KARL MARX: Poverty, hatred shaped life of a great revolutionary.

 Does the spread of Communism menace world security? Is it a sane political doctrine, or a new form of Fascism? This study of Communist No. 1, Karl Marx, helps to answer these questions.

THIS week, Mr. Churchill told the British House of Commons: "It is in the Kremlin, if anywhere, that the seeds of a new World war are being sown."

 What are Russia's plans?

 How is the original doctrine of Communism, as defined by the intellectual father of the Soviet regime, Dr. Karl Marx, likely to affect our future?

 The world would like to know.

 Marx, the most influential political economist of the past century (if not of all time) died in London 63 years ago.

 Today he is a sort of demigod to Communists throughout the world; to them his doctrines, as interpreted by Lenin and currently by Stalin, are an official gospel with the force of a religion.

 To others, including some non-Marxian socialists as well as many believers in individual freedom, Marx is one of history's most wicked men, a brilliant but depraved apostle of hate whose doctrines would destroy most of the values of Western civilisation.

 Some people believe that the Russian Revolution and Soviet international policy are the living embodiments of Marx's doctrines. Others regard them as a complete negation of his doctrines.

 The truth lies somewhere between.

 But, however narrowly limited is the possibility of understanding current Soviet manoeuvres through Marxian texts, a study of Marx helps to illuminate some basic attributes of Soviet thought and behavior that have puzzled Western observers.

 Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, a Rhineland city near the French border, the son of a well-to-do lawyer and a descendant rabbis on both sides.

 Heinrich hoped that his son would follow in his respectable footsteps. He was overjoyed when at 18 Karl became engaged to the 22-year-old girl next door, Jenny von Westphalen, beautiful daughter of a baron.

 Although Heinrich died when his son was only 20, he had already foreseen disappointment.

 After Karl had gone to the university (first at Bonn, where he soon got in trouble for radical activities and "nocturnal drunkenness and riot," then at Berlin), the paternal letters were filled with foreboding and reproach; for the boy's egoism, for his neglect of his parents, for his extravagance and "wild frolics," for the "demon" that seemed possess him, for fear that his heart was not as great as his mind, for the "dangerous and uncertain future" he was preparing for Jenny.

 Despite occasional "frolics," Marx was already displaying a prodigious intellectual energy.

 In one of his infrequent letters to his father, he reported that during the past term, in addition to reading an astonishing variety of books and writing summaries and reflections on them, he had written three volumes of poems to Jenny, translated the "Germania" of Tacitus and the "Elegies" of Ovid, plus two volumes of the "Pandects" (Roman civil law), written a play and an original philosophy of law that he tore up as worthless, and, "while out of sorts," got to know Hegel "from beginning to end." 

Hegel, who had died only a few years before, was to remain a major influence on Marx's thinking.

 The first of Marx's political articles that got him into trouble was written early in 1842. It was a blast at the Prussian censorship.

 Soon the young rebel began writing for Cologne's liberal Rheinische Zeitung. In October he became its editor-in-chief.

 A few months later the paper was suppressed because it had criticised the Russian Czarist regime.

 Marx, after a seven-year engagement, married Jenny and went off to Paris to study socialism.

 In Paris he swiftly developed from rebellious youth to full-fledged revolutionary, resolved to destroy existing society and bring about a "complete rebirth of mankind." 

In Paris, too, began the great friendship and collaboration of Marx's life. Friedrich Engels, two years younger, was also a Rhinelander, the son of a prosperous textile manufacturer with mills in Prussia's Barmen and in England's Manchester.

 Friedrich Engels' revolutionary zeal had been spurred by the degradation of Barmen's industrial workers and by the harsh bigotry of his grimly Calvinistic father. 

Outwardly Marx and Engels were almost complete opposites.

 Marx was short, stocky, powerful-chested, with a swarthy skin and shaggy mane and beard of coal-black hair. Engels was tall, slender, blue-eyed, fair-haired.

 Marx was grim, brooding, academic, awkward, unconventional. Engels was gay, gregarious, a devotee of fencing, fox-hunting, and other sports, a lover of wine and music.

 But when Engels stopped in Paris to pay a call on Marx in 1844, the two found their ideas and sympathies so closely matched and mutually so stimulating that they talked steadily for 10 days. Thereafter, whether they wrote jointly or discussed and encouraged each other's individual efforts, their lives and work were indissolubly joined. 

Marx was no mere armchair revolutionist.

 In Brussels, after being expelled from Paris, he and Engels joined the League of the Just (soon renamed the Communist League and transformed from a hole-and-corner conspiracy into a propaganda society with unconcealed revolutionary aims) and set about fanning, by means of writing and speeches, the fires of revolt that were to sweep Europe in 1848.

 In 1847, in the "Communist Manifesto," they produced one of the most forceful pieces of propaganda ever written. 

The next year, after the beginning of the revolts and Marx's expulsion from Brussels (in the course of which Jenny, jailed over night, was forced to share a cell with a prostitute), they hurried to Cologne to publish a revolutionary newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

 Engels even fired some rifle shots against the Prussian Army when it invaded the Palatinate. The revolution failed.

 Marx brought out the last number of his paper in red ink; it sold 20,000 copies. 

Years later, in 1864, after the Communist League had broken up, the two friends helped found the International Workingmen's Association — the first International. 

One of his sons-in-law compared Marx's mind to a warship with steam up, always ready to move in any direction on the sea of thought.

 He won arguments — but never any large personal following. He was handicapped not only by his metallic voice and general lack of stage magnetism, but more seriously by his passion to dominate, his fierce intolerance of any ideas or leadership except his own.

 Sooner or later he quarrelled with nearly all of his fellow socialists and other radicals. The failure of the 1848 revolution and the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, into which he had poured all that he could raise on his and Jenny's inheritances, left Marx penniless.

 Banished from Germany, he abandoned his Prussian citizenship. Now, for the rest of his life, he was a man without a country.

 After a short time in Paris and one last expulsion, he went to London to stay. There, determined to follow his goal "through thick and thin," he resolutely refused to let "bourgeois society turn me into a money-making machine."

 Marx was not entirely "practical" in his private affairs; there was about him something of the absent-minded scholar (he had once hoped to become a professor). 

Only once during his 33-year exile in England did Marx grow desperate enough to try to get a regular job: then a railway company turned him down because of poor hand writing.

 Always Marx plodded ahead on his masterpiece, "Capital," reading enormously in many languages and piling up mountains of notes. He worked mostly in the British Museum, daily from ten to seven, and then at home far into the night.

 When Marx in 1867 published the book "to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness, and my family," he firmly but quite wrongly hoped that he would soon be a "made man."

 In London, the Marx family's situation shortly grew so desperate that Engels felt compelled to go back to "filthy trade" in his father's Manchester mill in order to support them all. But the sums he was able to send from time to time were not enough to do more than keep the Marxes alive.

 After eviction from their first London home, the Marxes (with a German maid who stayed with them to the end) moved to a two-room tenement in the slums of Soho.

Sometimes Marx lacked money for writing paper or for postage. Sometimes, beset by dunning or distrustful tradesmen, the family lived for days on bread and potatoes. 

The evidence is surprisingly unanimous that under these circumstances Marx remained as devoted to his family as he was truculent in his relations with the bourgeoisie and rival revolutionists. A police agent, for example, regarded him as "the gentlest and mildest of men" in the home circle.

 Marx was plagued by ill-health during most of the last half of his life. He was tortured by chronic insomnia, inflammation of the eyes, racking headaches, rheumatism.

 THE great riddle of Karl Marx's personality will probably always be in dispute: how much was he driven to his extraordinary life and work by love of humanity, how much by hatred of capitalist society and of its more fortunate members?

 Certainly he kept himself personally remote from the proletariat he championed. 

The vivid accounts of English working-class miseries in the mid-19th century that help make "Capital" so heart-searing a document were drawn, not from personal observation, but in the main from Engels' "Condition of the English Working Class," and from reports of parliamentary investigations Marx read in the British Museum. 

"Working for the world" was one of Marx's favorite sayings, and occasionally he mentioned the service or the sufferings of humanity in his writings. But for every word of such explicit humanitarianism there are a thousand of hatred and appeals to hatred.

 He spoke the word "bourgeois" as though spitting out something evil-tasting.

