Siegmund Feilbogen, Zur Literatur des Sozialismus (1913)

Siegmund Feilbogen’s literature review surveys six recent works on socialist culture, cooperative organization, Marx’s intellectual genealogy, parliamentary government, agrarian reform, and the international socialist movement. Its unity lies in a recurring critical distinction: ethical aspirations and ingenious programmes deserve attention, but neither establishes economic feasibility or identifies the forces capable of bringing change about. Feilbogen welcomes cultural idealism, documentary scholarship, and practical reform while testing their claims against incentives, institutional power, and economic explanation.

Charles Andler’s La Civilisation socialiste supplies the opening vision. Feilbogen presents Andler’s distinction between democracy, understood as securing the worker’s full product, and socialism, which would transcend meticulous accounting between individual and society. Workers would contribute as genuine artists and scholars already do: for the excellence of their activity and the enrichment of collective life, rather than for personal maintenance. This cultural conception also shifts the explanation of value away from labour crystallized in commodities toward society’s judgments:

Aber eben die neuen sozialen Werte werden ganz neue Produktivkräfte entfesseln.

English translation: But it is precisely the new social values that will unleash entirely new productive forces.

The sentence captures the constructive promise Feilbogen finds in Andler: changed valuations might transform productive motivation itself. He hopes the lecture will inspire students, yet leaves open whether an economy founded on devotion without regard to individual remuneration could exist. That reservation provides the transition to W. A. Bonthoux’s L’Évangile Socialiste, whose author’s direct experience of working-class life yields a contrary warning: disconnecting reward from performance could encourage idleness and the transfer of effort onto others.

Feilbogen treats Bonthoux’s practical observations more respectfully than his comprehensive programme. Compulsory purchasing through cooperative shops is supposed to deprive entrepreneurs of customers and eliminate exploitation; higher wages during overproduction would supposedly clear unsold goods and eventually absorb profits. The review’s satire exposes the distance between this sweeping promise and the modest subscription solicited to found the first cooperative. Its decisive objection concerns the organization of production:

Wer freilich dann diesen Kostenpreis in wirtschaftlicher Weise niederhalten würde, das verschweigt uns der Verfasser, wie übrigens auch bessere Schriftsteller des Sozialismus.

English translation: Who, however, would then keep this cost price down economically is something the author does not tell us—as, indeed, neither do better writers on socialism.

This criticism extends beyond Bonthoux: abolishing profit does not by itself explain how costs would be controlled. Feilbogen thus turns a weak proposal into a substantive question about socialist economic coordination.

Karl Koepp’s comparison of Marx and Thomas Hodgskin shifts the review from programmes to intellectual history. Against the background of Anton Menger’s claims about Marx’s debts to earlier English socialists, Feilbogen praises Koepp’s detailed comparison of value, labour, capital, and surplus value, together with ten documentary appendices illuminating Hodgskin. The investigation matters less for its qualified conclusion about Hodgskin’s foundational importance than for the conceptual discrimination it enables:

Die eingehende Vergleichung so verwandter und so scharfsinniger Gedankengänge, ist ein vortreffliches Mittel, um jede Nuance der marxistischen Mehrwerttheorie schärfer zu erfassen.

English translation: The detailed comparison of such closely related and acute lines of thought is an excellent means of grasping every nuance of the Marxian theory of surplus value more precisely.

J. Ramsay Macdonald’s Sozialismus und Regierung then introduces a parliamentary socialism resistant to mechanical democratic equality. Feilbogen highlights its opposition to referendums, binding mandates, proportional representation, and other electoral arrangements, alongside its defence of parliamentary distinction and effective leadership. Macdonald’s cultural ideal includes educational leadership, responsible party organization, and a state conceived as an instrument of racial improvement. His acceptance of unequal wages and hierarchical relations makes this socialism compatible, in Feilbogen’s judgment, with bourgeois liberal support for worker-friendly practical politics.

The longest treatment concerns Franz Oppenheimer’s Die soziale Frage und der Sozialismus. Oppenheimer proposes breaking up large landed estates and settling agricultural labourers on their own holdings. Removing the rural reserve army would supposedly end the wage pressure that sustains surplus value and capitalism. Feilbogen challenges both the political mechanism and the demographic inference:

In den Tatsachen aber ist nirgends der geringste Ansatz zu einer Schwächung des Großgrundbesitzes wahrzunehmen.

English translation: In the facts, however, nowhere can even the slightest beginning of a weakening of large landed property be discerned.

Large landowners retain command over the rural population, while industrial workers have little immediate investment in subdivision. Nor would providing land for the agricultural population prove that the much larger total population would cease supplying wage labour. Feilbogen recommends internal settlement, especially against Austro-Hungarian emigration, but rejects its elevation into industrial labour’s universal remedy. His judgment remains discriminating: he praises Oppenheimer’s critique of Marxian accumulation and impoverishment theory, finds the revised labour-value theory mathematically equivalent to Marx’s, and ridicules the promise of millionaire-level incomes for everyone.

Finally, William English Walling’s Socialism as it is offers an international compilation of movement statements, especially from English-speaking countries. Feilbogen values its references, organization, and index as tools for journalists and speakers, but finds little scientific achievement beyond distinguishing capitalism-preserving social reform from revolutionary socialism. The closing notice situates Walling among American socialist writers. Across the review, socialism emerges as a contested field whose cultural ambitions require institutional explanations, whose theories benefit from historical precision, and whose proposed remedies must answer to observable social forces.