"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