 He asserted that the power of love had failed to better social conditions in the 1800 years since Christ, and that the "iron necessity" that drives the proletariat to destroy capitalism and capitalists "will open the way to socialist reforms by transformation of existing economic relations sooner than all the love that glows in all the feeling hearts of the world."

 He argued that what the proletariat needed was not Christian "self-abasement, resignation, submission and humility," but "courage, confidence, pride, and independence even more than it needs daily bread."

 Marxism is not to be found neatly packaged in "Capital" — and especially not in the first volume alone, which is all that most people read.

 His theories of history, politics, and revolution are scattered through the writings of 40 years.

 Some of the reasoning is difficult to follow, especially for those not steeped in the grandiose and mystical speculations of German philosophy.

 Sometimes the reasoning in one work contradicts in part, that in another. But Marxs' main conclusions, his fundamental principles, are reasonably clear.

 Marx called his theory "historical materialism." It was the application to history of what Engels called "dialectical materialism."

 From Hegel the team borrowed the notion that everything in the world is in constant flux; something new is always developing, something old is dying away. And sooner or later all this change is for the better.

 Progress is achieved by what Hegel called the dialectic: one force (thesis) is opposed by a second (antithesis), which has split from it, and from their conflict emerges a synthesis containing the best elements of both. 

When the unification is completed, then it gradually becomes old and the process is repeated. 

Hegel, a patriotic State-worshipper, believed that human progress had reached its apex in the Prussian State of Friedrich Wilhelm III.

 Marx held out for one more step.

 "Modern bourgeois society, rising from the ruins of feudal society," proclaimed the "Manifesto," "did not make an end of class antagonisms. It merely set up new classes in place of the old; new conditions of oppression, new embodiments of struggle. Our own age, the bourgeois age, is distinguished by this; that it has simplified class antagonisms. More and more society is splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great and directly contraposed classes: Bourgeois and Proletariat."

In "Capital," Marx set out to show how capitalism (thesis) must inevitably, by its own inner laws, become so increasingly intolerable to the proletariat as to produce revolt against the bourgeoisie (antithesis) and a classless society (synthesis).

 Marx, who scorned other socialists' neat blueprinted Utopias, said little about what the classless society would be like.

 He did not even find it necessary to assume that the revolution would wash away all human vice.

 For him it was enough that:

 ⬤ Most of the world's troubles have sprung from the exploitation of class by class. ⬤ The ascendancy of the working class would abolish classes by making every man a producer.

 ⬤ Abolition of private property in the means of production would mean that no one would have anything to exploit anyone with.

 To be sure, he predicted that after the revolution, while Communism was emerging from the womb of capitalism in a "long and painful travail," there would be a "political transition period" requiring a "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" and considerable inequality of living conditions.

 But after sufficient education and organisation, the no-longer-needed State would "wither away," and everyone would live in peace and plenty in a society devoted to "the full and free development of every individual," under the slogan, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!"

 This vision, the end result of the continuous progress assured by the dialectic, is to almost all Marxists not a hope but a "certainty," for to them, as to Marx, dialectic materialism is not a philosophy but a science, a science of society comparable in exactness with the science of biology.

 Indeed, Marx fancied himself as the Darwin of the social sciences.

 In explaining why capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, Marx begins with the theory, inconclusively advanced by Adam Smith and developed by David Ricardo that labor is the source of all value.

 He went on to develop his theory of surplus value, the keystone of his economic philosophy. According to this view, each worker spent only a fraction of his working hours earning his wages. The rest of the day he works for nothing.

 From this unpaid labor come all profits, providing those needed to pay interest and rent.

 Thus Marx arrived at his picture of society; a host of useless capitalists and landlords robbing the workers of the fruits of their labor.

 Every capitalist, he argued, necessarily likes to wring from his workers as much surplus value as he can; even if he is humane, his competitors force him to exploit. At first he may simply make his employees work longer hours. When the law forbids that, or the capitalist finds that it lessens efficiency, he may shorten the hours, but introduce the speed-up and stretch-out to make his workers work faster and harder. 

What do these things mean for the worker?

 Marx's summation: "They mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."

 Machinery produces technological unemployment. The capitalist accumulates more and more of the profits of his unpaid labor, he buys more and more machinery, machines do more and more of the work, fewer and fewer human hands are needed to tend them.

 Besides, capitalism needs a large unemployed "industrial reserve army" for the times when it suddenly wants to hurl large amounts of its overflowing wealth into new industries, or into old ones whose markets have suddenly expanded.

 Finally comes the worst of capitalism's evils, the periodic recurrence of ruinous depressions.

Marx, although asserting that capitalism tends to give the working class less and less money to buy its products, flatly rejected the belief of labor leaders and other reformers that everything would be all right if employers would only pay their workers high enough wages to maintain a balance between production and consumption.

 Marx held that the prime cause of depression is overproduction, resulting from expanding capital's insatiable urge to find a profit and the compulsion upon invested capital to keep producing, regardless of demand, in a desperate effort to maintain itself.

 Marx predicted capitalism's trend toward concentration and monopoly. "One capitalist," he observed, "always kills many."

 He predicted the virtual disappearance of the middle class, as one ruined capitalist after another dropped into the proletariat.

 He believed that the end would come when a handful of great capitalists at last con-fronted a proletarian multitude, disciplined and united by enforced association in great industries, driven to despair by prolonged depression.

 By that time, too, capitalism would have reached its highest development, as Marx believed it must; its centralisation and productivity would be at a peak of ripeness for handy plucking by the proletariat.

 To Marx it made no difference whether Capitalists are good or bad: they are driven by forces they neither control nor understand.

 No matter how much the worker's lot may be improved, there can be no final compromise; the class war must be fought to the end. The end must be "a revolutionary change in the whole structure of society," or else "the common ruin of the contending classes." 

Marx taught his followers to harness for their ends the energy of class hatred wherever it existed.

 But he was aware that the conditions for revolution had not arrived. The only hope of a proletarian victory, as he saw it, was through a temporary alliance with the bourgeois democrats then revolting against monarchy and aristocracy.

 In 1850, Marx gave the Communist League significant strategic instructions in handling the bourgeoisie: "In the event of a struggle against a common foe . . the interests of both parties coincide for the moment . . .

 "During the struggle and after the struggle . . the workers must at every opportunity put forth their own demands alongside those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers the moment the democratic citizens set about taking over the government . . . 

"From the first moment of victory our distrust must no longer be directed against the vanquished reactionary party, but against our previous allies, against the party which seeks to exploit the common victory for itself alone " 

The "Manifesto" laid out the goal: "The Communists . . . openly declare that their purpose can be achieved only by the forcible overthrow of the whole existing social order . . . Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all lands, unite!"

 What Marx meant by some of his strategic and tactical statements has been a subject of bitter dispute among his disciples.

 Interestingly enough, Marx did not mention a party in his 1850 address. In the "Manifesto" he wrote that "Communists do not form a separate party conflicting with other working class parties."

 He never spoke of a dictatorship of the party. Of course, just as he believed in the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat as instruments of struggle toward his goal of the classless and stateless society, he believed in a party as an educational agency. 

But he had never seen nor could he have envisioned the kind of monolithic and omnipotent party that rules Russia today. 

As for the "dictatorship" idea, there has long been controversy as to the meaning he attached to this concept.

 But this much is clear: Marx defined freedom as a condition in which the state is subordinate to society, and Engels equated the dictatorship of the proletariat with "the democratic republic."

 What was meant by this seeming semantic outrage?

 Some followers have believed that it meant a political democracy in which the proletariat, grown to immense proportions, could by ballot dictate economic measures, furthering its interests against those of the capitalists. Then the task of the party would be not to rule, but to educate and lead the proletariat.

 Perhaps this sounds like nothing more than New Dealism, rather than violent revolution.

 THE fact is that Marx observed the failure of his frequent prophecies of early revolution and he shifted from the hot intransigency of youth to the involved economic and metaphysical abstractions that make "Capital" such hard going in spots.

 Without ceasing to be a revolutionist, he became more reconciled to waiting and even eschewed the dogma of the universal indispensability of violence, declaring that socialism had a good chance of a peaceful birth where indigenous democratic traditions were as tenaciously rooted as in the Netherlands, England, and the U.S. 

Eventually, struggles inside the First International put before Marx and Engels the unpleasant alternatives of concentrating on its affairs to the neglect of study and writing or of letting dominance pass to the Russian anarchist, Bakunin, an advocate of direct and violent action without reference to political conditions.

