The trade unions will in the future become schools for educating the proletariat in the spirit of socialist industry. Their future role will therefore be immense. But at present they are in an undoubted impasse. There is no solution to it through palliatives and half-measures. The decay of British capitalism inevitably gives rise to the impotence of the trade unions. Only a revolution can save the British working class and with it its organizations.
In order to take power it is essential for the proletariat to have a revolutionary party at its head. To make trade unions equal to their future role they must be freed from their conservative functionaries, from superstitious dimwits who are waiting for “peaceful” miracles from god knows where and finally, simply from the agents of big capital and renegades after the Thomas style.
The reformist, opportunist, liberal Labour Party can only weaken the trade unions by paralysing the initiative of the masses. A revolutionary Labour party resting upon the trade unions will become in turn a powerful instrument for their recovery and resurgence.
In the compulsory, anti-Liberal, “despotic” collection of the political levies there is contained, like the future stem and car in a grain of wheat, all those methods of Bolshevism against which MacDonald never tires of sprinkling the holy water of his own indignant narrow-mindedness. The working class has the right and the duty to set its own considered class will above all the fictions and sophisms of bourgeois democracy.
It must act in the spirit of the revolutionary self-confidence that Cromwell fostered in the young English bourgeoisie. The raw Puritan recruits were, as we have said, inspired thus by Cromwell: “I will not cozen you with perplexed expressions in my commission about fighting for King and Parliament. If the King chanced to he in the body of the enemy, I would as soon discharge my pistol upon him as upon any private man; and if your consciences will not let you do the like, I advise you not to enlist yourselves under me.”
It is not bloodthirstiness nor despotism that sounds in these words but the awareness of a great historical mission which affords the right to annihilate all obstacles in its path. The young progressive class, sensing its vocation for the first time, speaks through the lips of Cromwell.
If one is seeking national traditions then the British proletariat should borrow this spirit of self-confidence and aggressive courage from the old Independents. The MacDonalds, Webbs, Snowdens and others have taken over from Cromwell’s comrades-in-arms only their religious prejudices and combine them with a purely Fabian cowardice.
The proletarian vanguard has to combine the Independents’ revolutionary courage with a materialist clarity of world-outlook.
The British bourgeoisie takes unerring stock of the fact that the chief danger threatens it from the quarter of the trade unions and that only under the pressure from these organizations can the Labour Party, having replaced its leadership, turn itself into a revolutionary force.
One of the latest methods of struggle against the trade unions is the independent organization of administrative and technical staff (technicians, engineers, managers, supervisors and so forth) as a “third party in industry”. The Times is conducting a very clever and a very ingenious struggle against the theory of “the unity of interests between mental and manual workers”. In this as in other cases the bourgeois politicians make very skilful use of the ideas of Fabianism which had been suggested by themselves.
The opposition of labour to capital would be disastrous to national development, says The Times, in concert with all the Labour Party leaders, and from this draws the conclusion: engineers, managers, administrators and technicians who stand between capital and labour are best of all capable of assessing the interests of industry “as a whole” and of introducing peace into the relations between the hirers and the hired. For just this reason administrative and technical staff must be set apart as a third party of industry.
In essence, The Times here goes wholly to meet the Fabians. The position in principle of these latter is directed in a reactionary and Utopian fashion against the class struggle and above all coincides with the social position of the petty-bourgeois or middle bourgeois intellectual, the engineer or the administrator who stands between capital and labour, being to all effects a tool in the capitalists” hinds, but wants to imagine himself to be independent.
The more he emphasizes his independence from proletarian, organizations, the more completely he falls into the bondage of capitalist organizations. We can predict without difficulty that Fabianism, as it is displaced from the trade unions and the Labour Party, will increasingly merge its destiny with the destiny of the intermediate elements of the industrial, commercial and state bureaucratic apparatus. The Independent Labour Party will after its current momentary upturn he inevitably cast down and, as the “third party in industry”, will end up entangled between the feet of capital and labour.
