names we give ourselves. For instance, quite a lot of people, mostly a
very amiable mild sort of people, call themselves Communist-Anarchists,
which Conservatives interpret as Double-Dyed Scoundrels. This is very
much as if they called themselves Roman Catholic Protestants, or
Christian Jewesses, or undersized giantesses, or brunette blondes,
or married maids, or any other flat contradiction in terms; for
Anarchism preaches the obliteration of statute law and the abolition
of Governments and States, whilst Communism preaches that all the
necessary business of the country shall be done by public bodies
and regulated by public law. Nobody could logically be in favor of
both all the time. But there is a muddled commonsense in the name
for all that. What the Communist-Anarchist really means is that she
is willing to be a Communist as to the work and obedience to public
law for everybody that is necessary to keep the community healthy
and solvent, and that then she wants to be let go her own way. It is
her manner of saying that she needs leisure and freedom as well as
taskwork and responsibility: in short, as I have heard it expressed,
that she does not want to be “a blooming bee”. That is the attitude of
all capable women; but to apply the term Communist-Anarchism to it is
so confusing, and so often perversely adopted by the kind of muddler
who, being against law and public enterprise because she wants to be
free, and against freedom because freedom of contracts is a capitalist
device for exploiting the proletariat, spends her life in obstructing
both Socialism and Capitalism and never getting anywhere, that, on the
whole, I should not call myself a Communist-Anarchist if I were you.
The truth is, we live in a Tower of Babel where a confusion of names
prevents us from finishing the social edifice. The Roman Catholic who
does not know what his Church teaches, the member of the Church of
England who would repudiate several of the Thirty-Nine Articles if
they were propounded to her without a hint of where they came from,
the Liberal who has never heard of the principles of the Manchester
School and would not have understood them if she had, and the Tory who
is completely innocent of De Quincey’s Logic of Political Economy: that
is to say, the vast majority of Catholics, Protestants, Liberals, and
Tories, have their counterparts in the Socialists, the Communists, the
Syndicalists, the Anarchists, the Laborists, who denounce Capitalism
and middle class morality, and are saturated with both all the time.
The Intelligent Woman, as she reads the newspapers, must allow for
this as best she can. She must not only remember that every professing
Socialist is not necessarily a Trade Unionist, and cannot logically
be an Anarchist, but is sometimes so little a Socialist that, when
entrusted with public business enough to bring her face to face with
the Conservative or Liberal leaders she has been denouncing, she will
be flattered to find that these eminent persons are quite of her real
way of thinking, and vote with them enthusiastically every time.
The name Communist is at the present moment (1927) specially applied
to and adopted by those who believe that Capitalism will never be
abolished by constitutional parliamentary means in the Fabian manner,
but must be overthrown by armed revolution and supplanted by the
Muscovite Marxist Church. This is politely called the policy of Direct
Action. Conservative Diehards who advocate a forcible usurpation of
the government by the capitalists as such call it a _coup d’état_. But
a proletarian may be an advocate of Direct Action without being a bit
of a Communist. She may believe that the mines should belong to the
miners, the railways to the railwaymen, the army to the soldiers, the
churches to the clergymen, and the ships to the crews. She may even
believe that the houses should belong to the housemaids, especially if
she is a housemaid herself. Socialism will not hear of this. It insists
that industries shall be owned by the whole community, and regulated
in the interests of the consumer (or customer), who must be able to
buy at cost price without paying a profit to anybody. A shop, for
instance, must not belong to the shop assistants, nor be exploited by
them for their profit: it must be run for the benefit of the customers,
the shop assistant’s safeguard against finding herself sacrificed
to the customer being that she is herself a customer at the other
shops, and the customer herself a worker in other establishments. When
incomes are equal, and everyone is both a producer and a consumer, the
producers and consumers may be trusted to treat each other fairly from
self-love if from no more generous motive; but until then, to make any
industry the property of the workers in it would be merely to replace
the existing idle joint stock shareholders by working shareholders
profiteering on a much larger scale, as they would appropriate the
rent of their sites and make none of those contributions to a central
exchequer for the benefit of the nation that now take place under
parliamentary rule. The inequalities of income between, say, miners in
the richest mines and farmers on the poorest soils would be monstrous.
