The contradictions undermining British society will inevitably intensify. We do not intend to predict the exact tempo of this process, but it will be measurable in terms of years, or in terms of five years at the most; certainly not in decades. This general prospect requires us to ask above all the question: will a Communist Party be built in Britain in time with the strength and the links with the masses to be able to thaw out at the right moment all the necessary practical conclusions from the sharpening crisis? It is in this question that Great Britain’s fate is today contained.
Footnote
1*. Since this was written the British government has taken a series of legislative measures in the fields of banking and finance to guarantee the change to the Gold Standard. Here we seem to have a “great victory” for British capitalism actual fact Britain’s decline is nowhere expressed more clearly than in this financial achievement. Britain was compelled to carry out this expensive operation through the pressure of the gold-backed American dollar, and the financial policy of her own dominions which were orientating themselves increasingly towards the dollar and turning their backs on the pound sterling.
Britain could not have accomplished this recent step towards gold currency without extensive financial “aid” from the United States. Bur that means that the fate of the pound sterling is becoming directly dependent on New York” The United States is taking into its own hands a mighty weapon of financial impression. Britain is being compelled to pay a high interest rate for this dependence.
The dividends will be charged against an already ailing industry. In order to hinder the export of her own gold she is forced to cut back the export of her own goods” At the same time she cannot refuse to transfer to gold currency without hastening her own decline in the world capital market” This fatal combination of circumstances brings on a feeling of severe malaise among the British ruling classes and gives rise to malevolent but impotent grumbling in the Conservative press itself. The Daily Mail writes: “By accepting the Gold Standard the British government is giving the Federal Reserve Bank (which is in practice in the power of the United States government) the possibility of creating a monetary crisis in Britain at any moment it chooses.
The British government is bringing the whole financial policy of its own country into submission to a foreign nation … The British Empire is being mortgaged to the United States”. “Thanks to Churchill”, writes the Conservative newspaper, the Daily Express, “Britain is falling under the heel of the American bankers”. The Daily Chronicle expresses itself more decidedly: “Britain is in fact demoted to the position of being the forty-ninth state of America”.
It could not be put more clearly or vividly! To all these reproaches (which lack conclusions or perspectives) Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, replies to the effect that there is nothing else for Britain to do but to bring her financial system into conformity “with reality’. Churchill’s words signify: we have become immeasurably poorer, the United States immeasurably richer; we must either fight America or submit to her; in making the pound sterling dependent on American banks we simply translate our general economic decline into the language of currency; we cannot leap over our own heads; we must conform “with reality”. – L.D.T.
Notes
- The Puritans were those sections of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who considered that the Protestant reformation had not gone far enough. They wanted less ritual and more democratic forms of church organization. Their opposition to bishops was of a piece with their political opposition to the rule of monarchy, an intellectual opposition to reliance on tradition and superstition, and a social ethic which combined a belief in the virtues of work and individual small-ownership. They were in effect the English bourgeoisie and provided the ideology of the various opposition groups in the 1640 Revolution.
- Quoted in M. Beer, A History of British Socialism (1919), Vol.1, p.283, from Quarterly Review, June-August 1826, pp.92-9
- On July 1 1911 a German warship visited the Moroccan port of Agadir allegedly to protect German interests against French expansion. The British government threatened action against a German presence so close to Gibraltar, and the threat of imperialist war was averted by a deal under which Germany was conceded part of French Congo to compensate for her withdrawal from Morocco.
- The first political movement of the British working class. Chartism took up the traditional demands of universal manhood suffrage and other Parliamentary reforms, and tried to achieve them by methods including petitions, strikes and armed insurrection during the period from 1837 to 1848. The strikers were beaten back to work and the insurrectionists were transported to Australia. The three petitions presented to Parliament in the period had enormous working class support, but were contemptuously rejected with large displays of force and arguments about the sanctity of property and the constitution.
- The Manchester school of economics represented the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie at the height of British economic supremacy in the mid-19th century. It comprised an extreme form of laissez-faire, considering that prosperity would follow the lifting of all barriers to capitalist enterprise. Its most famous exponents were the Liberal politicians Richard Cobden, a calico printer, and John Bright, partner in a firm of cotton spinners. Its policies triumphed with the lifting of virtually all British tariff barriers in the 1840s, culminating in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.
- The demand to put an end to the system whereby seats in Parliament could be bought and tiny groups could elect MPs came to a head with the election of a reforming Whig government in 1830. Under intense popular pressure, and the threat to flood the House of Lords with new peers, a measure was passed abolishing the worst of the “rotten boroughs” and extending the franchise to some of the middle class.
- The issue of Irish Home Rule and the support for it by the Liberal Party leadership, especially Gladstone, resulted in this break-away by the more pro-imperialist Liberals led by Joseph Chamberlain, who set up the Unionist Party and ultimately united with the Conservatives.
CHAPTER II Mr. Baldwin and … Gradualness
On 12th March of this year [1925] Mr. Baldwin, the British prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, delivered a long speech on Britain’s future to a Conservative audience at Leeds. This speech, like many other of Mr. Baldwin’s public utterances, was pervaded with anxiety.
We consider that from the point of view of Mr. Baldwin’s party such anxiety is entirely well-founded. We for our part shall approach these same questions from rather a different angle. Mr. Baldwin is afraid of socialism and in his demonstrations of the dangers and difficulties attending the road to socialism Mr. Baldwin made a somewhat unexpected attempt to gain support from the author of this book. This gives us, we hope, a right to reply to Mr. Baldwin without risk of being accused of interfering in Great Britain’s internal affairs.
Mr. Baldwin considers, and not without reason, that the greatest danger to the regime he supports is the growth of the Labour Party. He hopes, of course, for victory, since “our (the Conservatives’) principles are in closer accord with the character and traditions of our people than any traditions or any principles of violent change.” The Conservative leader nonetheless reminds his audience that the verdict of the last election was not the final one.
Mr. Baldwin is convinced, of course, that socialism is not practicable. But as he is in a rather confused state of mind and as, in addition, he is addressing an audience already convinced of the impracticability of socialism, Mr. Baldwin’s arguments to this effect are not distinguished by great originality. He reminds his Conservative audience that children are born neither free, nor equal nor as brothers.
He addresses this question to each mother at the meeting: were her children born equal? The self-satisfied laughter of his audience was his answer. To be sure, the mass of the British people had heard the same answer from the spiritual great-great-grandfathers of Baldwin, in reply to their demand for the right to freedom of belief and to be allowed to set up their church as they wished. The same arguments were later brought against equality before a court, and later, not at all so long ago, against universal suffrage.
People are not born equal, Mr. Baldwin; why then do they have to answer before one and the same court, according to the same law? One could have objected to Mr. Baldwin that although children are not born exactly alike a mother normally feeds her dissimilar children alike at the table, and makes sure, if she can, that they all have a pair of shoes on their feet. A bad stepmother, of course, might well act differently.
One could have explained to Mr. Baldwin that socialism is concerned not with the creation of anatomical. physiological and psychical equality, but tries only to guarantee all people similar material conditions of existence.
But we shall not weary our readers with further exposition of these elementary ideas: Mr. Baldwin can himself, if he is interested, turn to the relevant sources; and as his world-outlook inclines him towards ancient and purely British authors we could recommend to him old Robert Owen who, it is true, had no understanding whatsoever of the class dynamics of capitalist society, but in whose
