Basically fascism without the corporate oligopolies.
Indeed! Because the dividend system the OP proposes does not radically nationalize the land of the imperialist, metropolitan country but only proposes to do so for foreign conquests, where the native people there are only secondary shareholders or more likely, not at all, and because it is not a part of a comprehensive socialist system but only a one-shot "buy-off" plan, this cannot be regarded as socialistic, and is more properly labeled "corporatist" in the tradition of Mussolini. The difference between socialism and corporatism is who holds the power and hence sets the agenda for what is to be done with the collectivized wealth of the nation. Corporatists in practice uphold the property rights of the propertied classes in general, though they often may violate the rights of individual property holders in particular, and of course hold a gun to everyone's heads. But the propertied classes as a whole rarely express any serious objection to this power because they recognize the alternative facing them is radical nationalization by actual socialists.
No one tries this sort of universal dividend sort of thing because having appropriated a big share in a collective imperial venture (as say the British Crown owned controlling interests in overseas adventures in the late 17th and throughout the 18th century into the 19th) the big shots will simply apportion it as they see fit without any automatic pass down to individual citizens just for being citizens.
It was I believe Lenin's view that without any formal universal shareholding system, that the working classes of nations like Britain and France, and even Germany or the USA with only a small colonial investment, understood they were better off by virtue of being citizens of nations that collectively exploited other peoples, and therefore their political interests were compromised. Indeed, the reason that mass democracy was feasible in the developed nations was that the working classes were coopted, knowing their wages were higher thanks to foreigners being ruthlessly exploited; this made it safe enough for France and the USA to tolerate true republicanism, and for working classes to be allowed more and more political rights in Britain and Germany.
A shareholding system would tend to reinforce imperialism politically, but it cannot be called "socialist."
That sounds like the opposite. Imperialism artificially depresses wages in the home country by taking control of cheap labor and resources overseas. Imperialism doesn't get rid of the excess production, it takes control of it by force and keeit going to maximize the conquering country's profits.
It works differently in different eras. In the colonial era of the 19th century, material inputs from colonized countries were essential. Driving down the wages paid to the workers who produced primary raw materials did not necessarily drive down the wages of workers in industrialized countries who transformed those materials into finished consumer goods; rather it opened up a margin in which capitalists could make concessions to workers in their home countries, who could have serious leverage on the heart of the industrial system, and with primary producers overseas underpaid, still leave room for adequate profits since the labor input of the primary producers is undervalued, hence the inputs underpriced.
Think socialism for an Athenian style state without forced labour or communism.
Well, clearly your proposal involves some kind of force on the colonized peoples! That's entirely in the spirit of Periclean Athens of course--but after all, while quite a few of the citizen-voters with rights to assemble and govern democratically in Athens were not at all well off, still the total number of "citizens" (always excluding the women of all classes of course) were quite overwhelmed by the number of "foreigners" (whose ancestors had been permitted to settle in Athens many generations before, but never integrated as proper "citizens" of the polis) and of course slaves.
Would you say that if the nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth all voted that the revenues from some institution owned by the Commonwealth collectively should be distributed in equal shares to every nobleman, that that is socialism? Or if the barons who forced King John to sign Magna Carta had included terms so distributing revenues from some royal holdings, it would be? For an aristocracy to be organized on highly democratic terms among themselves is hardly unknown to history though it does seem rather unstable and improbable to persist in that form meaningfully--Periclean Athens did not last very long, nor did the PLC. A few centuries, and they were extinguished.
It might be more workable, certainly on the much shorter time scales we are looking at, for all the citizens of a nation such as Third Republic France, to be shareholders equally in some exploitive enterprise, but I don't think you can call that socialism. Well, you may adopt any definition you like I suppose, but I'm going to offer an alternate one I think stands up well to common practical use of the term (without oxymoronic modifiers anyway, such as Hitler's "National Socialism.")
This hypothetical country would need to adopt a
Georgist economic system, especially the
Citizens Dividend.
