By 1926 he finally abolished every trace of bourgeois democracy and freedoms. Having liquidated the organized labour movement he embarked on an imperial policy, bloodily seizing Abyssinia in 1935, sending armies to Spain and occupying Albania in 1939. In 1940 he led Italy into the Second World War in alliance with Hitler. After defeats in Greece and then in Italy he resigned in 1943. With the defeat of Nazi forces in Italy he was captured and hanged by partisans. [Note by TIA: Actually Mussolini started his career before World War I as an ultra-leftist who became editor staff of Avanti, the paper of the Italian Socialist Party. After the beginning of the war he became a rabid agitator for Italy to enter the war on the side of the Entente after receiveing money from British and French agents to set up a pro-war paper. – cf. Angelica Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel, New York 1938.]
- Guizot, History of Charles I and the English Revolution, translated by Scoble 1854.
- A region of Western France which during the French Revolution was economically backward and dominated by the clergy. It became the basis of two counter-revolutionary revolts in October 1793 and the summer of 1795 backed by royalist agents. The Vendée was not fully pacified until 1800 when Napoleon sent a strong expedition to the area and did a deal with the royalist church leaders.
- Cited in Guizot’s History.
- Ibid.
- Macaulay, History of England (1889 ed.), p.60.
- A group of deputies in the French Legislative Assembly of 1791, most of whom came from the Gironde district around Bordeaux. Led by Brissot, Roland and Vergniaud they opposed the revolutionary methods of rule imposed by the Jacobins. They represented the reformist elements of the middle class and were hostile to the Jacobins’ appeals to the masses. They were overthrown by the Jacobins on 2nd June 1793, and on 31st October all the leaders of the Gironde were executed.
- Martin Luther (1483-1546) was the original leader of the Protestant reformation. Though from a poor peasant background, Luther received a degree from the University of Erfurt in 1503 and was ordained a priest in 1507. Shocked by the corruption of the clergy and the sale of indulgences or pardons from the effects of sin, he nailed his famous 95 theses to the Church door at Wittenburg. This brought him into conflict with the papacy and made him the champion of its opponents and of those who looked to the authority of the Bible, which he translated into the German vernacular. At the Diet of Worms in 1521 he refused to accept the supremacy of the hierarchy over the church. A social conservative who opposed peasant risings against feudal oppression, Luther nevertheless represented an important break with the power of superstition and its political expression.
- This assembly of 1653, named after one of its members, was one of Cromwell’s attempts to establish an alternative form of political rule after he had executed the King and driven most of his opponents from Parliament. Most of its members represented various Puritan religious groups and as a result had little contact with political realities, so it was soon dissolved by Cromwell.
CHAPTER VII Trade Unions and Bolshevism
That the fundamental tasks of the labour movement cannot be assessed and defined from the formal and, ultimately, purely legalistic, standpoint of democracy is especially clearly evident from, the recent history of Britain herself, and particularly graphically so from the question of the trade unions” political levies. This question, at first sight purely practical, has as a matter of fact a huge importance in principle which, we fear, is not understood by Messrs. Labour Party leaders.
The trade unions have as their object the struggle for the improvement of the working and living conditions of wage earners. To this end union members make certain financial contributions. As for political activity the trade unions used to be formally regarded as neutral while in practice they most often followed at the tail of the Liberal Party.
It goes without saying that the Liberals who, like the Conservatives, sell all sorts of honours to the rich bourgeois in return for a substantial contribution to the party’s funds, needed not the financial assistance of the trade unions but only their votes. The position changed from the moment that the workers, through the medium of the trade unions, created the Labour Party. Having once brought it to life the trade unions then found themselves compelled to finance it. To do this, supplementary contributions from the organized workers were required.
The bourgeois parties protested unanimously against this “flagrant infringement of individual freedom”. A worker is not just a worker but also a citizen and a human being, MacDonald teaches with profundity. Quite so, echo Baldwin, Asquith and Lloyd George. As a citizen, a worker, whether he joins a trade union or not, has the right to vote for any party.
To exact from him an obligatory levy in support of the Labour Party represents an act of force not only upon his purse but also upon his conscience. It is after all a direct violation of the democratic constitution that excludes any element of compulsion in the matter of supporting this or that party.
Such arguments must in themselves make a powerful impact on the Labour Party leaders who would gladly reject the obligatory anti-Liberal, almost Bolshevik methods of the trade unions were it not for this accursed need of £.s.d. without which one cannot, even in a democratic Arcady, gain a seat in parliament. Such then is the sad fate of democratic principles that £.s.d. gives them bruised heads and black eyes. Here lies the imperfection of the best of worlds.
The history of the question of the trade unions’ political levies has by now become fairly rich in turns and dramatic episodes. We shall not recount it here. It was only the other day that Baldwin rejected (for the time being!) a fresh attempt by his Conservative friends to ban the collection of the political levy.
The Trade Union (Amendment) Act of 1913 [1], currently in force, while permitting unions to collect the political levy entitles every trade union member to refuse to pay this levy and at the same time forbids the trade unions to persecute members, expel them from the union and so forth.
If we believe the estimates of The Times (6th March 1925) about ten per cent of organized workers avail themselves of their right to withhold payment of the political levy. In this way the principle of individual freedom is saved at least in part. The complete triumph of “freedom” would be achieved only where the contributions could be collected solely from those members who had themselves declared their voluntary agreement.
But at present where there is a union resolution to that effect all members are obliged to pay the levy. Only those are exempted who give notice of this on the appropriate form in good time. In other words the liberal principle is turned from a triumphant rule into a tolerated exception. But even this partial implementation of the principle of personal freedom was achieved, – alas! – not by the will of the workers but the force of bourgeois legislation upon the organizations of the proletariat.
This circumstance gives rise to the question: how does it come about that the workers who constitute the vast bulk of the British population and consequently of British democracy too, are driven along the path of violating principles of “personal freedom” in the whole course of its struggle, while the legislating bourgeoisie and the House of Lords in particular come forward as the bulwark of freedom, now categorically forbidding “force” against the person of a trade unionist (the House of Lords judgement on the Osborne case of 1909 [2]) and now substantially restricting such force (the 1913 act)?
The crux of the matter is, of course, that the workers’ organizations, by asserting their anti-Liberal, “despotic”, Bolshevik right of enforced collection of the political levy, are in effect fighting for the real and concrete, and not a metaphysical possibility of parliamentary representation for the workers; while the Conservatives and the Liberals in upholding the principles of “personal freedom” are in fact striving to disarm the workers materially, and thereby shackle them to the bourgeois parties.
It is sufficient merely to take a