 Thereupon Marx and Engels sent the International to the U.S. to die, which it did.

 In 1889, with Engels' blessing and under the leadership of some of Marx's disciples, the Second International was founded. 

The Second International placed its faith in slow accretions of power by the proletariat, which would build a new socialist society inside the shell of the old. 

The socialist task, therefore, was to teach and preach the inevitable coming of a classless society by almost automatic evolution.

 World War I laid the Second International low.

 Another interpretation of Marx was made by V. I. Lenin for use in the country Marx had regarded as the least hopeful prospect for socialist revolution.

 By its use Lenin organised the Bolshevik Party, captured power, and founded the Soviet state, which he called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and, when he was being more accurate, the dictatorship of the Communist Party.

There is no record that he ever disputed a statement of Marx's. But to square all of Lenin with all of Marx is extremely difficult.

 Lenin regarded the party as an elite of hardened professional revolutionaries capable of knowing the relatively backward workers' interests better than the workers themselves. It must therefore be justified in using and means to make its will prevail. 

In contrast to Marx's contempt for concealment was Lenin's advice to members of the Communist Party that to capture strategic posts of power "it is necessary . . . to go the whole length of any sacrifice, if needed, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence, and subterfuge — to anything in order to penetrate ... at any cost, to carry on Communistic work. ..."

 When the saving revolutions that Lenin looked for in Germany and the industrially advanced west failed to develop, even with the sparkling of the Third International set-up in Moscow, he did not drop the power he got under such special conditions. He decided to dig in, build industry, await new tumults. 

War, he felt, must come — "the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for any length of time is inconceivable."

 Lenin was succeeded, after a struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by the latter, whose removal from the party secretaryship had been the outstanding point in Lenin's political testament.

 After a series of purges, political trials, and executions of most of their surviving old comrades, Stalin and a small group around him consolidated their dictatorship of the Communist Party and through it of the Soviet state.

 From proclaiming the goal of building "socialism in one country"— a revision of Lenin as well as of Marx — the Bolsheviks went on to a nationalism so strong that they claimed, with much justice, the mantles of ancient Russian national heroes, such as Peter the Great and even Ivan the Terrible.

 Thus was Marx reinterpreted again.

 During the last years of Lenin's life, Russian writers began referring to their gospel as "Marxism-Leninism" rather than simply as Marxism.

 After Lenin's death, Trotsky, in his attacks on Stalin, began referring invidiously to the current gospel as "Stalinism."

 For a time the use of this word was regarded by the regime as a sign of opposition and disloyalty. Then Soviet writers began referring to official doctrine as "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism," and later as simply "Stalinism."

 This is now an official Soviet term.

 Leninism has been called "the Marxism of the imperialist epoch"; Stalinism may be called the Leninism of the epoch of the party dictatorship.

 Last February, Stalin made a speech about capitalism's doom and socialist revolution.

 Until then he had not talked like a Marxist in any important public speech since 1939, when he said that Russians can expect to achieve a stateless society only when socialism is victorious in all or most countries and "there is no more danger of attack."

 Then Marxism went into a wartime eclipse. Neither during the pact with Nazi Germany nor during the "great patriotic war" did Marx make a happy Soviet symbol. 

No longer were huge posters showing Marx's head a dominant feature of Moscow parades and meetings. Throughout the war his name was taboo in the chief Army publication, Red Star.

 True, Marx's writings continue to be analysed, worked over, dissected, and classified by Soviet authorities.

 But basic Soviet policy is largely independent of Marx.

 For example, he declared that "we Communists do not deign to conceal our aims." But Moscow-controlled Communist parties conceal and disguise themselves, e.g., in Cuba where the Communists call themselves Popular Socialists.

 On the other hand, whereas Marx opposed all reformers, the Communist Party cannot be counted on to do so, as Australian Labor leaders learned when it so embarrassingly endorsed them at the last election.

 Such subterfuges and compromises are mightily modified forms of Marxism. 

Nevertheless, to Russians, Marxism, as interpreted by their leaders, has given some-thing important in addition to the wide variety of propaganda masks suitable for all eventualities of the changing world scene.

 It has given them reason, as the world's sole great "proletarian nation," to be suspicious of nations that are not only foreign, but capitalistic, and has given certainty that they are full sail in the main stream of history, while capitalistic outlanders stupidly row against the current.

 Has Marxism bound Russia to turn on her late allies and organise, agitate, and, if necessary, fight until the revolution has triumphed in all or at least some of the dominant countries of the world?

 Although Russian spokesmen may quote Marx on this point now and then, to try to find the answer to the question in Marx is futile. For Soviet policy is neither world revolution nor simple nationalism; the two aspects exist simultaneously.

 To Russia's revolutionary policy, the nationalist aspect lends a dynamism derived from propaganda about a holy socialist fatherland flowing with liberty and security; to the nationalist policy the revolutionary aspect brings the services of disciples in every foreign land, organised to do Moscow's bidding.

 None of this is simple Marxism.

 All of it ignores Marx's warning that the outcome of human struggle may be progress under socialism, but that it may also be — a striking phrase today— "the common ruin of the contending classes."

 Karl Marx has had an influence so great as to be difficult to explain in terms of his own theory of history.

 Somehow his personality and intellectual achievement seem to loom larger than they should according to his theory, with its stress on broad social forces.

 Few careers pose the problem of the relation of the individual personality to history so sharply as does that of this son of the bourgeoisie who sacrificed comfort and family to the intellectual goal of building a classless society.

 Marx's money worries lasted until 1869, when Engels sold out his interest in Ermen and Engels, moved to London, and gave his friend a settled income.

 Jenny died in 1881, Marx in 1883 at his dusty scholar's desk, Engels in 1895, after publishing the second and third volumes of "Capital."

 Marx's daughter Eleanor committed suicide in 1898 at the age of 43 because of a disappointment in love.

 Another daughter, Laura, and her husband, Dr. Paul Lafargue, committed suicide at the age of 70, feeling that their useful years were over and not wishing to be a burden in old age and illness.

 The third daughter, Jenny Longuet, alone left progeny; her son Jean was a leading French Socialist; her grandson, Robert-Jean Longuet, is a French Socialist writer.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article248500951

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM.

 Vigilance and Faith in Democracy

Professor Laski's Warning

"The essential duty of British Socialists at the present time is to work for the conquest of a Parliamentary majority in a straightforward, constitutional way," says Professor Harold Laski, in a special article in the London "Daily Herald."

THE collapse of democratic systems in the post-war world has naturally tended to weaken the faith of all students of politics in both their validity and staying power.

Certainly nothing is gained from concealing from ourselves that they confront a crisis of the gravest magnitude, and that no realistic observer can doubt the profundity of the challenge they encounter.

But it is one thing to admit this; and it is quite a different thing to assume that the case for parliamentary democracy should be allowed to go by default.

Socialists, of all people, have the obligation to recognise the solid advantages it represents over most of its alternatives, and the justification they have for defending it as, so far in our experience, the surest path available to the conquest of political power.

A country which abandons Parliamentarism does so under conditions that involve a revolution either of the Left or of the Right.

In the former circumstance both the approach to and the maintenance of the revolutionary government depend upon conditions unlikely of realisation save in the aftermath of unsuccessful war.

European Examples.

This has been the experience both of Russia and Germany, and the strength of organised government in the Allied countries stands in striking contrast.

It would be folly to throw away the solid prospects we confront for an alternative that might well destroy the prospects of democracy in the next generation.

This, of course, applies not less to the idea of force used on behalf of reaction. The use of it is possible and in that event, no doubt, we should be ruled, in our special English fashion, by a Fascist dictatorship.

But only economic prosperity would justify this adventure to the masses ; and in the ill-will it would encounter we are entitled to doubt whether that prospect is even thinkable.

Major Disasters.

Were it to occur, every Socialist ought to realise from Continental experience that, compared with the habits of a Parliamentary system, this would be a major disaster. It would end trade-union freedom; it would destroy liberty of the press; it would destroy the prospect of any Socialist propaganda save in an obscure and underground form.

Almost certainly the masses would pay the price of its establishment by the loss of all social legislation passed in the last generation.

The whole effort of such a regime, as in Italy and Germany, would be to consolidate the powers of the propertied classes at the expense of the workers.

Experience Teaches.