The OP is not proposing Georgism though. Properly speaking, that applies the theory that revenue on land (and other "natural monopolies" in some extensions) has a different character than revenue from production, and a pernicious one in the evolved liberal capitalist system, and that capitalism should be reformed by in effect nationalizing all land (and other natural monopolies) and having the state, in the name of the people as a whole, collect this revenue. What is done with that revenue, and how much it is collected versus refraining from doing so, then depends on the detailed politics of various followers of Henry George (or others who arrive at a similar platform independently--quite likely to happen nowadays that Henry George is far less well known than he used to be).
The basic idea is that while revenue from production is earned--a farmer selling wheat has worked, and applied productive inputs they had to buy at fair market value, to produce the commodity and sell it--revenue from land is unearned--the landlord did not produce the land. This is held to have distorting and pernicious effects on the economy as a whole. By the act of the state claiming ownership of all land, and collecting rents for it on behalf of the state and hence (in a liberal system) the people, the distortions are removed while the state has a revenue source more than suitable for its legitimate functions.
If this logic is accepted--and a glance at the list of supporters at the end of the article you cite shows how very broadly it was in the 19th century and well into the 20th--then it applies everywhere the state holds sway. For say the French Third Republic to be said to adopt Georgism, or Geoism or whatever we want to call it, it would apply first of all in France itself. The owners of all land would find themselves expropriated at a stroke, their former rents going to the state. Whether or not these are used for more grandiose government operations, or a residue from necessary state expenditures going equally to all the people in a Citizen's Dividend, or all of it goes to the citizens and the state must find yet other revenue sources for operations, would all be options different Georgists proposed, along with the idea of collecting only partial rents. Some implementations would be socialist by my definition, others not, by the way.
Proper Georgism then certainly would be "revolutionary" in its impact, both that it is a major revision of how capitalism evolved to work, and in that it would piss off mostly the same people that other approaches to socialism would.
But the OP says, what if revenues from
colonial ventures were in whole (or more realistically, partially!) distributed to the citizens. Presumably
not to the colonized peoples! The OP is specifically looking at it from the angle of buying off the masses of the powerful colonizing nation politically, so they line up to support policies that more generally have been attacked as benefiting but a few in the colonizing, imperial powers.
Georgism and this have only a passing acquaintance, and there are other ways of reckoning up and collecting the revenues to be distributed besides introducing Georgist levies of land revenue in the colonies. There could be a general share of all proceeds from all ventures, or taxes on colonial operations, or a head tax levied on the a peoples.
(Cash head taxes would also have the effect of forcing people out of their traditional occupations to seek work with wages paid in the colonial legal tender, which would tend to be otherwise hard to come by, and this was in fact a common practice in colonial holdings OTL, as it forced the natives to show up and work in mines and on plantations owned by the colonizers. It is often argued that colonies generally ran at a loss and were thus irrational pursuits for the European powers of the late 19th century, but I suspect this argument does not take into account the private profits the colonial system was really designed to enhance. It may well be that the ruling states spent more money than the state regime there collected in revenue, but I suspect these deficits were far more than offset in private incomes).
In any case, if the peoples of the lands being soaked of revenues, whether through profitable trading ventures, head taxes, enterprise taxes, repatriated profits, or some Georgian scheme for the state to attempt to collect rent revenues directly instead of recognizing the property rights of whomever the state deemed the legal land owner to do that, first of all had no say in the setup of this system, and secondly either got none of these revenues back directly, either in the form of funding the local government and its works or in the form of direct payments to each person, or got back in either form only a portion, while people in the colonizing nation did receive such payments regularly, then calling that socialism is to identify socialism as theft, from the poorer to benefit the richer.
It may be possible to show that particular socialist or Georgist thinkers and politicians may have supported such a scheme regarding the colonies--but neither would be happy with someone suggesting this is the sum total of their program!
Socialism is a way of distributing wealth and structuring the economy, imperialism is a political and military policy, communism in practice is a command economy with a dash of Stalin's Imperialism. The socialist imperialists I'm describing have no desire to help "others", there is no internationalist sentiment and the "others" are viewed as irrelevant.
