by admin » Mon Jul 08, 2019 3:19 am
Part 2 of 2
The Communist Party: its Origin
To what group of men can this remarkable transformation in so short a time be attributed? For it must be recalled that a bare twenty years ago the vast territory of Soviet Russia was a scene of indescribable misery and confusion; a defeated army with millions killed arid wounded; workers and peasants everywhere in revolt; famine and epidemics raging through the land. Five Great Powers had invaded, or were invading the country; first victorious Germany, to grasp more land; then Great Britain, France and even the U.S.A. to help the White Army to restore the Emperor to his throne; whilst Japan was in occupation of some of Siberia. No one outside Russia, except a few fanatical communists, believed in the early twenties that Bolshevik Russia could or would survive. Today, despite violent prejudices against the new social order on the part of capitalist governments and their supporters, all the governments of the world, whether dictatorships or political democracies, are compelled to recognize that the USSR is a Great Power, with a stabilized population of two hundred millions; a decline of the death-rate and rise of the birth-rate; no unemployment, and, so many competent investigators think, a steadily rising standard of health, comfort and culture, for the vast population of one-sixth of the earth's surface.
No one denies, whether he admires or abhors the daily life and destiny of the two hundred million inhabitants of the USSR, that it is to the Communist Party, as created by Lenin and developed by Stalin and his associates, that the credit or discredit of the entire organization of the Soviet Union belongs. What is the origin and constitution of the Bolshevik Party? What is its living philosophy and what are its activities? And finally, what are its defects, or "infantile diseases," to use Lenin's term, which may or may not be permanent?
The All-Union Party (of Bolsheviks), which today is its official title, first appeared in 1898 at Minsk, as the result of a cleavage in the Social Democratic Party of Russia, two separate parties emerging -- the Bolshevik, the Majority Party, and the Menshevik, the Minority Party. I need not, in this summary, describe in detail the tangled history of the Communist ( Bolshevik) Party of the USSR. The Bolshevik Party led by Plekhanov and afterwards dominated by Lenin, was inspired by the Marxian vision of a world revolution, whilst the Menshevik adhered to the liberal policy of the German Social Democratic Party and the British Labour Party during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Unlike his Russian predecessor, unlike any other party organizer, Lenin had no use, within the Bolshevik Party, for mere sympathizers, for partly converted disciples who were ready to vote for his Party. The Bolshevik Party was not a Party of electors prepared to give their vote for candidates selected by the Party; popular election did not exist in Tzarist Russia. The Party that Lenin forged for his revolutionary activities became, after die seizure of power, the organization by which alone the revolution, so Lenin believed, would be maintained and directed. Today it exists, as the student of political science will realize, chiefly as the means by which the people of the USSR, in all their multiform participation in public affairs that we have described, have been supplied with a political, intellectual and legislative elite enjoying the confidence of the people by its disinterestedness, its superior training and its practical insight into the needs of the immediate situation, able to guide the people's uncertain state during the first period of its new freedom. Otherwise there would have been no continuous guidance, no persuasion, ubiquitous and consistent, of the hundred and sixty million inhabitants belonging to different races, mostly illiterate, scattered over one-sixth of the earth's surface.
Its Organization
The elaborate constitution of the Communist Party described in the sixty-paged chapter of Soviet Communism is a complicated type of democratic self-government of which I can here give only a mere outline. From first to last there is no mention of an autocratic leader whose will is law. The Communist cell, the basic organization to be found in every type of association, industrial and agricultural, scientific and cultural, even associations for games and sport, elects deputies to local conferences of the Party, and from these conferences deputies are appointed to the congress of the Party of each constituent republic or autonomous region, and from thence to the supreme authority of the Party -- the All-Union Congress of the Communist Party meeting at Moscow. So far as its internal constitution is concerned, it is a democratic organization, similar to the recognized professions in Great Britain of medical men and surgeons, of barristers and solicitors, and it admits new members after examination to test their capacity to practise the vocation concerned. Where it differs from these professional organizations is in the rigor and all-inclusiveness of the conditions imposed on the members, and in the variety and importance of its activities.
"Puritan" Ethics
What, for instance, is the code of conduct for the individual member? Here I may note that there is a stop in the mind of former Bohemian admirers of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917-1922 regarding what seems to them a terrifying resurrection of what they call "puritan ethics ." Within the Communist Party and among the five million Comsomols (the organization of youth) sexual promiscuity, like all forms of self-indulgence, has come to be definitely thought contrary to communist ethics, on the grounds enumerated by Lenin: "it is a frequent cause of disease; it impairs the productivity of labor; it is disturbing to accurate judgment and inimical to intellectual acquisition and scientific discovery, besides frequently involving cruelty to individual sufferers." This insistence on self-restraint, in all cases where the health and happiness not only of the individual person but also of the community are at risk, accounts for the penalization of homosexuality and for the limitation of abortion to cases in which the life of the child-bearing mother is threatened -- reforms which are violently denounced by some of the more anarchic of Soviet critics. Most reactionary of all, from the standpoint of the libertarian, is the outspoken approval of the lifelong attachment of husband and wife as the most appropriate setting under communism for family life.