The experience of Italy and Germany makes it clear:

(i) That this consolidation can, in terms of modern administrative technique, be very rapidly effected, and

(ii) That it can postpone the prospect of successful assault upon itself for a considerable period.

Duty of Socialists.

I believe, therefore, that the essential duty of Socialists at the present time is to work for the conquest of a Parliamentary majority in a straight-forward, constitutional way. Once that majority is obtained, it is their duty to use it for fully Socialist purposes, and if challenged to protect its right to such a use by all the means at its disposal.

It seems to me clear that such an attitude is far more likely to secure the purposes of Socialism than any alternative strategy.

It throws the onus of conflict, if there be a desire for it, on our opponents at a period when they are least likely to be successful in its promotion.

It rallies to the side of a Socialist Government that great body of middle opinion which is habituated to a belief in law and order. It splits, therefore, the ranks of the enemies of Socialism by compelling them, in circumstances where legal authority is hostile to them, to stake their cause upon a gambler's throw.

These, I think, are the circumstances, in which a reaction of violence from the Right has the least chance of obtaining its objectives.

Appeal To Reason.

My argument, up to this point, has been one built essentially upon strategic considerations. But there are other reasons of importance which make the defence of the Democratic system an urgent matter for Socialists.

There is an unfortunate tendency abroad, both on the extreme Right and on the extreme Left, to belittle the importance of reason and persuasion in the settlement of human affairs.

We speak of war as inevitable; the Right to do so on the ground of some alleged need of human nature, the Left as a necessary consequence of a capitalist society. We speak of dictatorship as inevitable; the Right do so because they see no other way of arresting the progress of Socialism, the Communists because they insist that only force can break the will of the opponents of Communism.

False Assumption.

The underlying assumption of this attitude is the futility of any method save that of force in the settlement of human differences.

I do not myself deny that there are occasions in the history of the world when these differences are so final that there is, in fact, no alternative but force to their settlement.

But I do not believe that the use of force is likely to be successful unless its employment is related to a previously widespread conviction of its necessity; and it is then at least a matter for discussion as to whether it will be necessary to employ it.

The enforcement of the Peace of Versailles by the victorious allies is an instance of the use of force to settle a dispute: I do not think it can be called a striking success.

The Case of Hitler.

The regime of Hitler is an example of the forcible imposition of a philosophy upon a population 13 millions of whom at least dissent vehemently from its implications; and it is, I suggest, obvious to most thinking persons that it will provoke its own violent overthrow sooner or later.

Because the use of reason is the high-road to the consolidation of power it seems to me urgent to rely upon it until it has been demonstrated that no attention to, or respect for, its conclusions is likely to be displayed by our opponents.

No Blind Faith.

This does not, in my judgment, imply that the task of the Labor Movement must be founded upon a blind faith in the hypotheses of democracy.

The old maxim that perpetual vigilance is the price of freedom was never so obviously true as in our day.

But it does mean that Socialists, with the example of Italy and Germany before them, have the duty to take freedom seriously, and to recognise that the secret of its persistence is courage in those whose business is its defence.

Democracy the Goal.

The way to lose freedom is to be careless of its importance, to spurn its opportunities, to belittle its significance. There has been a good deal of that temper in the Labor Movement; above all, as in the case of India and the unemployed, an inertia before attacks upon its foundations which has encouraged the reactionaries to go on with their work of destruction.

It is useless to deny that the next years are likely to be a period of momentous challenge to Socialists. They may well have to prove their faith on the battlefield. At least let them remember that the goal at which they aim is a democratic society; they cannot abandon their struggle to secure it while the power remains to keep the flame of reason alight.

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld.), 13 July 1933 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article183074262

"NO CLEAR DIRECTION."

 Professor Laski Discusses Roosevelt.

CONTEMPORARY America is a bewildering spectacle; I returned to England after five weeks with a sense that here, in comparison, were stability of purpose and direction of effort! It is true that the new American Government is the best since the end of the war.

It has courage, it has initiative, and, in an important degrees, it has good will. But one cannot avoid the sense, as one watches it at work, that it is overwhelmed by the complexity of its task; that it has no clear direction in which it is seeking to move; and, not least important, that the stage of evolution the American economic system has reached is unlikely to permit it the luxury of the wholesale economic reconstruction America so patently requires (says Professor Laski in the London "Herald").

What is being decided in America? Essentially, I think, the present phase is the end of the struggle between the little man and the great combination for the control of the sources of productive power. As yet, in a European sense, there is no Labor movement in America; the trade unions, with, but one notable exception, lack any serious political sense of the technique required for the defence of the wage-earning classes.

Political Issues.

The major political issues are, therefore, what they were in Great Britain when Liberals and Conservatives dominated the scene. The policies pursued by the Democrats do not think of issues in terms of the nation's mastery of its life.

They conceive of the achievement of an equilibrium in which the independence of the small owner-merchant, farmer, manufacturer, or what not, is secured.

But this is a futile attempt to arrest a technological evolution in which the small producer is bound to go to the wall. Mr. Roosevelt is seeking to protect him by a policy of regulating capitalism.

At the moment, he has a free hand simply because the Republicans are so discredited. But his effort depends upon a rapid recovery of prosperity. If that does not come, he will lose his hold of Congress at the next election, and, with it, his initiative in legislation.

In that event his last year of office will be barren; and he will hand over to the Republicans—who stand essentially for big business—a highly centralised political machine more apt to the development of industrial feudalism than the world has seen in modern times.

Workers' Outlook.

The American working man will, under those circumstances, be proletarianised under conditions which will make the task of organisation more arduous and more bitter than it has been anywhere since the industrial revolution.

What I felt in America was that the whirlwind of depression had come so quickly that no Government could bridge the gap between the historic psychology of its electorate and the measure required for reconstruction. That is why, I think, the Presidential policy will be regulation, where the facts require socialisation.

Roosevelt Doomed.

That is why I believe that, despite his profound desire to help "the forgotten man," President Roosevelt is doomed to defeat; he is trying to do with the American economic order things its environment does not make possible.

And this is why I come back to England with a profound sense that our outlook is a more hopeful one. For though the experimental temper of Washington is incomparably better than the reactionary do-nothingism of our own Government, here, at least, the lines of division in policy are clear.

The British people have given their Government as wide a mandate for private enterprise as it has ever received; it is terribly and convincingly clear that it has no notion how to make use of it.

The alternative in this country is not, as in the United States, a policy of limited control. The alternative is a clear policy of wide, and rapid socialisation for which the  psychology of the people is being increasingly prepared.

If there is no European catastrophe, if, further, we can count upon respect for constitutional principles, the next years in England ought to give the Labor Party the most creative opportunity in its history.

Compare that situation with the American position. There are 15 million unemployed who with their dependents probably constitute a population greater in number than the whole of our people.

Great schemes must develop, like unemployment insurance, of social welfare, for which the necessary Civil Service will have to be improvised. Control of banking, hours of labor, property-rights, will have to be invented; and these experiments will have to run the gamut of a Supreme Court which is nothing so much as the final defender of economic privilege. That is not all.

States And Federation

The relation of the States to the Federal Government is largely archaic; yet it will be astonishingly difficult to secure its radical amendment. The temper of the people is ardent for change, but it is still set in an overwhelmingly individualist environment. Labor is badly organised and politically unconscious.

 There is no well-developed co-operative movement. The whole social life of America, in a word, is still planned upon the assumption that it is the fabled land of opportunity. And only the actual vision of America can make the observer realise the volume of reconstruction, psychological and institutional, which the new environment requires.

I did not feel that the American Government has either the power or the institutions essential to the task it confronts. It is still, as a Government, largely thinking in terms that the conditions have made obsolete.

It is a "Liberal" Government at a time when the recipe of Liberalism has no applicability to the issues before us.

Inflation?

It may do something by inflation to relieve the terrible pressure of mortgages and debt-interests. It may ease the tariff-barriers which have so woefully handicapped international trade.

It may establish a sounder banking system and offer a greater security to the investor. It may promote schemes of social welfare on the lines of the legislation fostered by the Liberal Government of 1906. But even supposing that it achieves all these things, it will still have left the effective economic power of the community in the hands of the few.

It will still not have been able to plan an America in which there is even an approximation to an equal claim on the common good.

It is no doubt true that the motives of Mr. Roosevelt and his colleagues reveal a far more liberal and creative temper than those of the "National" Government. 