So to you, the word "socialist" seems not to have any content at all. Or perhaps as you understand things, there is a natural and normal way that wealth is distributed and economies are structured, and socialists are all of those, anyone at all, who in any way for any reason seeks to alter that natural and normal way? Because if you don't assume there is a natural and normal way (I don't mean to suggest any opinions you may have as to whether this natural and normal way is good or bad) then it would appear you are saying the word socialist actually has no meaning at all, since at the end of the day every society has some way or other of distributing wealth and structuring the economy, and thus every society is socialist by your definition. If you mean to single any one out at all as socialist, meaning other people are not, they need to be distinguished from non-socialists somehow, so I infer you mean "ways of accomplishing all that
other than the natural and normal one." Some people accept the natural order, and others propose
alternate ways of distributing wealth and structuring the economy. All of these people are socialists, presumably the word seems applicable because they would
change society.
You go on to make it clear that people who have no desire to help others and reject internationalism could in your view aptly be described as a kind of socialist.
Well, you certainly could cite the example of Hitler's National Socialists if you like; you've described them aptly. The question is, is it reasonable to accept them as being in range of people who should properly be called socialists at all? Because if they are not, then we can explain the fact they have that word in their name for two reasons--one, that the German National Socialist Worker's Party that Hitler entered was originally organized on more conventionally socialist lines--although certainly the idea that the benefits of socialism should be restricted to one narrowly defined set of people and indeed they had no regard for the claims of others. And secondly it was convenient to leave the word in there to confuse and mislead sectors of the public they wished to either recruit or reassure, who liked the implications of "socialism," just as after Hitler's fall the regime that ran eastern Germany called itself the German
Democratic Republic, even though there was no democracy there at all in the sense of leaving any meaningful choice in the hands of the populace. If you would argue the Nazis were as fair an example of socialism as any other movement others might care to name because they called themselves a kind of socialism, then would you also argue that East Germany was as fair an example of democracy as say, Switzerland or Britain or Sweden?
I think it should be clear there is a mainstream to the socialist movements, that groups like the Nazis are well outside that mainstream, and that socialists generally do share some broad concepts in common. They don't generally want to monkey around with the economy just for the hell of it, but rather on grounds of social justice, while also holding that economic efficiency would also be better provided by their proposed alterations than simply conserving the status quo. Social justice in turn is generally grounded on the Enlightenment concept of general human rights, and the unity of the human species. There are other approaches and other bases, but we generally find that rather than identifying as socialists, people who want to mess with the economy on say religious or nationalist grounds tend to call themselves something else and not to subscribe to the general pattern of policies we can most reasonably call "socialist."
"Socialism" has in fact generally been identified with democracy, at least in principle, and has not generally been focused on particular nationality, but asserts that in principle what is good for the working people of one nation would be good for all. Socialists are often willing to focus on only their own country and own fellow citizens--but this is not out contempt for or indifference toward foreigners, but rather because pragmatically the working classes of each separate nation have separate struggles with separate governments that they seek to win power over. Few movements properly called socialist have expressed the sort of predatory unconcern with the rights of the colonized peoples you casually attribute to them.
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The scheme might be possible. But given that poor track record whereby so many today claim the colonies were mostly unprofitable and irrational for the imperial nations to acquire, the lesson seems clear that what profits there were to be gleaned from them would have been those that went OTL to private fortunes. To take a great fortune from a few, and distribute it among the masses, is to perhaps have rather little to give to each of tens of millions of people. It goes against the logic of capitalism, which always concentrates wealth instead of distributing it.
As I said at the beginning of this reply, the working classes in the metropolis acquired an interest in colonialism anyway, understanding that the prosperity of their employers was enhanced by colonial profiteering, and thus their jobs were dependent on imperialism--were the workers to loftily do away with it upon achieving power, the industries they would, if they were rather radical socialists, take over to run themselves would often lack either inputs, or markets, or both. They would understand that global markets, including in other developed nations, would close against them and meanwhile the rival nations would take over both the liberated markets and inputs.
Nor would a colonial dividend guarantee the loyalty of all; being given such a concession might merely embolden more radical and comprehensive socialists that they still have little to lose but much more to gain, while the dividend itself, though small by bourgeois standards, would tend to embolden them to more daring struggle, since they have a reserve of income to fall back upon, or pool.