Thus the test of membership of the Communist Party is fundamentally that of acceptance of an ideology relating to man in his relation to man, and man's relation to the universe, from which is evolved an exceptionally strict code of conduct, not imposed on the ordinary citizen, a code which all members must carry out, the sanction being reprimand, or, if obdurate, expulsion from membership. It has even added, in its new category of "sympathizers," something analogous to the "lay brothers" of the religious orders. In fact, in the nature of its mentality, as in the code of personal conduct, the Communist Party resembles more a religious order than the organization of the learned professions of Western Europe, such as those of lawyers and doctors, engineers and public accountants.
The Education of the People
Can I sum up the purpose -- the vocation, of the Communist Party of two million five hundred thousand members, reinforced by five million Comsomols, who are at work in the USSR today? They constitute, it is said, the vanguard of the proletariat, or, varying the metaphor, the spearhead of its activity, in the maintenance of the Bolshevik revolution and the building-up of the state. But what does this mean in practice? At all times more than half the party membership continues at its manual labor in the factory or the mine, in the oilfields or at the hydro-electric plants, on the farms or in the railway or postal services, they serve in the armed forces on land, sea and in the air, with the mercantile marine or the river-transport vessels. The specific Party duty is so to lead their working lives as to be perpetually influencing the conduct of all their fellow citizens among whom they work. They must set themselves to be the most zealous, the most assiduous, the most efficient workers of their several establishments. They must neglect no opportunity of raising their own qualifications and increasing their technical skill. They must make themselves the leaders among the wage-earners, employing every means of educating the non-Party mass in communist doctrines and Soviet policy. In the meetings of the trade union and die consumers' cooperative society, as in the manufacturing artel and the collective farm, they must, in concert with their comrades in the concern, constantly take an active part, using their influence to guide the whole membership towards the most complete fulfilment of the function of the organization in the socialist state, along the lines from time to time authoritatively prescribed by the All-Union Congress held at Moscow and addressed by the Party leaders, of whom, as I have before stated, Stalin exercises the greatest influence.
The Living Philosophy of Soviet Communism
But there is another factor in Soviet Communism, setting it in contrast with the civilization of the western world. It is based on an intellectual unity throughout all its activities; it definitely rejects every remnant of the superstition and magic which the twentieth-century man in the capitalist democracies retains in his conception of the universe and of man's place in it. That is to say. Soviet Communism has a new ideology as well as a new economics. Soviet Communism puts no limit to the growth of man's knowledge. It counts, in fact, on a vast and unfathomable advance of science in every field, but it refuses to accept as knowledge, or as the basis of its code of conduct, any of the merely traditional beliefs and postulates about man and the universe for which no rational foundation can be found, or any of the purely subjective imaginings of the metaphysician or the theologian. It excludes, and dogmatically excludes, the supernatural, whether this takes the form of the primitive belief in good and evil spirits, or the more civilized reliance on a one omnipotent God (whether or not opposed by a Devil) involving the immortality of all human beings, each individual being destined for Heaven, Purgatory or Hell This new living philosophy, termed scientific humanism, is working out the ethics of a new civilization arising from its own experience of social life. And in that pragmatic evolution of a code of conduct based essentially upon the hygiene of the individual and of the social organism of which he forms part, Soviet Communism is assisted by the essential unity in principle of its economics and its ethics. Under Soviet Communism, with its planned production for community consumption, the pecuniary gain to the profit-making entrepreneur, nicknamed the "Economic Calculus," the free working of which is the be-all and end-all of capitalist civilization, is deemed an undesirable guide to action, whether public or private.
Scientific Humanism
To quote the last words of the last book of the Webb partnership, in the postscript to the second edition: "The dominant motive in everyone's life must be not pecuniary gain to anyone but the welfare of the human race, now and for all time. For it is clear that everyone starting adult life is in debt to the community in which he has been born and bred, cared for, fed and clothed, educated and entertained. Anyone who, to the extent of his ability, does less than his share of work, and takes a full share of the wealth produced in the community, is a thief, and should be dealt with as such. That is to say, he should be compulsorily reformed in body and mind so that he may become a useful and happy citizen. On the other hand, those who do more than their share of the work that is useful to the community, who invent or explore, who excel in the arts or crafts, who are able and devoted leaders in production or administration, are not only provided with every pecuniary or other facility for pursuing their chosen careers, but are also honoured as heroes and publicly proclaimed as patterns and benefactors. The ancient axiom of 'Love your neighbour as yourself is embodied, not in the economic but in the utilitarian calculus, namely, the valuation of what conduces to the permanent well-being of the human race. Thus in the USSR there is no distinction between the code professed on Sundays and that practised on weekdays. The citizen acts in his factory or farm ac- cording to the same scale of moral and ethical values as he does to his family, in his sports, or in his voting at elections. The secular and the religious are one. The only good life at which he aims is a life that is good for all his fellow men, irrespective of age or sex, religion or race."