But I need not plague you with arguments: the arrangement is impossible
anyhow; only, as several of the proletarian proposals, and cries of
the day, including Trade Unionism, Producers’ Co-operation, Workers’
Control, Peasant Proprietorship, and the cruder misunderstandings of
Syndicalism and Socialism, are either tainted or saturated with it to
such an extent that it wrecked the proletarian movement in Italy after
the war and led to the dictatorship of Signor Mussolini, and as it is
often supposed to be part of Socialism, you had better beware of it;
for it has many plausible pseudo-socialistic disguises. It is really
only Poor Man’s Capitalism, like Poor Man’s Gout.
On their negative side the proletarian Isms are very much alike: they
all bring the same accusations against Capitalism; and Capitalism makes
no distinction between them because they agree in their hostility
to it. But there is all the difference in the world between their
positive remedies; and any woman who voted for Syndicalism or Anarchism
or Direct Action disguised as Communism indiscriminately under the
impression that she was voting for Socialism would be as mistaken as
one who voted for Conservatism or Liberalism or Imperialism or the
Union Jack or King and Country or Church and State indiscriminately
under a general impression that she was voting against Socialism.
And so you have the curious spectacle of our Parliamentary Labor Party,
led by Socialists who are all necessarily Communists in principle,
and are advocating sweeping extensions of Communism, expelling the
so-called Communist Party from its ranks, refusing to appear on the
same platforms with its members in public, and being denounced by it
as bourgeois reactionaries. It is most confusing until you know; and
then you see that the issue just now between the rival proletarian
parties in England is not Communism against Socialism: it is
constitutional action, or Fabianism as it used to be called, against
Direct Action followed by a dictatorship. And as Diehard Capitalism is
now sorely tempted to try a British-Fascist _coup d’état_ followed
by a dictatorship, as opposed to Liberal constitutional Capitalism,
the confusion and disunion are by no means all on the Labor side. The
extremists of the Right and those of the Left are both propagandists of
impatient disgust with parliament as an institution. There is a Right
wing of the Right just as there is a Left wing of the Left; whilst the
Constitutional Centre is divided between Capitalism and Socialism. You
will need all your wits about you to find out where you are and keep
there during the coming changes.
The proletarian party inherits from Trade Unionism the notion that the
strike is the classic weapon and the only safeguard of proletarian
labor. It is therefore dangerously susceptible to the widespread
delusion that if instead of a coal strike here and a railway strike
there, a lightning strike of waitresses in a restaurant today, and
a lightning strike of match girls in a factory tomorrow, all the
workers in all the occupations were to strike simultaneously and
sympathetically, Capitalism would be brought to its knees. This is
called The General Strike. It is as if the crew of a ship, oppressed by
its officers, were advised by a silly-clever cabin boy to sink the ship
until all the officers and their friends the passengers were drowned,
and then take victorious command of it. The objection that the crew
could not sail the ship without navigating officers is superfluous,
because there is the conclusive preliminary objection that the crew
would be drowned, cabin boy and all, as well as the officers. In a
General Strike ashore the productive proletarians would be starved
before the employers, capitalists, and parasitic proletarians, because
these would have possession of the reserves of spare food. It would be
national suicide.
Obvious as this is, the General Strike has been attempted again and
again, notably on one occasion in Sweden, when it was very thoroughly
tried out; and though it has always necessarily collapsed, it is still
advocated by people who imagine that the remedy for Capitalism is to
treat labor as the capital of the proletariat (that is, the spare
money of those who have no money), and to hold up the Capitalists by
threat of starvation just as the Capitalists have hitherto held up the
proletariat. They forget that the capitalists have never yet been so
absurd as to attempt a general lock-out. It would be much more sensible
to support a particular strike by calling all other strikes off, thus
isolating the particular employers aimed at, and enabling all the other
workers to contribute to the strike fund. But we have already discussed
the final impossibility of tolerating even particular strikes or
lock-outs, much less general ones. They will pass away as duelling has
passed away. Meanwhile be on your guard against propagandists of the
General Strike; but bear in mind too that the term is now being used
so loosely in the daily papers that we see it applied to any strike in
which more than one trade is concerned.