No Organised Workers

But what is lacking in America is a seriously organised and self-conscious working class which sees the problems of power and is prepared to think in those terms. Until that epoch arrives in the United States I find it hard to see how any progressive movement can have behind it the driving force which brings success.

There may be sporadic improvement. There may be well-meant effort to anticipate and stem working-class discontent before it assumes unmanageable proportions. But there will be no decisive attack on the central citadel of power.

In Great Britain it is toward that decisive attack that we are marching. There is no need, Heaven knows, to anticipate that the task will be other than a very difficult one; the British Labor Movement is learning slowly, but, I think, steadily the lessons of 1931.

But at least the character of the alternatives is with us one that is increasingly obvious. To retain the present social order means to retain the present drift and misery and inability to plan in a wholesale way.

A government of the Left in these next years means experiment with the vital foundations of the national life. We have reached a stage in our evolution where that experiment is the alternative to disaster. And it is because a government of the Left may still be the choice of the British people that I find here a prospect of hope not yet discernible on the American horizon.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article185468576

SOCIALISM LOOKS AT UNIVERSITY

 SUBVERSION BY SUBSIDISED PEDANTRY

— PROFESSORS AND PLANNED ECONOMY

(By SOLOMON BRIGG.)

 (No, 24.)

IN previous articles we have been examining the technique of Capitalism facing this the major crisis of its existence. In turn we have analysed the Fascist experiment, the position of the Press, certain phases of financial control, and the insidious attempt to undermine responsible working-class organisation by suborning responsible working-class executives.

 One of the most recent phases of declining capitalism has been its growing consciousness that an enlightened democracy represents the most serious challenge to the continuance of its exploitation of the masses. In America, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos have brought to literature a recognition of the social necessities of the times, and ripped away the conventional hypocrisy cloaking the vices of a materialistic age.

 In England, Bernard Shaw with his mordant pen has in the "Apple Cart" and similar works, shown the true significance of the social struggle, Harold Laski has remorselessly analysed the political concepts from London University; G. H. D. Cole has advocated Fabianism from the shelter of Oxford; whilst in literature J. Middleton Murry, the late D. H. Lawrence and more recently Aldous Huxley have shown that the intellectuals of the period all realise its deficiencies due to the failure of capitalism to assess true social values.

 Aldous Huxley in "Brave New Worlds" is seen by John Strachey as sending the "long, delicate, probing fingers of his analysis into every corner of capitalist society. Go where you like, 'do what you will,' you will never escape from the smell of ordure and decay." 

That the Australian Government censored this volume from the gifted pen of England's most brilliant young literary giant is thus seen in its true perspective. His Utopia is a repugnant one, machine conceived and machine built, and its automata may well be accepted as the most devastating destructive criticism of the machine age yet essayed in literature. But authority is even more restive under satire than the philippics of its avowed opponents.

 Effective Contribution

 In England the London University has been long a meeting place for intellectuals and social theorists, free to promulgate their views, however dangerous from the point of view of the established order. Such freedom of thought was rightly regarded as the most effective contribution to intellectual democracy achieved in any part of the world. Laski in his recent work, "Democracy in Crisis," felt himself free to pursue his analysis even as far as a consideration of the possible reactions of the Crown itself, and Middleton Murry in the "Adelphi" is free to consider the application of revolutionary Communism to Britain without calling down the wrath of the authorities.

 Professor Albert Einstein, the world's greatest physicist, found sanctuary from the excesses of Nazi-ism in a Chair at Oxford University, and no one questioned his political views prior to his appointment, although everyone recognised that they were not in harmony with present-day Capitalism. Nevertheless, when he appeared in the gallery of the Lords during a debate on the Semitic question, members of that House, models of Conservative propriety, broke the traditions of ages by rising in their places to applaud his appearance.

 Professor Soddy, Professor of Physics at Oxford, feels himself free to advocate radical monetary theories, and even officials of the British Treasury itself, like Mr. R. G. Hawtrey and Dr. Wm. Shaw, are free to enter the field of monetary controversy, expounding heterodox views on occasions in direct opposition  to those of their own department.

 Mr. J. M. Keynes, in his "Essays in Persuasion," finds that "the Economic Problem,  as one may call it for short, the problem of want and poverty, and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle," but if he held the views of Marx he would still be free to practise his profession at Cambridge without restraint. So Marx himself, after conflicts in Prussia and expulsion from Paris, found sanctuary in London, and "Das Kapital'" represents the fruits of his research in the British Museum and London libraries.

 This led, no doubt, to his observation that Britain was the only country in which he had been that could achieve the emancipation of the working classes without recourse to violence but could, in fact, achieve it by utilising the constitutional processes at hand.

 All of which leads up to an examination of the position of the intellectuals in Australia, and the attitude adopted by the University administrators to freedom of thought and discussion. The noble conception of the University presented by Cardinal Newman has lost much of its lustre during recent years. As the economic struggle has intensified, Capitalism has realised the necessity of regimenting every agency to assist it in its fight.

 Politically-minded

 So the University as Australia knows it has become politically-minded in the very narrow sense of the term, and we have witnessed of late developments which show that it no longer can be regarded as an institution of scholarship and research, but rather as a very pliant instrument for the cultivation of a ''correct attitude." It is, indeed, significant that professors of history, and economics in particular, who have shown a disposition to examine facts from a detached intellectual standpoint and convey their judgement judicially and honestly to their students, have invariably been frozen out. In the realm of history, obviously, the man who essays a true economic interpretation of the principal phases of historic development and the motives actuating the leading figures engaged, may be regarded as a "social menace" by those desirous of maintaining the present system.

 If he exposes the cant teachings of the schools regarding the many "fights for freedom" and shows how Imperialism meant the exploitation of helpless colored races, how unscrupulous employers were protected by an equally unscrupulous State when exploiting the workers, particularly the women and children, he is immediately out of court— and incidentally out of a job. Obviously the results of such teaching will be quickly apparent in a new attitude in the schools, and instead of the vicious sentimentalism and gross misrepresentations of facts now posturing in the guise of history, the children who are not destined to reach the higher stages of the educational regime will be informed of the truth regarding the mistakes of the past.

 How many are conversant with the terrible story of the transportation of the early industrialists, who had the temerity to advocate some relief from the sufferings of their fellows? The history professor who deals with even the objective data of the Five Years' Plan is regarded as a dangerous influence, although in every other country in the world this experiment is being studied in order to ascertain the benefits of a planned economy, and already its principles have been adopted in a modified form in the tottering citadels of Capitalism itself.

 Banks' Briefs.

 But when we turn to Economics, the position is even more desperate. Indeed, in many of our public institutions we find occupants of teaching positions who are at the same time obviously in receipt of briefs from private banks and large trusts. How they reconcile their dual positions it is impossible to say, as in a crisis like the present they are called upon to interpret the functions of the institutions they are sponsoring, and analyse for their students the effects of the policy being pursued by the financial institutions.

 If they consent to become paid propagandists in a quasi-private capacity, how may they avoid becoming partisans in the lecture hall? But their position becomes altogether intolerable when called upon in their public capacity to act in the advisory capacity as monetary technicians to the State in defining relief measures. As the private banking institutions occupy the keystone of the present monetary arch their views are impossible of acceptance as the unbiassed judgment of independent experts.

 The Chicago economic professor, charged with being the presiding genius behind one of the most lucrative "rackets" in that exotic centre of the modern technique of speedy expropriation, is, if guilty, merely pursuing the present liberal tendencies of his profession to their logical conclusion. The threadbare plaint of the University pedant that he is removed from the worldly taints of commercialism is every day proving a mockery and sham.

 So the lecture hall has become the forum for the political and commercial aspirations of its dons. If it is intellectually and politically dangerous for a University teacher to examine in a controversial manner the teachings and practices of Communism it must be equally intellectually and politically dangerous for another professor to openly espouse the revolutionary philosophy of Fascism, or advocate the destruction of the existing Parliamentary instrument.

 Labor believes that it should be the function of the University teacher to examine untrammelled every modern political, social and economic phenomenon as it arises, without the interference of any group of muddling administrative penguins. The first duty of every teacher must be that he thoroughly examines all the data available, forms his independent judgment, and is then free to indicate his views. Otherwise he must submit all the objective facts in a dispassionate manner pro. and con., and leave his students to formulate their own opinions. Either method properly handled gives to posterity a chance, but there must be no suppression of material facts, as so often happens at present for the sole reason that such do not happen to coincide with the views of the teacher.