The Infantile Diseases of Soviet Communism
At last I come to the question: What have been the disreputable features, the infantile diseases, to use the Leninist term, of the new social order during the twenty years of its existence? Or, to put the question more bluntly: What exactly is die indictment of Soviet Communism on the part of those who insist that it is a step backward in human progress and therefore should be opposed by the capitalist democracies?
There is, of course, the complete pacifist who objects to the use of physical force, whether to upset a cruel tyrant at home or to repel a foreign power bent on new lands to conquer -- a living philosophy and code of conduct which neither I nor the vast majority of the critics of Soviet Communism regard either as practicable or desirable as the way of promoting the welfare of mankind. I will therefore pass it by as irrelevant to the purpose of this introduction. [xiv]
The Treason Trials
Let us take the first objection. During the three or four years from the autumn of 1917 to 1922, the Bolshevik Government had established itself in Moscow and had succeeded in repelling the German, British, French, American and Japanese invasion, of that part of the territory of Tsarist Russia which the Bolsheviks thought themselves capable of defending. For some time after they had made a formal peace with their recent enemies they were confronted not only by local rebellions but by continuous and extensive underground sabotage in the newly established plants and factories, mines and means of communication, workers' flats and hospitals, by the remnant of the up- holders of the old Tsarist regime, all of which had to be summarily suppressed. But this obviously necessary use of force was not the only task awaiting the revolutionary government. History proves that in all violent revolutions, those who combine to destroy an old social order seldom agree as to what exactly should be the political and economic pattern of the new social organization to be built up to replace it. Even our own limited revolution of 1689 in Great Britain, whereby a Protestant king by Parliamentary statute was substituted for a Catholic king, by Divine Right, was followed, for nearly a hundred years, by generation after generation of conspirators to whom treason and rebellion, spying and deceit, with or without the connivance of a foreign power, were only part of what they deemed to be a rightful effort to overturn an even worse state of home and foreign affairs than they had joined as rebels to destroy. Thus, when we published the second edition of Soviet Communism in 1937, the outstanding scandal, so hostile critics of the Soviet Union declared, were the Treason Trials which took place in the thirties, not only of old Bolshevik comrades of Lenin and opponents of Stalin's subsequent policy, but also of the best known commanding officers of the Red Army, many of whom had been Tsarist generals, transferring their allegiance to the Bolshevik Government in order to defend their native land from invasion by German, British, American, French and Japanese armies; but who, it was alleged and I think proved, had begun to intrigue with the German Army against the new social order of the Soviet Union. The most important of these conspiracies was the Trotsky movement against the policy of building up socialism in one country as impracticable and insisting that the Bolshevik Party should abide by what was held to be the Marx-Lenin policy of promoting proletarian revolutions throughout the world. The success of the Soviet Government in instituting not only a political but an industrial democracy, and thereby enormously increasing the health, wealth and culture of the inhabitants, and the consequent recognition of the USSR as a Great Power, discredited the Trotsky movement, which I think was finally liquidated by the murder of Trotsky in Mexico by one of his own followers. Today, and for some time, there has been no sign of conspiracies or faked conspiracies within the Soviet Union. The fear of German invasion and the consequent dominance of the Nazi system of racial oppression has made clear to all the bona-fide citizens of the USSR the overwhelming desirability of keeping out of world war as long as possible, meanwhile devoting their energies to increasing their means of livelihood and their defensive power; whilst the capitalist democracies and Axis powers were engaged in mutual mass murder and the destruction of property. When the German attack plunged Russia into war it was immediately apparent that the inhabitants of the USSR, whether soldiers or civilians, men, women and young people, were so convinced of the benefits yielded to the Socialist Fatherland that they resisted not only with reckless courage, but with considerable skill and ingenuity the powerful onslaught of the highly mechanized German Army hitherto victorious conquerors of one country after another.
There are, however, features in Soviet Communism which are either wholly absent in Great Britain, the self-governing Dominions and the U.S.A., or are far less virulent and permanent than they seem to be in the Soviet Union of today.