Notes
- The Trade Union (Amendment) Act of 1913, allowing unions to collect political contributions from members who did not object, was one of the few measures secured by the Labour Party in Parliament before the 1920s.
- Osborne was a Liberal Party agent and member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants who proceeded successfully against his union taking political contributions from him. This aroused a depth of feeling against the courts in the working class movement comparable to the effect of the Taff Vale decision of 1901. Though it caused considerable financial difficulties it was effectively reversed by the 1913 Act.
- The advocacy of duplicity in political matters allegedly advocated by Niccolo Machiavelli (1467-1527) in his book The Prince (1513).
CHAPTER VIII Prospects
Arising out of the fact that Mrs. Lloyd George, the wife of the former Premier, lost a valuable necklace, the Daily Herald, the organ of the Labour Party, meditated on the Liberal leaders who go over to the side of the enemy and give their wives valuable necklaces. The leader-writer of the paper came to the following instructive conclusion on this matter, “The existence of the Labour Party depends on its success in restraining the workers’ leaders from following this same disastrous road.”
Arthur Ponsonby, a, hopeless Liberal, who even in the ranks of the Labour Party has not ceased to be a Liberal, in the same number of the paper gives himself over to reflections on how the Liberal leaders, Asquith and Lloyd George, ruined the great Liberal Party. “Yes”, the leader-writer repeats after him “the Liberal leaders have changed their simple habits and manners for the manner of life of the wealthy with whom they continually associate; they have assimilated arrogance in reference to the lower orders”, and so on.
One would have thought that there was nothing astonishing in the fact that Liberal leaders, in other words, of one of the two bourgeois parties, lead a bourgeois style of life. But for the Liberals in the Labour Party, Liberalism is represented as an abstract system of high ideas and Liberal Ministers who buy their wives necklaces are represented as traitors to the ideas of Liberalism.
The reflection on how to save the workers’ leaders from following this disastrous road is, however, more instructive. It is absolutely clear that these considerations are timid and stammering warnings to the semi-Liberal Labour leaders on the part of the semi-Liberal Labour journalists who have to reckon with the mood of its working-class readers. One can without difficulty imagine the careerist depravity which rules among the ministerial upper ten of the Labour Party!
It is enough to mention that Mrs. Lloyd George herself, in a letter of protest to the editor of the Daily Herald, herself alluded to one or two facts like the “regal” present received by MacDonald from his capitalist friend. After these recollections the editors immediately bit their tongues.
It is wretchedly puerile to imagine that the conduct of the Labour Party leaders can be regulated by cautionary tales of Lloyd George’s wife’s necklace and that politics can in general be guided by abstract moral prescriptions. On the contrary, the morals of a class, its party and its leaders derive from politics taken in the broadest historical sense of the word. This is nowhere more clearly seen than in the organizations of the British working class.
The Daily Herald has hit upon the idea of the harmful effect that hobnobbing with the bourgeoisie has upon the worldly morals of “leaders”. But this of course is wholly dependent upon the political attitude towards the bourgeoisie.
If they stand on the position of an implacable class struggle there will be no place for any kind of hail-fellow-well-met relations: Labour leaders will not yearn to be in bourgeois circles nor will the bourgeoisie let them in.
But the leaders of the Labour Party defend the idea of the collaboration of classes and the rapprochement of their leaders. “Co-operation and mutual trust between employers and workers is the essential condition for the well-being of the country” – so, for example, Mr. Snowden taught at one of the parliamentary sittings this year. We hear similar speeches from Clynes, the Webbs and all the other leading lights. The trade union leaders adopt the same standpoint: all we hear from them is the necessity of frequent meetings between employers and workers’ representatives around a common table.
Yet at the same time the policy of a perpetual “amicable” dialogue of the workers’ leaders with bourgeois businessmen in the quest for common ground, that is to say, the setting aside of what distinguishes the one from the other, presents, as we have heard from the Daily Herald, a danger not only to the morals of the leaders
