SOCIALISM AND THE STATE.

 (By J. R. MACDONALD, M.P., in the "Labor Leader.")

Before the war the British Socialist had no memory or experience of the State as anything but the political organisation of a tolerably free people working democratic institutions. The institutions had their defects, but not to such an extent as to destroy their general character. If they failed, the fault was not in them, but in the people who worked, or ought to have worked, them. It was therefore difficult for us to comprehend the deeper meaning of the controversy which went on in some Continental countries between State Socialism and Social Democracy. We know it now.

This war has revealed to us dangers of State authority which have hitherto appeared to be only fanciful. We have not only become familiar with militarism in power, but we have been brought hard up against the crude idea, contributed mainly by trade union officials, that in order to prove their allegiance to democratic government minorities must allow themselves to be suppressed. Thus we have had the sudden appearance in Great Britain of the tyrannical State and the Jack-in-Office bureaucracy. In future the Socialist doctrine of State authority and of the State itself must be defined with far more care than hitherto, and must be rid completely of the idea of the servile political and military State.

A belief in democracy is not the same as a belief in majority rule, because democracy is not a mathematical conception. Democracy is a spirit and method of government confined in its operations by the end which it serves—liberty. It includes the safeguarding of freedom of thought and speech, as well as of majority authority; it protects the individual responsible to his inner light as well as the individual as part of a crowd; it recognises conscience as well as authority, liberty as well as obedience. When perfect, it is a kind of government which has discovered how to harmonise in co-operative activities the apparent opposites of law and individual rights, order, and individual initiative.

After the war we may nationalise the railways and run them as State capitalist enterprises. We may nationalise essential industries and conduct them in the spirit of the Munitions Act, offering "national necessity" as a justification. In form, Socialism will have triumphed; in fact, it will have receded because capitalism will be the ruling factor; and will be strengthened by becoming representative, impersonal, and political, instead of being individualist and unrepresentative.

Of all the form of State organisation, and of all the motives behind State authority which are most obnoxious to and destructive of Socialism, the military State is the chief. As militarism strengthens its grip upon the life of nations—a thing which its uniform failure to guarantee national security has done in Europe, generation after generation—the acquiescence of Labor becomes more and more important to the military authorities. These authorities are not primarily concerned with commercial profits; they are ignorant of both economics and polities; of all experts in social responsibilities they are the furthest removed from the real life of the nation. But, moved solely by their own needs, they would be willing to give heed to certain Labor claims in order to keep Labor quiet and transform Labor leaders into their own servants and spokesmen. The German State shows that a military authority is willing to be philanthropic if it is allowed to exact obedience; the history of the British aristocracy and the Tories shows that they are willing to be charitable if they are regarded with becoming deference and allowed to control the economic life of the State. There is, therefore, nothing inconsistent between a military State and a Labor philanthropic State. In that State there may be a complete system of wages boards, of standard rates, of trade union recognition, of physical health and training, of apparent protection of Labor against capital.

On the other hand, in order not to upset capital, the military State will give a corresponding protection to it in the shape of tariffs or by the adoption of any other scheme which capital may put forth. But the end which such a State serves is not liberty, but obedience; not democracy, but bureaucracy; and if a majority of trade union officials, using the votes of their societies, were to support this bureaucracy, that would not make it the duty of Socialist Democrats to acquiesce. The economic and social mechanism which is built up within such a State is one which catches up Labor in itself, binds it to itself, and confines it by a baffling network of interrelated interests. That is the servile State in its purest and most deadening manifestation. Its general structure will be Socialist, but its life will be slavery. It will secure a certain decree of animal comfort, but not the comfort which releases the spirit of man.

Some of our Socialist friends have not only supported a war, but the spirit of war, and from that they have come to adopt new and very bad standards by which to value liberty and conscience.

To this Socialism must issue a decisive challenge. The conditions created by the war have made us identify conscience with pacifism. But that is to narrow the issue. Conscience made some men fight and restrained others from fighting. The first must have liberty as well as the second. Those who do agree with them do so, not as to whether they had a right to act as they did, but as to whether they were wise to act as they did, and so the door of Socialism is as open to the soldier as to the conscientious objector, to the recruiter as to him who declined to recruit. But Socialism can have nothing to say to him who limits liberty by military expediency, and who defended a needless oppression and excuses himself by saying that social stability required the sacrifice.

Nor within its four corners is there to be found any justification for those who took official positions and used them to impose the will of Governments upon organised labor, who took decisions of policy from other classes and interests and carried them as mandates to Labor.

Before the war I felt that what was called "the spirit of the rebel" was to a great extent a stagey pose. Karensky, in a speech addressed to soldiers representatives put the idea into these striking words: "Are we a free Russian nation or a band of mutinous slaves?" It is now required to save us, but I must be serious. If, for instance, the wider federation of trade unions, which we ought to support, is to result in more centralised authority and the crushing out of all sectional and local initiative trade unionism will become mass without life and the natural conservatism of officialdom— who has not felt it creep over him?— will sap the vitality and blurr the vision of democracy. The organisation of Labor must, like the State itself provide room for the man of free mind and must allow the swelling buds of minority thought to burst out into foliage.

The war has brought us face to with two great dangers—the first that of trade union authority becoming so centralised that Labor policy can be determined by officials; the second that of government by an inert mass—the block votes' decisions of trade union congresses and Labor party conferences since the war created important minorities show this tendency—inert because only at the official top does real responsibility rest.

Let there be no mistaking of the position. Here again we are facing the ubiquitous difficulty of apparently conflicting truths. It is as easy to show the calamity that would follow an independent local control and a weak, irresponsible Central Executive as to point out the shortcomings of the opposite state of affairs. Socialists must devise an organisation which will assign proper functions and liberties to both, so that they can work in co-operation.

From this point onward we can only summarise Mr. Macdonald's argument. He showed that the methods of trade union government necessary in industrial affairs transplanted from the trade union region without modification into the political region threaten the political Labor movement with great danger. The government of trade unionism shows signs of degenerating into a bureaucracy claiming absolute authority not merely in industrial but in political matters. "This has a direct bearing upon my subject. British Socialism has never agreed that the political State working from a bureaucratic centre by political agents can control the factories and workshops. It has always believed that in industrial control the workmen affected must have special concern. Whilst it opposes the cruder Syndicalism of the Sorel school, it need not oppose National Guilds, especially if they will supplement their industrial programme by recognising that the political State must exist to regulate national industrial interests in a general way."

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld. : 1912 - 1936), Thursday 13 September 1917, page 8