The Idolization of the Leader
The first of these is the idolization of one individual as an infallible leader who must be reverenced and obeyed and not criticized. This idolization was seen in the popular elevation of Lenin, notably after his death, to the status of saint or prophet, virtually canonized in the sleeping figure in the mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, where he was, to all intents and purposes, worshipped by the adoring multitude of workers and peasants who daily pass before him. After Lenin's death it was agreed that his place could never be filled. Some new personality had to be produced for the hundred and sixty million inhabitants of the USSR, most of whom were illiterate, deplorably superstitious and incapable of grasping the new philosophy of the Communist Party. Among the leaders of the Communist Party there ensued a tacit understanding that Stalin should be "boosted" as the supreme leader of the proletariat, the Party and the state. His portrait and his bust were accordingly distributed by tens of thousands. But this idolization of Stalin has largely ceased to exist in the Soviet Union of today. In the village, municipal and union Soviets, local heroes are held up for the admiration of and imitation by the people; heroes of the workshop and of the field, heroes of research and exploration, ordinary everyday people whose heroism consists not in an isolated courageous act under the stress of emotion, but in outstanding continuous application of courage and intelligence, initiative and self-discipline. The portraits of these heroes and heroines are to be seen everywhere. Moreover, Stalin's recent step down from the pedestal of the Holy Father of the Communist Party to the prosaic position of Prime Minister, elected strictly according to the constitutional procedure of a political democracy, has, so to speak, secularized his status and made it that of any other Prime Minister ultimately dependent on the votes of the people. When Stalin disappears from the scene will he have a successor as an idolized figure? I doubt it. The very conception of an infallible or a mysteriously inspired leader is wholly inconsistent with the Marx-Lenin materialist interpretation of history. Lenin would have mocked at his idolized figure in the mausoleum in the Red Square of Moscow. Stalin has never claimed to he more than the duly appointed official of the Communist Party and the democratically elected member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Hence, I believe this infantile disease will die out with the spread of education among the multitude and the practice of the scientific method in all branches of human activities. With a more enlightened electorate and the emergence of men with specialized talents I foresee that the influence now exercised by Stalin will be inherited by a group of prominent members of the Communist Party, of its All-Union Congress, qualified to stand for the central committee and its sub- ordinate councils. This group who happen to become the recognized leaders of the party will grow larger and more diversified with the development of new scientific technique in all departments of government, alike in Moscow and in its constituent republics.
The Disease of Orthodoxy
Far more repugnant to our western political habits is the absolute prohibition within the USSR of any propaganda advocating the return to capitalist profit-making or even to any independent thinking on the fundamental social issues about possible new ways of organizing men in society, new forms of social activity, and new development of the socially established code of conduct. It is upon this power to think new thoughts, and to formulate even the most unexpected fresh ideas, that the future progress of mankind depends. This disease of orthodoxy in a milder form is not wholly absent in the capitalist political democracies. No one suggests that Switzerland is not a political democracy, and yet, as I have already noted, members of the Society of Jesus are not only refused citizenship but are actually banished from their native land, a penalization which has been extended of late years to the members of the Third International, assuredly a strangely discordant couple to be linked together in the dock of Swiss Courts of Justice accused of the propaganda of living philosophy incompatible with the public safety. Likewise the U.S.A., in some of the constituent States, through the device of Primaries, has excluded the Communist Party, and today even the Socialist Party, from selecting the candidates for election to the legislature of those states; while in one or two states being a member of the Communist Party is punished by penal servitude. In Oklahoma City, we are told in the New York Nation, December 28, 1940, "mere membership in the Communist Party is regarded as a crime punishable by imprisonment for ten years and a fine of 5000 dollars. This vindictive sentence was passed on Robert Wood, state secretary of the Party, in October, and has now been repeated in the case of Alan Shaw, twenty-two-year-old secretary of the Oklahoma City Local. In neither case was any overt act charged. Both men were convicted of violating the state criminal syndicalism law on evidence consisting of selected passages from the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Since the ideas put forward in these books were those of Communist leaders, it was charged, they must also be subscribed to by the accused. . ."
Whenever a country is threatened with foreign invasion or revolutionary upheaval, the suppression of sects advocating disobedience to the law, sabotage or giving information to the enemy is a necessary use of force on the part of a government, however democratically representative of the majority of the inhabitants it may be. Have we not imprisoned two M.P.'s and a distinguished ex-Cabinet Minister, and some thousand other fellow citizens? Have we not interned thousands of well-conducted and even distinguished foreigners because they were suspected of a like antagonism to our existing social order? Have we not blamed the tolerance of Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium towards what is termed Fifth Column activities, i.e. propaganda by its own citizens of the Nazi system as an alternative to their own type of government?
It is not surprising, therefore, that there should have been intolerance, on the part of the Soviet Government, towards free thought and expression, by word and by writ, of antagonism to its home and foreign policy. How does this intolerance differ in character from the intolerance manifested in Great Britain? As we have described previously, free criticism, however hostile it may be, is permitted, even encouraged, in the USSR, of the directors of all forms of enterprise, by the workers employed, or by the consumers of the commodities or services concerned. In Great Britain no such detailed and personal criticism by the workers employed, or by the consumers of commodities and services concerned, is tolerated by capitalist profit-makers when they close down works or charge monopoly prices, or even if they go bankrupt through inefficiency or fraudulent practice. Moreover, when anxious to encourage historical research, the Soviet Government is singularly open-minded and has just published a translation of the complete works of Ricardo into Russian, which is exactly as if the British Government were to issue from the Stationery Office a translation into English of the complete works of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
There is, however, a type of suppression of free thought by word and by writ that is absent from capitalist democracies but is indisputably present in the USSR. No criticism of the living philosophy of the Communist Party is permitted in the Soviet Union. It would, for instance, be impossible to issue a stream of pamphlets against Soviet Communism and in favor of the capitalist system, such as the Fabian Tracts for Socialists, or the works of G. D. H. Cole and Harold Laski, criticizing capitalism and suggesting various forms of socialist organization; it would be still more impossible to publish a condemnation of Soviet Communism such as the Webbs' The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation. Nor would there be permitted in the USSR newspapers and periodicals as favourable to profit-making capitalism as the Daily Herald, the weekly Tribune or the monthly Left Book "News (leave alone the Labour Monthly] are to the various types of socialism. I venture to prophesy that this form of intolerance -- which we term the disease of orthodoxy -- will prove to be merely the growing pains of a new social order which has struggled into existence in a hostile world. I may note, in passing, that owing to the increasing urgency of war, our Home Secretary has banned, for the last fourteen months, one daily paper -- the Daily Worker -- and has threatened another -- the Daily Mirror -- with a like fate. I see no reason to doubt that with the increased prosperity of the Soviet Union, at peace with the world, the Communist Party of the USSR, whose living philosophy depends for its realization on the scientific method, will gradually lift the bar to free discussion in the press about rival conceptions of political and economic systems, if only to increase the prestige of the new civilization among the intelligentsia of other countries, and, be it added, to gratify the passion for discussion, day in and day out, of every conceivable issue, practical and theoretical, which distinguishes the Russian Slav, the majority race of the USSR.