A favorite plea of the advocates of the General Strike is that it could
prevent a war. Now it may be admitted that the fear of an attempt at
it does to some extent restrain governments from declaring unpopular
wars. Unfortunately once the first fellow-countryman is killed or the
first baby bombed, no war is unpopular: on the contrary, it is as well
known to our Capitalist governments as it was to that clever lady the
Empress Catherine of Russia that when the people become rebellious
there is nothing like “a nice little war” for bringing them to heel
again in a patriotic ecstasy of loyalty to the Crown. Besides, the
fundamental objection to the general strike, that when everybody stops
working the nation promptly perishes, applies just as fatally to a
strike against war as to a strike against a reduction of wages. It is
true that if the vast majority in the belligerent nations, soldiers and
all, simultaneously became conscientious objectors, and the workers
all refused to do military service of any kind, whether in the field
or in the provisioning, munitioning, and transport of troops, no
declaration of war could be carried out. Such a conquest of the earth
by Pacifism seems millennially desirable to many of us; but the mere
statement of these conditions is sufficient to shew that they do not
constitute a general strike, and that they are so unlikely to occur
that no sane person would act on the chance of their being realized.
A single schoolboy militarist dropping a bomb from an aeroplane into
a group of children will make an end of local pacifism in an instant
until it becomes certain that the bomber and his employers will be
called to account before a competent and dreaded tribunal. Meanwhile
the fear of a so-called General Strike against war will never deter any
bellicose Government from equipping and commissioning such adventurous
young aces. But no Government dare send them if it knew that it would
be blockaded by a combination of other nations sufficiently strong to
intimidate the most bellicose single nation.
The formation of such a combination is the professed object of the
present League of Nations; and though there is no sign so far of the
leading military Powers even consulting it, much less obeying and
supporting it, when they have any weighty military interests at stake,
still even their military interests will force them sooner or later
to take the League seriously, substitute supernational morality,
law, and action, for the present international anarchism, according
to which it is proper for nations, under certain forms, to murder
and plunder foreigners, though it is a crime for them to murder and
plunder oneanother. No other method of preventing war so far discovered
is worth your attention. It is very improbable even that our quaint
and illogical toleration of conscientious objection during the last
war will ever be repeated; and in any case the experiment proved its
futility as a preventive of war. The soldier in the trenches will
always ask why he should be shot for refusing to go “over the top” when
his brother at home is spared after refusing even to enter the trench.
The General Strike is still more futile. War cannot be stopped by the
refusal of individuals or even of whole trades to take part in it:
nothing but combinations of nations, each subordinating what they call
their sovereign rights to the world’s good, or at least to the good of
the combination, can prevail against it.
This subordination of nationalism is called supernationalism, and might
be called catholicism if that word could be freed from misleading
historical associations. It already exists in the United States of
America, which are federated for certain purposes, including currency
and a _pax Americana_ which was established at the cost of a fierce
war. There is no reason except pure devilment why the States of Europe,
or, to begin with, a decisive number of them, should not federate to
the same extent for the same purposes. The Empires are changing into
Commonwealths, or voluntary federations, for common human purposes.
Here, and not in local antipatriotic strikes, are the real hopes of
peace.