Labor however, must be determined that the channels of true education shall not be polluted by capitalistic subversion, by making the various University faculties merely a convenient method of subsidising propaganda to be disseminated there-from through every aspect of public life. Hitler in his expulsion of the University professors because of their refusal to embrace Nazi-ism or because of their religious beliefs, Jewish or Roman Catholic, has revealed the ultimate results of such a policy. 

Repugnant

 Similarly in Russia the historic pronouncement that the intellectuals of the old regime would provide a satisfactory "manure" is repugnant to our ideals of intellectual freedom. The Universities must remain sanctuaries for free and independent research and erudition, and, with the growing reliance upon technicians for guidance in a planned economy, it is more urgently necessary than ever before that they should remain such.

 Unfortunately Labor administrators in the past have often failed to appreciate the necessity of policing these important avenues by failing to secure adequate representation of working class thought on the administrative executives of these institutions. In the future development of our country this must be regarded as one of the most urgent tasks, and no excuse accepted for failing to carry out the declared will of the Movement in this connection. 

 The true conception of the position of the University teacher should be that he is equal in status with our present conception of the position of a Supreme Court Judge. His remuneration must be sufficient to enable him to devote his time entirely to his duties; and, being thus economically independent, a condition of his employment must be that he cannot accept retainers from outside institutions. He is indeed a servant of society and he should be at all times prepared to give his services to solving the problems confronting the State.

 Apart from these conditions, he must be free to advance any views which his studies inform him to be intellectually and socially correct. By adopting these principles, the University might be restored to its former position of honor in the community.

Labor Daily (Sydney, NSW), August 1933 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article236575880

A NEW AMERICA

 AMERICA remains, after Soviet Russia, the most exhilarating country in the world. It is a whirlpool of ideas.

 It has a receptivity to experiment, a passion for discussion, the intensity of which is literally bewildering. No one, I think, can say in what direction it is moving with any certitude. But that its pattern of life is changing at a speed greater than at any previous period is, I think, equally undeniable.

 The crisis has left changes of profound significance. The traditional belief in the leadership of business men has been rudely shaken. The conservatism of the universities has been greatly modified; even at places like Harvard and Yale intellectual leadership is in the hands of 'radical' undergraduates.

 The emphatic note of all significant American literature is one of protest; there is not today in American letters a single figure of any real importance on the conservative side.

 There is an awakening of labor to political consciousness, slow, indeed, but in a new way profound. There is a new zest among the younger generation for public service; Government work as an official has a new prestige value. There is a new sense of the State, a recognition that the old way of laissez-faire is decisively over.

 One constantly has the impression in the United States that its temper is like nothing so much as that of France in the generation before 1789. Doubt of all accepted values, eager exploration of novelty, a general atmosphere of insecurity, the widespread sense that great events are in the making—these are universal. Something new is being made. The one thing we do not know is the nature of the new thing. 

We do not know because, above all, those in America who have learned least from the crisis are its business men and the corporation lawyers who are their dependents. They are the Bourbons of contemporary America.

 Frightened out of their wits in 1933, now that profits are being earned again, their one anxiety is the repression of disturbing ideas. They are terrified even by the mild liberalism of the President. They are angry at any hint of radicalism from a university teacher. They even believe that the New Deal is, as one eminent professor put it, ten out of the twelve points of the Communist Manifesto. They have no programme to meet the problems of the new time. They hate the trade unions. The militancy of the farmer disturbs them greatly.

 One sound thing in America seems to them the immovable conservatism of the Supreme Court. They are beginning to find democracy a very dubious inheritance now that democracy is beginning to think in economic terms.

 * * * 

THE intellectuals, the mass of the workers outside the old craft trade unions, the bulk of youth, a growing section of the professional classes, not least of them the teachers, are aware that liberal America, the fabled land of opportunity, is in grave danger if big business regains its power.

 There is not, I think, any great increase in a steadfast adherence to Left opinion. But there is a deeper interest in Left opinion, a more constant sense of the importance of its thinking, than at any time in the history of the United States.

 That is not to say that the Left is going to win. Big business in America is very conscious of its power. It is more willing than any similar class in Europe to exhaust all its energy and its ingenuity to maintain it. Its latent Fascist temper is intense: and the vast army of unemployed is a fertile soil for Fascist ideas.

 The appeal of what Mr. Wells calls the "raucous voices," Dr. Townsend, Father Coughlin, and a score of lesser men, to the angry, the disappointed, the half-educated is an important one. Their link with big business is no more apparent to the multitude in America than was Hitler's to big business in Germany, or Mussolini's in Italy.

 There is a new America in the making, even though its contours are undetermined. If liberal America triumphs, it will make a new and fundamental contribution to our common civilisation; for the elements are there of a renaissance of the human spirit.

 But its victory has still to be won, while its defeat might open a grim and ugly chapter in the history of mankind. — By Professor Harold Laski, in 'The Daily Herald,' London.

Daily News (Perth, WA ), 6 April 1937 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article85698508

COMMUNISM.

 A surprisingly large number of people obviously imagine that Communism is of recent origin, and is likely to be of mushroom duration. They have a vague notion that it is a political importation from Russia, that it can appeal only to men of debased ideals and destitute of morals.

 It would clear the intellectual air, it would even sweeten public discussion, if some people who talk ominously of Communism would devote the time they spend in denouncing it to understanding it. It is a fact, which any one may proceed at once to prove, that comparatively few can give an intelligent informed account of this thing to which so many profess themselves bitterly opposed. For their own satisfaction, as well as in fairness to Communist propagandists, such citizens ought to acquaint themselves with the true nature of the doctrine. It is extremely likely that thereby their antagonism to Communism will become more intense than before, but their objections will be based on definite knowledge, not on stupid prejudice. Ignorance on the subject is inexcusable. Communism has a copious literature. Much of it, however, is disfigured by extreme views on one side or the other.

 In contrast to writing of that class there has just been issued a volume which, may be regarded as authoritative and impartial; it will also be found eminently lucid and readable. In the Home University Library series (Williams and Norgate) them is now included "Communism," by Harold J. Laski, (Professor of Political Science in the University of London. Professor Laski's final judgment is that Communism is a dangerous doctrine. Even if the possibility of its success be assumed, he considers that the cost of establishing it would be enormously high, while an attempt that ended in failure might easily come near to the destruction of civilised life. In his volume Professor Laski traces the process by which he reaches his conclusion.

 Communism aims at a society in which classes have been abolished as a result of the common ownership of the means of production and distribution. It believes that this aim can be realised only by means of a social revolution, in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is the effective instrument of change. The world's attitude to these things is extremely divided. Some people do not regard the aim with disfavor, but they deplore the means, they distrust the instrument. Quite a host of people are prepared to include aim, means and instrument in one vehement comprehensive anathema.

 It is desirable to realise that Communism is no mere modern craze. It is old, and has a history that is for the most part honorable. It dates back to the birth of Western political thought. Christianity was impregnated with it. Throughout the Middle Ages numerous sects aspired to practise it. Admittedly it was not practised as an economic theory, but as an expression of piety.

 On the other hand, many able men with no claim to piety felt that the practice of private property led to economic inequality, and that economic inequality was fatal to human equality. For centuries the social structure continued to be simple, and men vaguely sought a solution to obvious evils along the line of ethics rather than that of economics. The French Revolution, however, transformed the worker's mode of thinking; the Industrial Revolution transformed his mode of earning his living.

 Men were for a time confused by the new society which sprang up as a result of the use of steam-driven machinery. The evils of industrial capitalism were discerned by men like Robert Owen, who sought to combat them with moral communism. But, despite Owen's practical experiments, men's ideas continued in a state of confusion. That confusion was cleared up by the advent of Karl Marx. Whether it be counted for good or evil, it is undeniable that Marx imparted to Communism a philosophy, and was the means of creating an international organisation which lays continuous emphasis upon the unified interest of the working classes of all countries.