The Commintern or Third International
At first sight the least important, but in many ways the most injurious feature of the internal structure of the Soviet Union, exciting the enmity of the British and other Capitalist Democracies, are the highly organized Communist Parties whose policy is dominated by the Commintern in Moscow, presided over by Dimitrov, the Bulgarian socialist rendered famous by his courageous and successful defense during the celebrated Berlin trial springing out of the burning of the Reichstag in 1933. These Communist Parties within the territories of the Allied Governments, have pursued what has been termed a "contortionist" [xv] policy, in order to serve the national interests, not of their own country, but of the USSR. In the first stages of the Allies' war with Germany, during the period of the German Soviet Pact of 1939, they denounced the war as an "imperialist war, wholly in the interest of the ruling capitalist and landlord classes of Great Britain, intent on safeguarding and extending the British Empire with its dominion over the colored races of Africa and Asia." But directly Hitler's German Army marched, without warning, into the USSR, they suddenly turned round and started a campaign for an all-out war against Hitler's barbarous Nazi armed forces. How far Premier Stalin and his colleagues in the Sovnarkom and the Presidium approve of the continued existence of the Third International is unknown. In the two years after Lenin's death, Stalin successfully advocated the policy of building up a multiform democracy which would eliminate the capitalist and the landlord within the vast territory of the USSR; and he denounced Trotsky's alternative of organizing, in other countries, violent revolutions against the capitalist system. Hence the foreign policy of the Soviet Government has been, throughout the leadership of Stalin, in favor of peace, if possible enforced by the League of Nations, and if that broke down, secured by treaties of non-aggression between the Soviet Union and all other sovereign states, without attempting to interfere with the internal organization of each other's countries. Persistent rumor suggests that he would like to see the Commintern disappear, but, owing to its foundation by Lenin during the first glorious days of the revolution of 1917, he is not prepared to suppress it. [xvi]
There is however another explanation for the continued existence of a British branch of the Commintern or Third International, and the continued clash of this organization with the Labour and Socialist Parties within the capitalist democracies in which the blame is on the other side. From the very outset of the Bolshevik revolution in the autumn of 1917, the International Federation of Labour and Socialist Parties (known in former years as the Second International) has actually accepted, as representing the Russian people, three hardened counter-revolutionaries, who opposed Lenin and the revolution of 1917, and since then have continued to intrigue against the Soviet Government It is also a regrettable fact that the International Federation of Trade Unions, representing the Trade Union movement of the capitalist democracies, has refused to accept, as members, representatives of the Ail-Union Central Committee of Trade Unions (AUCCTU) with its twenty-three million members. It is an odd fact that it is only the International Cooperative Alliance which has from the first to last accepted representatives of the Central Board of the Centrosoyus with its thirty-seven million members. [xvii] Let us hope that Sir Walter Citrine by his wise recognition, on terms of equality and warm friendship, of the All-Union Central Committee of the Trade Unions of the USSR, will remedy this disastrous situation within the trade union world and that henceforth the Red trade unions will be represented by Russian trade unionists in the Inter- national Federation of Trade Unions. If so, we may hope that the International Federation of Labour and Socialist Parties will follow suit and that the Third International and Second International will be thus merged in one organization aiming at a new social order within their own countries as well as permanent peace among all the nations of the world.
Britain and Russia: Social Reconstruction at Home
One more question. Why have I exhausted the dwindling strength of an Over-Eighty in arguing that Stalin is not a dictator, whose word is law, as Hitler is, and Mussolini tried to be; that the USSR is not only a fully fledged political democracy, but also an industrial democracy, with a powerful trade union and consumers' cooperative movement, with a newly invented type of associations of owner-producers in the collective farms and industrial cooperatives, all alike under the control of the central and local government of a representative democracy, without distinction of sex, class or race? And finally, that through planned production for community consumption, and the elimination of the profit-making motive, the Soviet Union has, in the short space of twenty years, increased the opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the vast majority of its near two hundred million inhabitants, scattered over one-sixth of the earth's surface?