You will find constitutional changes specially bothersome because of
the continual clashing between the tightening-up of social discipline
demanded by Socialism and the jealousy of official power and desire to
do what we like which we call Democracy. Democracy has a very strong
hold on organized labor. In the Trade Unions every device is tried to
make the vote of the whole union supreme. When delegates vote at the
Union Congresses they are allowed a vote for every member of their
respective unions; and as far as possible the questions on which they
cast their hundreds of thousands of votes are settled beforehand in
the unions by the votes of the members; so that when the delegates go
to Congress they are not representatives but mere spokesmen handing in
the decisions of their unions. But these crude democratic precautions
defeat their own object. In practice, a Trade Union secretary is the
nearest thing on earth to an irremovable autocrat. The “card vote” is
not called for except to decide questions on which the decisions could
not be carried out unless the delegates of the Big Powers of trade
unionism (that is, the unions whose membership runs into millions)
could outvote the delegates of the Little Powers; and as in the ranks
of Labor not only is “the career open to the talents” but absolutely
closed to nonentities, the leaders are much more arbitrary than they
would be in the House of Lords, where the hereditary peers may include
persons of average or less than average ability. Even the humblest
Trade Union secretary must have exceptional business ability and power
of managing people; and if anyone but a secretary obtains a delegation
to a Congress he must have at least a talent for self-assertion. He may
be for all public purposes an idiot; but he must be a fairly blatant
idiot, and to some extent a representative one, or he could never
persuade large bodies of his equals to pick him out from the obscurity
of his lot.
Now as this oligarchy of bureaucrats and demagogues is the result of
the most jealous democracy, the oligarchs of labor are determined to
maintain the system which has placed them in power. You must have
noticed that some of the most imperiously wilful women, unable to
bear a moment’s contradiction, and tyrannizing over their husbands,
daughters, and servants until nobody else in the house can call
her soul her own, have been the most resolute opponents of Women’s
Rights. The reason is that they know that as long as the men govern
they can govern the men. Just so a good many of the ablest and most
arbitrary of the leaders of Trade Unionism are resolutely democratic
in Labor politics because they know very well that as long as the
workers can vote they can make the workers vote as they please. They
are democrats, not because of their faith in the judgment, knowledge,
and initiative of the masses, but because of their experience of mass
ignorance, gullibility, and sheepishness. It is only the idealists of
the propertied and cultivated middle classes who believe that the voice
of the people is the voice of God: the typical proletarian leader is
a cynic in this matter, believing secretly that the working folk will
have to be born again and born differently before they can be safely
allowed to have their own silly way in public affairs: indeed it is
to make this rebirth possible that the leaders are Socialists. They
have often been strongly anti-Socialist. Thus both the cynics and the
idealists are strenuous defenders of democracy, and regard the series
of enfranchisements of the people which began with the Conservative Act
of 1867 and culminated in Votes for Women, as a glorious page in the
history of the emancipation of mankind from tyranny and oppression,
instead of a reduction to absurdity of the notion that giving slaves
votes to defend their political rights and redress their wrongs is much
wiser than giving razors to infants for the same purpose.
The naked truth is that democracy, or government by the people through
votes for everybody, has never been a complete reality; and to the
very limited extent to which it has been a reality it has not been
a success. The extravagant hopes which have been attached to every
extension of it have been disappointed. A hundred years ago the great
Liberal Reform Bill was advocated as if its passage into law would
produce the millennium. Only the other day the admission of women
to the electorate, for which women fought and died, was expected to
raise politics to a nobler plane and purify public life. But at the
election which followed, the women voted for hanging the Kaiser;
rallied hysterically round the worst male candidates; threw out all
the women candidates of tried ability, integrity, and devotion; and
elected just one titled lady of great wealth and singular demagogic
fascination, who, though she justified their choice subsequently, was
then a beginner. In short, the notion that the female voter is more
politically intelligent or gentler than the male voter proved as great
a delusion as the earlier delusions that the business man was any wiser
politically than the country gentleman or the manual worker than the
middle class man. If there were any disfranchised class left for our
democrats to pin their repeatedly disappointed hopes on, no doubt they
would still clamor for a fresh set of votes to jump the last ditch
into their Utopia; and the vogue of democracy might last a while yet.