 Professor Laski furnishes a judicial account and careful analysis of Communist economics; these are almost entirely a polemic in defence of Marx's "Capital." He subjects the Communist "Theory of the State" and "Communist Strategy" to similar treatment. The Communist will talk of the present social system only in terms of class war. His creed is that capitalism must be overthrown, and that it can be overthrown only by revolution. However that creed be regarded, it is impossible to ignore the fact that its adherents draw inspiration from it. They are eager to have the world converted: they are determined to have the gospel preached. People must realise that, in dealing with modern Communism, they are dealing with a new religion. Nothing is gained by dismissing it as intellectual or moral error. The only effective answer to Communism will be supplied when the champions of the existing social-economic system proceed to put their house in better order.

 Even those who reject Communist principles must admit there is much truth in the Communist indictment of modern capitalism. The productive and distributive methods of the latter are incapable of explanation in terms of social justice. Not unnaturally, workers whose employment is insecure and whose future contains no ray of hope, are inclined to succumb to Communism's radiant promises.

 And yet, these promises are as deceptive as they seem attractive. The fundamental defect of Communism is its refusal to recognise that this is a complex world; its problems are as intricate as they are varied. No single economic solution can hope to be all-embracing; no single method of social arrangement will meet humanity's diverse needs. To the average person the solution would seem to lie in more complete co-operation between the economic forces. Communism offers the formulæ of conflict and the class war.

 In a world that is striving to get rid of international war any appeal to carry on a class war is unlikely to evoke a wide response. Communists are not the only persons who are eager to establish economic justice and to increase opportunities for human happiness. Of the vast hosts of citizens who are sceptical as to the claims of Communism many would gladly co-operate in the work of ushering in a worthier social order. But they repudiate the barbarous theory that revolution and war, class or any other kind, are a necessary preliminary.

 Even if these things could be proved necessary, there would still be grave doubts if the political and economic organisation called Communism would be satisfactory. It is significant that, even in Russia, the Communistic Mecca, the movement has been defeated, not by armed forces which capitalism is supposed to be able to command, but by the stolid refusal of the Russian peasantry to play the part assigned to them in the new system.

 The fatal defect in the Communist is his foreshortened vision. The only goal he can see is the dictatorship of the proletariat. The rest of the world, however will continue to reject the Communist doctrine until they can see a good deal further into the Communistic future.

Age (Melbourne, Vic. ), August 1927 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article206166395

NATIONAL GUILDS.

 (By Professor Murdoch.) 

The present time may perhaps be known to future historians as the Age of Bewilderment. It is a time of swift and stupefying disintegrations of belief; a time when the authoritative voices have lost their old dogmatic tone, and the prophets are put to shame, and the experts visibly confounded; a time when the old faiths have crumbled, and the old formulae have failed us, and the old certitudes—the cherished doctrines, the rooted convictions—are torn up and blown hither and thither like dead leaves by the mighty hurricane which has come raging and roaring through the world. Nowhere is this so manifest as in the field of industrial relations. None but the obvious charlatan any longer dares to speak with assurance of what the industrial future may hold in store for us. We know that it will be different from the present; beyond that barren knowledge, all is groping and conjecture. Nevertheless, if we look steadily at the chaos and confusion around us, we do presently begin to discern, or to think, we discern, hints of a certain definite drift of opinion; we do begin to see which way the wind is blowing. In the industrial world I submit that the wind is blowing, though gustily enough, m the direction of national guilds.

 At the risk of seeming to utter the stalest of truisms, one must remark that during the last hundred years we have been presented with four main attempts to solve the industrial problem—the problem, that is, of the relations of Capital and Labour to one another and of the State to both. Individualism was followed by Socialism, Socialism by Syndicalism; and now Syndicalism is being rapidly superseded in its turn by the idea of National Guilds, an idea to which some of its apostles have given the rather misleading name of Guild Socialism.

 Dickens has stated in one immortal phrase the comfortable gospel of Individualism: "Every man for himself and God for us all, as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens." The theory of Individualism was, briefly, that the private employer was to settle his own relations with the employed, while the State stood aside and minded its own business. The practical applications of this alluringly simple creed gave England the spectacle of, in Mr. Sidney Webb's words, "women working half-naked in the coal mines; young children dragging trucks all day in the foul atmosphere of the underground galleries; infants bound to the loom for fifteen hours in the heated air of the cotton mill, and kept awake only by the over-looker's lash; hours of labor for all, young and old, limited only by the utmost capabilities of physical endurance." England, the England that had lately emerged from an heroic struggle for the liberties of Europe turned herself into an industrial hell, so appalling that, though some may still sigh in secret for the good old days before the State began to pry and fuss and meddle in industry, no one openly advocates a return to such conditions. As an avowed creed, Individualism is dead and done with, one of the evil memories of mankind.

 It was succeeded, inevitably, by Socialism; I mean, of course, neither the socialism of the red flag and the barricades and the swift and sudden and relentless seizure of land from  the landlord and of capital from the capitalist, nor the mild, hum-drum, respectable, unadventurous Fabian socialism which aims at the gradual training and equipment of a vast army of State officials; I mean something wider, some thing which includes these and innumerable other creeds, all of which have this belief in common, that salvation cometh by the State, that the industrial problem is to be solved by the action of the State. This is a belief, which no longer animates any large body of thinking persons.

 In France and America Socialism was succeeded by Syndicalism, a doctrine which sprang out of the worker's discovery that the politician was a broken reed and that the bureaucrat could be as much a tyrant as the worst private employer. The discredit into which, all the world over, politicians and parliaments have of late years fallen—whether justly or unjustly I do not pretend to know—made inevitable the coming of some such philosophy as that of Syndicalism.. The syndicalist was essentially anti-socialist; he was 'more hostile to the State than even the old individualist had been. He pinned  his faith to industrial combinations, arrayed for battle against capitalism; and his method was violence. His choice of methods was a fatal mistake, because if the appeal is to violence the worker must always, in the long run, be beaten; but his worst blunder was his attitude towards the State. By taking up that attitude, he not merely threw away an indispensables weapon, but quixotically put that weapon into the hands of the enemy. The failure of the great Australian strike of last year—essentially a  syndicalist adventure—showed many thoughtful men among the strikers where the fallacy of syndicalism lay.

 On the heels of Syndicalism came the doctrine of National Guilds, a doctrine which has made great strides since the war began, and which, as even the London "Times" admitted the other day, "is stirring great numbers of the younger workers, and is receiving quite inadequate notice in the general Press." It has certainly received quite inadequate notice in Australia; we are destined, if I am not mistaken, to hear much of it in the near future. The best exposition of it, so far, is to be found in a book entitled "National Guilds," by Mr. A. R. Orage, the editor of the "New Age," a journal which has been preaching this gospel, week in, week out, these many years. Another book which the inquiring spirit may be strongly advised to read is the remarkable volume, "Authority, Liberty, and Function," by Ramiro de Maeztu, a Spaniard, who writes excellent English, and who seeks to give  the doctrine a philosophical basis.

 A recent article in the "Round Table" points out that the adoption of the Whitley Report by the British Government is a momentous event in the ordering of British life:  "It lays firm the foundations of the new industrial order which the country expects to see after the war—and upon a basis of absolute equality between the two chief partners in the industrial process, management and labour." Now it is true the Whitley Councils are not National Guilds but they are unquestionably a step in that direction; their establishment is one among the innumerable straws which show which way the wind, in Britain at all events, is blowing. The doctrine of National Guilds appears to combine what is best in the ideals of the trade unionist with what is best and most practicable, in the ideals of the socialist; it avoids the fatal error of Syndicalism, in that it clearly recognises the necessary functions of the State: but the name sometimes given to it, "Guild Socialism," is, as I have said, rather misleading, for the National Guildsman has no belief whatever in the State enterprises which we commonly call socialistic. He pins his faith to the idea of a combination of all the men and women—labourers, administrators, hand-workers, brain-workers, skilled and unskilled—connected with a particular industry into a guild which shall manage that industry as a national undertaking. He does not seek to supplement wages by the method known as "profit-sharing:" he seeks rather to abolish the wages system and to substitute therefore a genuine partnership. In the work of the guild the State participates, regulating and controlling on behalf of the community. Syndicalism aims at the creation of guilds so powerful as to be able at their own sweet will to hold up the community; a madness into which the National Guildsman does not fall, being saved by his altogether saner and sounder view of the true relation of the State and industry. I am not going to attempt however, an exposition of this new gospel. Frankly, I am qualified neither to champion nor to condemn, nor even to expound, this or any other industrial creed. But I suppose that even a rank outsider, who confesses with shame that he has never read through a text-book of economics, may be allowed to recognise that the industrial condition into which we have fallen is intolerable in the present and full of darkest menace for the future. Even an outsider may be allowed to feel convinced that the problem will never be solved except by the substitution of some form of partnership for the present relations of employer and employed; and that, unless a sufficient number of people can be brought to recognise this in time, the present war of the nations will be followed by an industrial war within each nation, more horrible still. And my sole purpose in writing these lines is to draw some attention to a proposal which has not yet, in Australia, attracted the notice it deserves; a proposal which may be right or wrong, but which is at any rate an honest attempt to grapple with the facts which lie at the root of industrial discontent. Some in our midst are already thinking along these lines, as a recent correspondence in the columns of the "West Australian" shows. No one, I imagine, believes that the Guild idea can be suddenly realised, in England, or anywhere else; the change must come bit by bit, as all great and salutary changes do; and the essential preliminary is that as many minds as possible should be set brooding over the matter.