I started this task with the approval and help of my life partner (also an Over-Eighty) because we thought it desirable that all those who are sincere in their avowed intention of creating a new social order within their own country, designed to eliminate the poverty in the midst of plenty, characteristic of the wealthiest and the most powerful of the capitalist democracies -- the United Kingdom and the United States of America -- should study the internal organization of the USSR so as to avoid its mistakes and learn from its successful experiments. Owing to Great Britain's unified and stabilized population and unwritten constitution which permits every possible alteration, the establishment of this new social order need not involve a violent upheaval against a despotic and corrupt government, as it did in Tsarist Russia. Thus the British people will be able to avoid the crudities and cruelties inherent in a sudden and violent revolution, rendered more ruthless by the intervention of foreign powers in favor of the old Tzarist regime. On the other hand, in order to carry out this social reconstruction, without undue delay, it will be desirable to study the bolder experiments practicable in the USSR owing to the fact that the revolutionary government swept away the remnants of the old social order and therefore had a clear field for experiments, deliberately devised, to carry out their new living philosophy of scientific humanism. We may discover that many of the newly formed institutions are not contrary to the living philosophy of the Christian religion which the political leaders of the capitalist democracies assure us is the foundation-stone of our own civilization, but are actually more in accordance with the precept of "love thy neighbour as thyself" than the root impulse of profit-making enterprise, "each man for himself and devil take the hindmost."
Cooperation for a New World Order
But this peaceful establishment of an equitable humane social order has ceased to be the main purpose of this essay. The vital issues confronting the British people are, first to win the war and then to win a permanent peace. It is obvious that the heroic resistance, over a battle-front of 1500 miles, put up not only by the Red Army and Air Force, followed by a successful offensive, but also by civilians, men, women and children, is helping us to win the war in a shorter time than was practicable before Great Britain's all-out alliance with the USSR. What seems crystal clear, even if we beat Germany to her knees and occupy her territory and emancipate the conquered peoples, we shall not secure a permanent peace without the whole-hearted consent of the USSR. In order to obtain this cooperation in setting up a new League of Nations for the prevention of aggression, we must treat the government and people of Soviet Russia as equals, without any reserve arising from the deep-seated antagonism of our ruling class to the internal organization of the socialist fatherland. For it is difficult to deny that during the period between the two world wars the ruling class of Great Britain was hostile to the continuance of Soviet Communism even within the land of its birth. In the remarkable book Ambassador Dodds Diary -- published after his death -- there is documentary evidence that the governments of Great Britain and the U.S.A. were, through their diplomatic representatives, official and unofficial, trying to turn Hitler's aggressive "intuitions" away from their sea-bound frontiers towards the common enemy of Hitler's Germany and the capitalist democracies of the U.S.A. and the British Commonwealth of Nations -- the Soviet Union. This would mean that Germany would have secured the enormous resources of oil, minerals and foodstuffs in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, and might have been able to defeat the superior man-power of the USSR with its one hundred and eighty million inhabitants.
Today the scene has changed. Our great Prime Minister Churchill has secured national unity by the reorganization of his Cabinet on the basis of close collaboration with the Soviet Union in decisively beating Hitler's Army in the west, recapturing the Baltic Provinces, with a possible joint occupation of Berlin by the Allied armies. When this has been accomplished the four Great Powers -- the United States of America, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the heroic Chinese represented by Kai-shek -- can render Japan powerless by bombing her cities and munition factories from the Siberian airfields and invading with armed forces Manchuria, and thus collaborating in throwing Japanese armies out of China.
This new outlook entails abandoning the hostile attitude of some sections of our ruling class towards the internal structure of the new social order established in the USSR. For if we fail to treat her on terms of equality as a democratic and freedom-loving people, how can we win the war against Hitler's barbaric hordes intent on world domination, and reconstruct on a democratic basis the devastated states of Denmark and Norway, of the Netherlands and Belgium, of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Jugoslavia, and above all, of the downcast and humiliated inhabitants of the great historic Republic of France. The recent treacherous assault of Japan on the U.S.A. and the British Commonwealth of Nations, and the preliminary victories of the Japanese air force in Malaya, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, is another instance of the urgent need of an all-out cooperation with the USSR, with our other ally China, against the barbarous Axis Powers. Whether we like it or not, it seems that, owing to the closeness of her lengthy frontiers, in the west and in the east, to Germany and Japan, the Soviet Union will become the paramount military Power in "winning complete victory for the Allies. "The whole civilized world," said the late British Ambassador to Moscow -- Sir Stafford Cripps -- in his farewell message to the Soviet people, "proclaims your victories, and we, your allies, are proud to count ourselves as such. But the end is not yet. The power of the Nazis is shaken but not broken. . . When victory comes, of which we are so confident, our two nations will have the privilege of leading the peoples of Europe towards a civilization of sanity and cooperation. Together we must march forward to that victory. Together we must work and plan to bring about the happier life which their sufferings and their patience have earned for the masses of humanity.
B.W.
February 1942.
