In 1920, Lansbury continued, all the workers who were serving in the army were included among those insured because the government was at the time not quite sure whether they would turn their rifles in the direction desirable to the government (The Times, 10th March 1925). After these words the parliamentary report records: “cheers from Opposition benches” that is from the Labour Party, and cries of “Oh!” on the government benches.
Lansbury does not believe in revolutionary force. But he nevertheless recognizes following Lord Derby, that a fear of revolutionary force brought about a law on state insurance for the unemployed. Lansbury is conducting a struggle against attempts to repeal this law; consequently be believes that a law brought about through fear of revolutionary force is bringing a certain benefit to the working class. So the benefit of revolutionary force is hereby proved virtually mathematically. For, with respect to Mr. Lansbury, if there were not acts of force there would be no fear of it.
If there were not a real possibility (and necessity) of turning rifles against the government in certain circumstances then the government would have no grounds to fear it. Consequently Lansbury’s so-called disbelief in force is the purest delusion. In practice he makes use of this force, in the form of an argument, at least every day. Even more does he enjoy in practice the conquests of the revolutionary force of past decades and centuries.
He merely refuses to draw the threads of his ideas together. He rejects revolutionary force for the seizure of power, that is to say for the complete liberation of the proletariat. But in struggles that do not transcend the bounds of bourgeois society he is perfectly amenable to force and makes use of it. Mr. Lansbury is for retail but against wholesale force. He resembles the vegetarian who accepts duck or rabbit meat with equanimity but rejects the slaughter of larger animals with righteous indignation.
We can foresee, however, that Mr. Lansbury or his more diplomatic and more hypocritical fellow-thinkers will object: yes, against a fascist regime or any sort of despotic government, perhaps we won’t argue: well, in the end a certain degree of force might be permissible; but it is quite impermissible under a regime of democracy. We for our part would right away register this objection as a surrender of a position of principle, for we were originally talking not about under what conditions force is permissible, or expedient, but whether it is ever permissible taken from an abstract, Humanitarian-Christian-socialist point of view.
When we are told that revolutionary force is impermissible only under a regime of political democracy then the question is thereby transferred to another plane. This does not however mean that democratic opponents of force are more profound and cleverer than the Christian-humanitarian ones. Here we can without difficulty be convinced that this is not so.
Is it indeed true that the question of the expediency and permissibility of revolutionary force is decided by reference to the greater or lesser “democraticness” of the forms of the rule of the bourgeoisie? Such a formula is wholly refuted by historical experience. The struggle between the revolutionary and the peaceful legalistic reformist tendency within the workers’ movement did riot at all begin from the moment a republic was established or universal suffrage introduced.
In the era of Chartism and right up to 1868 workers in Britain were utterly deprived of the vote, that is, of the basic implement of “peaceful” development. Nonetheless, the Chartist movement was split between the supporters of physical force whom the masses followed, and the supporters of moral force, predominantly petty-bourgeois intellectuals and labour aristocrats.
In Hohenzollern Germany. [3] With its impotent parliament a struggle within social democracy took place between the supporters of parliamentary reforms and the proponents of a revolutionary general strike. And finally even in Tsarist Russia under the June 3rd regime [4] the Mensheviks [5] liquidated revolutionary methods of struggle under the slogan of a struggle for legality.
Thus to invoke the bourgeois republic or universal suffrage as the basic reformist and legalist argument is a product of theoretical narrowness, a short memory or pure hypocrisy. Legalistic reformism in its true essence signifies the subservience of slaves to the laws and institutions of the slave-owners. Whether universal suffrage forms one of these institutions or not and whether they are crowned by a king or a president are for the opportunist questions of a secondary nature. He always goes on his knees before the idol of the bourgeois state and agrees to proceed towards his “ideal” by no other way than through the asses’ gate built for him by the bourgeoisie. But the gate is built so that it is impossible to pass through it.
What is political democracy and where does it start from? In other words, where, which countries, does the ban on force cover? Can for example a state be called a democracy where there is a monarchy and an aristocratic chamber?
Is it permissible to adopt revolutionary methods to topple these institutions? To this the answer may be made that the British House of Commons has sufficient power to abolish royalty and the House of Lords should it find this necessary, so that the working class has a peaceful way of completing a democratic regime in its country. Let us allow this for the moment. But what is the position with the House of Commons itself? Can this institution really be called democratic, even from a formal point of view?
Not in the slightest. Considerable groups of the population are deprived of the franchise. Women have the vote only from the age of 30 and men only from 21. [6] The lowering of the age qualification is from the standpoint of the working class, where working life starts early, an elementary demand of democracy. Besides, parliamentary constituencies are divided up in such a perfidious fashion that one Labour member must win twice as many votes as one Conservative. [7]
By keeping the age qualification up the British parliament exiles active youth of both sexes and charges the destiny of the country to primarily the older generations which, wearying of life, look more under their feet than out in front. Here lies the point of the high age qualification. The cynical geometry of the constituencies gives a Conservative vote as much weight as two Labour votes. Thus the present-day British Parliament represents the most flagrant mockery of the will of the people even taken in the bourgeois-democratic sense.
Has the working class the right, even while remaining on the ground of the principles of democracy, to demand that the present privileged. and basically usurping House of Commons introduce a really democratic franchise? But if parliament answers that with a refusal – which., we contend, would be inevitable, for only the other day Baldwin’s government refused to make women the equal of men in respect of the age qualification – would the proletariat in such an event have the “right” to win from the usurper parliament the introduction of a democratic franchise by means of, let’s say, a general strike?
If we further suppose that either the present, usurping House of Commons, or a more democratic one, resolved to abolish royalty and the House of Lords – of which there is not a hope – this would still not mean that the reactionary classes which had proved to be in the minority in parliament would submit unreservedly to such a decision.
Not so very long ago we saw the Ulster reactionaries under the leadership of Lord Carson taking the path of open civil war when they had a difference of opinion with the British parliament over the question of the system of administration for Ireland, in which the British Conservatives openly supported the Ulster rebels. But, we shall be told, such a case amounts to an open rising on the part of the privileged classes against a democratic parliament and obviously such a rebellion would have to be quelled with the aid of state force. Let us record this admission but demand here that one or two practical conclusions be drawn from it.
Let us allow for the minute that a Labour majority in parliament results from the next elections and that as a start it resolves in the most legal fashion to hand over the landlords’ land to the farmers and the chronically unemployed without compensation, to introduce a high tax on capital and to abolish the monarchy, the House of Lords and a few other obscene institutions. There cannot be the least doubt that the possessing classes would not give in without a fight, and all the less so since the entire police, judicial and military apparatus is wholly in their hands.
In the history of Britain there has already been one instance of civil war when the King rested upon a minority in the Commons and a majority in the Lords against the majority of the Commons and a minority in the Lords. That affair was in the 1640s. Only an idiot, let us repeat, only a wretched idiot, can seriously imagine that a repetition of a civil war of that kind (albeit on new class bases) can be prevented in the twentieth century by the evident success of the last three centuries of a Christian world-outlook, humanitarian feelings,