West Australian (Perth, WA),  1918  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article27473534

Peace Treaty Disaster

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REPUBLIC EVADES WORKERS 

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Ominous Figures In Background

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By SOLOMON BRIGG

 EARLY 1919

It was early in 1919 that the Weimar Constitution establishing the ill-fated Weimar Republic finally took shape.

The work was entrusted to the National Assembly, and although the elections had shown that 23,400,000 Germans had voted in favor of Democracy against 4,700,000 opponents from the Right and 2,300,000 from the Left, the Government's chief concern appeared to be escape from the influence of the Workers and Soldiers' Councils.

 Control by the working class was not acceptable to the new rulers, so the drafting of the new constitution was undertaken at Weimar, well removed from the democratic influences of Berlin.

 Concessions were certainly given, but already could be seen in the background the ominous figures of the major industrialists, who were destined to destroy the new Republic.

 The Socialist revolution was not to be socialist In form, and in the transfer of powers the old bureaucrats of the Prussian regime succeeded in maintaining their machine almost intact.

 Own Theories

 Thus the actual drafting of the Constitution was not undertaken by the Workers' Councils, but by Herr Preuss, a well-known official of the Prussian Ministry of the interior, who succeeded In undermining all the objectives of the Socialist majority and imposing his own theories of a minimum of democratic rights. 

Strange, indeed, was the conduct of the leading doctrinaire socialists.

 Instead of insisting upon the adoption of their platform they acquiesced in the decisions of the reactionary Preuss.

 The Weimar Constitution rejected the central plank of socialism, but promised the socialisation of all enterprises which were "suitable" for social administration.

 In other words, the Government was satisfied with the right to participate in the administration of industry, with all profits and final responsibility still the prerogative of capitalist proprietors.

 Costly Disputes 

The trade unions were given representation on the federation controlling the industry, while Factory Councils were established for the purpose of providing the basis of job control. Although the membership of the trade unions increased to eight millions within a few months, they found themselves involved in a series of costly disputes, in which the employers invariably secured all the gains, while the Government refused to intercede. 

Investigation committees were established early in 1929 to report upon the socialisation of the mining and potash industries, while the Government even went so far as to draft a law to provide for the socialisation of the electrical industries.

 But Big Business proved too active, and all the initial enthusiasm soon disappeared, leaving the powerful industrialists in control.

 In January, 1919, there was a general strike in the Ruhr area, and the socialisation of the mines was proclaimed. The workers were armed and took possession of the buildings. But once again Noske rushed his Prussian Old Guard troops to suppress the workers. In attempting to keep to the "middle of the road", the Government was actually building the machinery that was to encompass the destruction of the Republic.

 Driving Wedge

 The Weimar Constitution was bourgeois republican in form, while the bitter dissensions between the various groups of Socialists made it easy for Hitler later to drive a wedge into the proletarian movement. On the positive side, the Weimar Constitution achieved the unification of Germany, removing the barriers offered by the existence of hereditary rulers in the various States, while the disappearance of the Hohenzollerns enabled the people to think in terms of the nation rather than in terms of the Prussian oligarchy.

 Thus the first step was the centralisation of all forms of government.

 The constituent States, or Lande, were in future to receive most of their revenue from the proceeds of national taxation, so financial control was highly centralised, making it possible for the Governor of the Reichsbank to exercise such enormous influence in the political affairs of the day.

 Disastrous Blow

 But the most disastrous blow of all was the signing of the Peace Treaty, which imposed such crushing terms of humiliation upon the German people. Germany had set its faith in President Wilson's 14 Points, but when its representatives reached Versailles in 1919 they found themselves face to face with the tigerish Clemenceau and Lloyd George, with memories of his "Hang the Kaiser" campaign still fresh in his mind.

 The Allies backed up by the insistence of the international banks— including J, P. Morgan and Sons— were insistent that the terms offered were the minimum, and all the pathetic idealism of Woodrow Wilson could in no way abate the harsh conditions. It was thus a bitter paradox that the Social Democrats, who had raised the flag of revolution to force Germany into peace, should be called upon to bear the brunt of all the odium attached to that peace.

 Versailles rankled deep in the heart of every German, and when Hitler was seeking a rallying cry to secure support for his plot on behalf of Monopoly Capitalism, there was no more potent slogan than "Down with the Treaty of Versailles," while the Social Democrats were pilloried as betrayers of their country.

 Refused To Sign

 Schiedemann, the Chancellor, indignantly refused to sign the terms and, together with the Democrats, left the Government in June, 1919. The Government was immediately reconstructed under Gustav Bauer— a Majority Socialist leader— and Socialism was committed to the fatal policy of fulfilling the conditions, including reparation payments.

 H. N. Brailsford, in his penetrating study, "Property or Peace," sums up the situation rather admirably thus:

 "The truth about this Republic that died so easily is that It was never more than half-alive. The Republic was born in defeat: it lived through humiliation; it went down in slump. Its signature, and not that of the imperial Warlord, was set to the treaty that stamped Germany as guilty untouchable, on the fringes of human society; it was excluded through its formative years from the League of Nations; it must acquiesce, while the Allies, supported by colored troops, occupied the Rhineland, and sit by passive while the French occupied the Ruhr; its was the currency that the inflation degraded, and its the policy (though the burden of reparations and occupation set it in motion) that wiped out the savings of the small middle-class and brought its standard down to a proletarian level; it was the tributary that must send the surplus of German toil by the one-way road to Paris and New York; its was the flag that only rationed armaments might defend, while the Poles across its border assembled great guns and tanks and aeroplanes for the use of conscript millions.

 "The Powers that imposed these burdens and humiliation of a struggling Republic were themselves based on the sovereignty of the people, and in their more exalted moments believed that they had fought the war to make the world secure for democracy."

 That appraisal reveals the tragedy that was the Weimar Constitution in all its facets.

 Instead of a complete social transformation, the Socialists were satisfied with an external political change, but below the surface the Junkers and major industrialists held an even tighter rein than ever.

 No Transition.

 There was no transition— only a change in nominal rulers. Thus the Weimar Constitution provided that authority to interpret the Constltutlon was to be vested in the Supreme Court. No Republican had ever been appointed to that body, and its decisions were always adverse to the Socialist regime, so that the Monopoly Capitalists were as secure as ever.

 Brailsford explains this surrender thus:

 "The German Republic sprang from a spontaneous mass revolt of the workers. It doomed itself to defeat, because in the early days the party that assumed leadership lost the initiative. It postponed indefinitely its proper aims. It dropped into a posture of passive defence. It ranged itself in ever-widening coalitions with sections of the middle-class, and, therefore, it fought only to hold the ground which these also valued— civil liberty, Parliamentary institutions and International peace.

 "In its attachment to these it was stubborn and sincere. But It never forced an issue or launched a challenge; always it was countering the moves of its adversaries: and choosing at each turn the lesser of the two evils confronting it." 

Yet during this time Germany had the largest Communist Party of any country outside Russia. Internationalist organisations flourished, and international Communism regarded Berlin as its intellectual headquarters. Of its activities Brailsford is no less scathing when he declares:

 "The record of the German Communists was, if anything, less excusably futile than that of the Socialists. The Socialists were the victims of an illusion about legality. The Communists had no such illusions. Yet, proclaiming from first to last the duty of physical resistance, they, too, went down without a blow."

 So even in its first year the Weimar Constitution exhibited all the elements of weakness that were to provide the fuel for its destruction.

Labor Daily (Sydney, NSW ), 1935

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article236480305