r Hardie, "the collectivist state to be a
preliminary step to a communist state. I believe collectivism or State
Socialism is the next stage of evolution towards the communist state."
"Every class in a community," he said in this same speech, "approves and
accepts Socialism up to the point at which its class interests are
being served." It would appear, then, that Mr. Hardie means by
"Socialism" a program of reforms a part of which at least is to the
benefit of every economic class. He contends only that this "Socialism"
could never be "fully" established until the working class intelligently
cooeperate with other forces at work in bringing Socialism into
being.[111]

"State Socialism with all its drawbacks, and these I frankly admit,"
said Mr. Hardie, "will prepare the way for free communism." Mr. Hardie
considers it to be the chief business of Socialists in the present day
to fight for "State Socialism," and is fully conscious that this forces
him to the necessity of defending the present-day State, as, for
instance, when he writes elsewhere, "It is not the State which holds you
in bondage, it is the private monopoly of those means of life without
which you cannot live." Private property and war and not the State Mr.
Hardie believes to have been the "great enslavers" of past history as of
the present day, apparently ignoring periods in which the State has
maintained a governing class which consisted not so much of property
owners as of State functionaries; to periods which may soon be repeated,
when private property served merely as one instrument of an all-powerful
State.

Mr. MacDonald still more closely restricts the word "Socialism" to the
"State Socialist" or State capitalist period into which we are now
entering. "Socialism," says MacDonald, "is the _next_ stage in social
growth,"[112] and throughout his writings and policy leaves no doubt
that he means the very next stage, the capitalist collectivism of which
I have been speaking. The international brotherhood of the nations,
which many Socialist thinkers feel is an indispensable condition for the
establishment of anything like democratic Socialism, Mr. MacDonald
expects only in the distant future, while the end of government based on
force, which is also considered essential by the majority of Socialist
writers, Mr. MacDonald postpones to "some far remote generation."[113]
In other words, the position of the recent Chairman of the Labour Party
is that what t