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Notes:
i. See New Constitution of 1936, pp. 86-122.
ii. Modern Turkey, by John Parker and Charles Smith, 1940, Routledge. "Freedom for Colonial Peoples" in Programme for Victory, Routledge.
The insistence that an illiterate and uncivilized people requiring to be educated for the art of self-government before they can exercise the right freely and with good results has been brought out by the studies of Professor Macmillan of the natives of South Africa and the West Indies. An ardent supporter of democratic self-government for the natives of our colonies, he describes his conversion, brought to him after years of experience, of the need for a period of apprenticeship to overcome "natural obstacles to freedom." "It is unnecessary to remind you of the stultifying, soul-destroying effect of utter poverty and prolonged physical deficiency. Considerations of political freedom do not touch the oppression of poverty. That this always existed in Africa is clear. It was a revelation to me to find, in parts of Africa, quite untouched by white settlement, or any white influence at all, poverty every whit as abject as that induced by landlessness in South Africa" ( Freedom for Colonial People by Victory, p. 91, a collection of essays prepared by the Fabian Society, 1941). Hence Macmillan suggested that the superior race who have become the dominant power in a territory inhabited by a primitive race should, before they retire from an authoritative position, educate the native inhabitants not only in the art of self-government, but in the capacity to produce sufficient wealth for a healthy and a cultural life. For a more detailed study of the need for educating the natives in the art of self-government and the maximizing of production, see also Macmillan's Africa Emergent (Faber, 1938) and Democratization of the Empire (Kegan Paul).
iii. Preface to Anne Louise Strong's translation of the New Soviet Constitution, pp 87-90.
iv. In the New Constitution of 1936 the recall is permitted: Article 142. Every deputy shall be obliged to report to the electors on his work and on the work of the Soviet of working people's deputies, and may at any time be recalled by decision of a majority of the electors in the manner prescribed by law.
v. There are many descriptions of the Swiss Constitution and the working of the referendum, the initiative and the recall. The most authoritative seems to be The Referendum in Switzerland, by Simon Deploige, advocate, translated into English by C. P. Trevelyan, edited with notes, introduction and appendices by Lilian Tom, 1898:
"(5) The prohibition of the Jesuits, which was part of the programme of 1872, 'may be extended also by Federal ordinance to other religious orders whose action is considered dangerous to the state or disturbs the peace between sects' (Art. 51).
"(6) The foundation of new convents or religious orders and the re-establishment of those which have been suppressed are forbidden (Art. 52)" (p. 115).
See also Government in Switzerland, by J. M. Vincent: “The order of the Jesuits,” it is stated, "and societies associated with it, are forbidden to locate anywhere in the country, and their activity in church or school is entirely prohibited. The establishment of new monasteries, or the reopening of suppressed cloisters, is also forbidden. The downfall of the Jesuits in Switzerland was caused by their incessant interference in affairs of state, and the intense ultramontane character of their policy. It was chiefly their agitation that brought about the conflict of religions which resulted in the secession of the Sonderbund, and very nearly the downfall of the republic. It was determined that in future this particular activity should be excluded, since without the agitators the people would soon learn to accommodate themselves to each other's religious views. . . The introduction of the Federal Constitution, the last edition being 1874, introduced proportional representation and destroyed the party system by the referendum, the initiative and the recall" (p. 275).
vi. London County Council, a political division of London. Ed.
vii. There is also what the American big business chiefs call "the English lovely law of libel," i.e. the use by big British capitalists of action for slander or libel to ensure the suppression of all criticism "of the malpractices of capitalist enterprise." This "accepted technique," to quote the Bishop of Birmingham's protest in the House of Lords, June 17, 1941, makes defense in die law courts so costly, sometimes running into "thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds, which are mere nothing to a multi-millionaire capitalist ring” but are so ruinous to private individuals that no one who is not himself a millionaire dares to risk it.
viii. Party leadership. Ed.
ix. The American Political System, by D. W. Brogan, 1933, pp. 383-384.
x. Further, who actually govern the Great Britain of today? Is it the rapid succession of Cabinet Ministers and their under-secretaries, who come and go, or the permanent civil servants? The practice of changing the principal officers of a government department with a change of the Party in power, as is usual in the United States of America, is universally condemned by political scientists as leading to favoritism and even to financial corruption, in deciding who these civil servants should be. In Great Britain the salaried officials appointed by the national government or local government authorities are life appointments, in the higher positions recruited mainly by competitive examination. In the case of highly specialized occupations, such as medical men, lawyers and chartered accountants and sanitary inspectors, this examination is conducted by the professional organization and therefore consists, like the Soviet Communist Party, of a self-elected elite who alone can practise the profession, whether they are appointed by the state or employed by private individuals. For these reasons the civil service as a whole may be considered as a self-determined elite with a specialized knowledge and an obligatory code of personal conduct, and to some extent a social outlook approved of by the existing government, largely influenced by that of the superior civil servants who belong, by origin, and always by social ties, to the landed and capitalist class. It is noteworthy that some of the ablest of the superior civil servants are attracted out of government service by the offer from great capitalist enterprises of salaries four or five times greater than those of the head departments. During the present war the reverse process has taken place, and some of the most important salaried posts have been transferred to profit-making capitalists, thus strengthening the capitalist system as against the socialist movement as represented by the Labour Party. Today the headship of most of the new functions of government, rendered necessary during the war, such as the rationing of food, the control of shipping, and other types of war production and distribution, have been taken over by business men who have been and are still connected with the particular type of capitalist enterprise concerned.
