important remedy to many of the problems plaguing nineteenth-century Britain.

The industrial revolution in Britain, which had its most intense phase in the latter end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, cast out of our rural and urban life the yeoman cultivator and the copyholder, the domestic manufacturer and the independent handicraftsman, all of whom owned the instruments by which they earned their livelihood; and gradually substituted for them a relatively small body of capitalist entrepreneurs employing at wages an always multiplying mass of propertyless men, women and children, struggling, like rats in a bag, for the right to live. This bold venture in economic reconstruction had now been proved to have been, so it seemed to me, at one and the same time, a stupendous success and a tragic failure. The accepted purpose of the pioneers of the new power-driven machine industry was the making of pecuniary profit; a purpose which had been fulfilled, as Dr. Johnson observed about his friend Thrale’s brewery, “beyond the dreams of avarice.” Commodities of all sorts and kinds rolled out from the new factories at an always accelerating speed with ever falling costs of production, thereby promoting what Adam Smith had idealized as The Wealth of Nations. The outstanding success of this new system of industry was enabling Great Britain, through becoming the workshop of the world, to survive the twenty years’ ordeal of the Napoleonic Wars intact, and not even invaded, whilst her ruling oligarchy emerged in 1815 as the richest and most powerful government of the time.

On the other hand, that same revolution had deprived the manual workers — that is, four-fifths of the people of England — of their opportunity for spontaneity and freedom of initiative in production. It had transformed such of them as had been independent producers into hirelings and servants of another social class; and, as the East End of London in my time only too vividly demonstrated, it had thrust hundreds of thousands of families into the physical horrors and moral debasement of chronic destitution in crowded tenements in the midst of mean streets. There were, however, for the manual working class as a whole, certain compensations. The new organization of industry had the merit of training the wage-earners in the art of team-work in manufacture, transport and trading. Even the oppressions and frauds of the capitalist profit-maker had their uses in that they drove the proletariat of hired men, which capitalism had made ubiquitous, to combine in Trade Unions and co-operative societies; and thus to develop their instinct of fellowship, and their capacity for representative institutions, alike in politics and in industry. Moreover, the contrast between the sweated workers of East London and the Lancashire textile operatives made me realize how the very concentration of wage-earners in the factory, the ironworks and the mine had made possible, in their cases, what the sweater’s workshop, the independent craftsman’s forge and the out-worker’s home had evaded, namely, a collective regulation of the conditions of employment, which, in the Factory Acts and Mines Regulation Acts3 on the one hand, and in the standard rates of wage and the normal working day of the Trade Unions on the other, had, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, wrought so great an improvement in the status of this regulated section of the World of Labor. It was, in fact, exactly this collective regulation of the conditions of employment, whether by legislative enactment or by collective bargaining, that had raised the cotton operatives, the coal-miners and the workers of the iron trades into an effective democracy; or, at least, into one which, in comparison with the entirely unorganized workers of East London, was eager for political enfranchisement and education; and which, as the chapels, the co-operative societies and the Trade Unions had demonstrated, was capable of self-government. I wished to probe further this contrast between the wage-earners who had enjoyed the advantages of collective regulation and voluntary combinations, and those who had been abandoned to the rigors of unrestrained individual competition. But I wanted also to discover whether there was any practicable alternative to the dictatorship of the capitalist in industry, and his reduction of all the other participants in production to the position of subordinate “hands.” For it was persistently asserted that there was such an alternative. In this quest I did not turn to the socialists. Fabian Essays4 were still unwritten and unpublished; and such socialists as I had happened to meet at the East End of London belonged to the Social Democratic Federation, and were at that time preaching what seemed to me nothing but a catastrophic overturning of the existing order, by forces of whose existence I saw no sign, in order to substitute what appeared to me the vaguest of incomprehensible utopias.

There was, however, another alternative lauded by idealists of all classes: by leading Trade Unionists and the more benevolent employers, by revolutionary socialists and by Liberal and Conservative philanthropists: an experiment in industrial organization actually, so it was reported, being brought into operation on a small scale by enthusiastic working men themselves. This was the ideal of “self-employment,” and the peaceful elimination from industry of the capitalist entrepreneur; to be secured by the manual workers themselves acquiring the ownership, or at any rate the use, of the capital, and managing the industry by which they gained their livelihood. It was this ideal, so I was told, that animated the Co-operative Movement in the North of England and the Lowlands of Scotland — a movement barely represented in the London that I knew.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS