Even a blind man can sense here the purely class nature of the principle of personal freedom which in the given concrete conditions signifies nothing but the possessing classes” attempt politically to expropriate the proletariat by reducing its party to nil.
The Conservatives defend from the trade unions the “right” of a worker to vote for any party – those same Tories who for centuries denied the workers the franchise altogether! For even today in spite of all that we have seen and experienced we cannot read the history of the struggle for a reform bill in Britain at the beginning of the 1830s without emotion. With what astonishing obstinacy, what tenacity and what insolence did the slave-owning class of landlords, bankers and bishops, in short, a privileged minority, beat back the assaults upon the stronghold of parliament by the bourgeoisie with the workers at their tail!
The reform of 1832 was passed when it could no longer not be passed. The extension of the franchise was carried out with the specific intention of separating the bourgeoisie from the workers. The Liberals were in essentials in no way distinguishable from the Conservatives, for once they had won the electoral reform of 1832 they left the workers in the lurch.
When the Chartists demanded from the Tories and the Whigs that workers be granted the franchise the opposition of the parliamentary monopolists took on a frantic character. Yet now that the workers have finally won the franchise, the Conservatives come out in defence of “individual freedom” against the tyranny of the trade unions.
This vile, revolting hypocrisy does not meet its true appraisal in parliament. On the contrary, the Labour MPs thank the Prime Minister for magnanimously refraining from tightening a financial noose around the neck of the Labour Party today while wholly and completely reserving the right to do so at a more suitable moment. The drivellers who amuse themselves with the terms “democracy”, “equality” and “individual freedom” should be sat down on a school bench and be forced to study the history of Britain as a whole and the history of the struggle to widen the franchise in particular.
The Liberal Cobden stated on one occasion that he would more willingly live under the rule of the Bey of Algiers than under the rule of a trade union. Cobden was here expressing his Liberal’s indignation at the Bolshevik tyranny implanted in the very nature of the trade unions. In speaking for himself Cobden was right.
A capitalist who falls under the rule of a trade union will find it very tough: the Russian bourgeoisie will be able to tell a thing or two about that. But the whole point is that the worker has a perpetual Bey of Algiers over him in the form of the employer, and he cannot weaken the latter’s tyrannical regime otherwise than by means of a trade union.
Of course the worker has to make some sacrifices for this, not only financially, but also personally. However his “individual freedom”, through the medium of the trade union will in the final count gain incomparably more than it loses. This is the class standpoint. It cannot be leapt over.
From it there grows the right to contribute to the political levy. The bourgeoisie in its mass nowadays considers it essential to reconcile itself to the existence of trade unions. But it wants to restrict their activity to the point past which the struggle against individual capitalists passes over into a struggle against the capitalist state.
The Conservative MP Macquisten pointed out in parliament that a refusal by trade unions to make political levies is observable mainly in small-scale and scattered branches of industry; as for the concentrated branches of industry then there, he complains, “moral pressure and mass intimidation” is observable.
This observation is in the highest degree interesting! And how typical of the British parliament that it was made by an extreme Tory, the sponsor of a prohibitive bill, and not a socialist. It signifies that the refusal of political contributions is observable in the most backward branches of industry where petty bourgeois traditions are strong and where, consequently, a petty bourgeois conception of individual freedom generally tied up with voting for the Liberal if not for the Conservative party is strong too.
In the new, more modern branches of production the class solidarity and proletarian discipline reign supreme, and that is what appears as terror to the capitalists and their servants from the Labour renegades.
A certain Conservative MP related, as if delivering a thunderbolt, that in one trade union the secretary publicly threatened to display a list of members who refused to pay contributions to the party. The Labour MPS began indignantly to demand the name of this impious secretary.
Yet such a course of action ought to have been recommended to every trade union. It is obvious that this will not be done by those bureaucrats who amid the howls of both bourgeois parties seek to chuck the communists out of workers” organizations. As soon as it is a question of the latter there is no more talk of individual freedom: at this point arguments about state security come on to the scene. One cannot, they say, let communists who reject the sanctity of democracy into the Labour Party.
Yet in the course of the debate on the political levy, the sponsor of the prohibitive bill, Macquisten, whom we are already acquainted with, let fall a phrase regarding this same democracy which the Opposition greeted with frivolous laughter but which they really ought not only to have engraved on the walls of parliament but to have repeated and explained at every workers” meeting.
In using figures to illustrate the importance of the trade unions’ political contributions, Macquisten pointed out that prior to the Liberals” 1913 Act, the trade unions spent only about £10,000 for political purposes, but now, thanks to legalization of political extortion, they had a fund of £250,000 in hand. It is natural, says Macquisten, that the Labour Party has grown strong. “When you have an income of £250,000 a year you can form a party for any end you like.”
The furious Tory said a little more than he had intended. He openly admitted that a party is made, and that it is made with the aid of money and that funds play a deciding role in the mechanics of “democracy”. Need it be said that bourgeois funds are immeasurably more abundant than proletarian ones? This alone completely shatters the phoney mystique of democracy. Any awakened British worker must tell MacDonald: it is a lie that the principles of democracy form the highest criterion for our movement. The principles themselves fall under the control of financial resources by which they are distorted and falsified.
Yet, nonetheless, it must be admitted: if we stand by a formally democratic point of view and if we operate with a concept of an ideal citizen and not a proletarian, a capitalist or a landlord, then the most reactionary gorillas of the Upper House will prove to tie the most consistent. Every citizen has, damn it, the right freely to support with his purse and his vote the party that his free conscience dictates!
The only trouble is that this ideal British citizen does not exist in nature. He represents a legalistic fiction. Nor has he ever existed previously. But the petty and middle bourgeois does come fairly close to this ideal concept. Today it is the Fabian who considers himself to be the yardstick of the ideal middle citizen.
for whom the capitalist and the proletarian are nothing but a “deviation” from the ideal type of citizen. But there are not really that many Fabian philistines on earth, though there are still rather more than there need be. But in general voters can be divided into property-owners and the exploiters on the one hand, and proletarians and exploited on the other.
The trade unions – and here no amount of Liberal casuistry is of avail – represent the class association of wage labourers for the struggle against the greedy and, avaricious capitalists.
One of the principle instruments of the trade union is the strike. Members” dues go to support the strike. During a strike the workers wage a ruthless struggle against strike-breakers who are exercising another Liberal principle – the’freedom to work”. During any major strike the union requires political support and is compelled to turn to the press, the parties and parliament. The hostile attitude of the Liberal Party towards the struggle of the trade unions was indeed one of the causes that forced them to form the Labour Party.
If you go into the history of the origin of the Labour Party it becomes clear that from a trade union standpoint the party in a sense forms its political section. It needs a strike fund, a network of officials, a newspaper and a trusted member of parliament. The expense of voting a member into parliament is just as legitimate, necessary and obligatory as that of a secretarial apparatus.
A Liberal or Conservative trade union member may say: I punctually pay my usual member’s dues to the trade union but I refuse the extortions for the Labour Party as by my political convictions I vote for the