Possibly there may be here and there lunatics looking forward to votes
for children, or for animals, to complete the democratic structure. But
the majority shows signs of having had enough of it. Discipline for
Everybody and Votes for Nobody is the fashion in Spain and Italy; and
for some years past in Russia the proletarian Government has taken no
more notice of an adverse vote than the British Raj of an Indian jury’s
verdict, except when it turns the majority out of doors in the manner
of Bismarck or Cromwell.
These reactions of disgust with democracy are natural enough where
Capitalism, having first produced a huge majority of proletarians with
no training in management, responsibility, or the handling of big
money, nor any notion of the existence of such a thing as political
science, gives this majority the vote for the sake of gaining party
advantages by popular support. Even in ancient Greece, where our
proletarians were represented by slaves, and only what we call the
middle and upper classes voted, there was the same reaction, which is
hardly surprising in view of the fact that one of the famous feats
of Athenian democracy was to execute Socrates for using his superior
brains to expose its follies.
Nevertheless, I advise you to stick to your vote as hard as you can,
because though its positive effects may do you more harm than good,
its negative effect may be of great value to you. If one candidate is
a Socratic person and the other a fool who attracts you by echoing
your own follies and giving them an air of patriotism and virtuous
indignation, you may vote for the fool, that being as near as you can
get to executing Socrates; and so far your vote is all to the bad. But
the fact that your vote, though only one among many thousands, may
conceivably turn the scale at an election, secures you a consideration
in Parliament which it would be mad and cowardly for you to relinquish
as long as inequality of income prevents you from being really
represented by the members of the Government. Therefore cling to it
tooth and nail, however unqualified you may be to make a wise use of it.
The Labor Party is in a continual dilemma on this point. At the
election of 1918 the leader of the Labor Party, a steadfast supporter
of votes for women, knew quite well that he would be defeated in his
old constituency by the vote of the suburban ladies; and he was.
The Labor Party, confronted by a scheme for making Parliament more
representative of public opinion by securing due representation for
minorities (called Proportional Representation), finds itself forced to
oppose it lest it should break Parliament up into a host of squabbling
groups and make parliamentary government impossible. All reformers who
use democracy as a stepping stone to power find it a nuisance when
they get there. The more power the people are given the more urgent
becomes the need for some rational and well-informed superpower to
dominate them and disable their inveterate admiration of international
murder and national suicide. Voltaire said that there is one person
wiser than Mrs Anybody, and that is Mrs Everybody; but Voltaire had
not seen modern democracy at work: the democracy he admired in England
was a very exclusive oligarchy; and the mixture of theocracy and
hereditary autocracy that disgusted him in France was not a fair test
of aristocracy, or government by the best qualified. We now know that
though Mrs Everybody knows where the shoe pinches and must therefore
have a say in the matter, she cannot make the shoe, and cannot tell a
good shoemaker from a bad one by his output of hot air on a platform.
Government demands ability to govern: it is neither Mrs Everybody’s
business nor Mrs Anybody’s, but Mrs Somebody’s. Mrs Somebody will
never be elected unless she is protected from the competition of Mrs
Noodle and Mrs Bounder and Mrs Noisy Nobody and Mrs King-and-Country
and Mrs Class War and Mrs Hearth-and-Home and Mrs Bountiful and Mrs
Hands-off-the-Church and Mrs Please-I-want-everybody-to-love-me. If
democracy is not to ruin us we must at all costs find some trustworthy
method of testing the qualifications of candidates before we allow
them to seek election. When we have done that we may have great
trouble in persuading the right people to come forward. We may even
be driven to compel them; for those who fully understand how heavy
are the responsibilities of government and how exhausting its labor
are the least likely to shoulder them voluntarily. As Plato said, the
ideal candidate is the reluctant one. When we discover such a test you
will still have your electoral choice between several Mrs Somebodys,
which will make them all respect you; but you will not be taken in by
Mrs Noodle and Co. because they will not be eligible for election.
Meanwhile, Heaven help us! we must do the best we can.
84
PERORATION