xi. "Norway has no two-party system, but proportional representation. The whole country is not one constituency but is divided into eighteen provinces and eleven groups of towns with proportional representation within each separate constituency. Since the last Great War no party has commanded an absolute majority in the national parliament, called the Storthing, and no government has been a majority government This means that generally the administration has not been very strong. . . There was a feeling that political institutions and procedures had not been readjusted to meet modern conditions; in many quarters there was a craving for 'more business in politics and less politics in business.' Certain sections in the press were constantly trying to ridicule the Storthing and the whole political system as not efficient enough. And- the complex party situation called for a thorough discussion of the very principles of our parliamentary system. . .
"But anybody taking this as an evidence of budding sympathy for a totalitarian system of government would have been entirely mistaken. It was rather evidence of a growing realization of the waste of energy in Party strife, of a groping toward new means of minimizing the costs of friction in public life, of a realization of the fact that national politics does not mean merely fighting fighting other Parties and platforms and their political ideas and conceptions, but that it means also (and in daily routine more than anything else) cooperation and coordination." See I Saw it Happen in Norway, by Carl J. Hambro, pp. 66, 70-71.
xii. One of the cardinal defects of the Two-Party or Many-Party System, as contrasted with government by a permanent civil service, or the equivalent, a One-Party elite, is that the immediate purpose of a general election, contested by rival Parties, is to bring into office a group of men many of whom have no technical qualification, whether as administrators, or for dealing with such specialized services as national finance, or the supervision of courts of law, foreign or military affairs, special services of education, health insurance and unemployment.
xiii. This type of organization -- associations of self-governing owner-producers -- is also that of specialized workers, such as fishermen and the hunters of fur-producing animals, as well as the handicrafts for the production of specialized articles, and in a few cases of factory and mine workers. These industrial cooperatives or self-governing workshops today include over two million workers and show every sign of increasing. Within the capitalist profit- making system they have been a failure in spite of the devoted propaganda of the Christian Socialists in 18401860 or the more revolutionary fervor of the Guild Socialists in 1910-1922. The few that have survived are closely connected with and dependent on the consumers’ cooperative movement.
xiv. Those readers who are complete pacifists may be interested in an article by me in I Believe (a volume of essays by twenty-three eminent men and women published by George Allen and Unwin, pp. 337-338), where I give my reasons fox rejecting the assertion "that all wars are wrong.”
xv. See the angry pamphlet issued by the Labour Party Publication Department, Transport House, April 1940: Stalin's Men "About Turn." A more elaborate and documented denunciation of this sudden twist-round of the Communist Party, June 22, 1941, is Victor Gollancz's able book, Russia and Ourselves. It is notable that neither one nor the other mentions the fact that the Communist Party is by its constitution dependent for its policy on the Commintern at Moscow; if that ceased to exist, the little group of able men presided over by the distinguished scientist Professor J. B. S. Haldane and the honest and able labor leader Harry Pollitt, as general secretary, could become members of the local Labour Parties or of the Fabian Society, and take an active part in the organization of a united Labour and Socialist Party.
xvi. We are told in the most authoritative history of the Communist Party -- Outline History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2 vols., by N. Popov -- that (pp. 61-62) 'The First, Constituent, Congress of the Communist International was held at the beginning of March 1919. It was attended by delegates from Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Germany, the United States, Norway, Hungary, Switzerland, Finland, Britain and other countries. The central question at the Congress was that of bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship, the report on this question being made by Lenin. In his introductory speech at the opening of the Congress, Lenin said: 'It is only necessary to find that practical form which will enable the proletariat to realize its domination. Such a form is the Soviet system with the proletarian dictatorship. . .” In Lenin's book State and Revolution we are told the purpose of the Commintern -- "'This victory of the world proletarian revolution calls for the greatest confidence, the closest fraternal union and the greatest possible unity of revolutionary action on the part of the working class in progressive countries. These conditions cannot be achieved unless a determined rupture is made on matters of principle, and a ruthless struggle is waged against the bourgeois distortion of socialism which has gained the upper hand among the leaders of the official Social-Democratic and Socialist parties'" (p. 63).
xvii. This "odd fact" is explained by the similarity in constitution and activities of the Consumers’ Cooperative Movement in the Soviet Union and in capitalist countries; whereas there is a striking difference ( as will be understood by readers of the foregoing pages ) between the constitution and activities of the Trade Union Movement within Capitalist Democracies, compared to the multiform democracy of the Soviet Union. This disparity of aim is even more true in the case of the Labour and Socialist Parties in capitalist countries, compared with the activities of the Communist Party in the USSR, with its planned production for community consumption as the accepted economic structure.
