For years we have been told by Labour Party supporters (who had never tried to teach or even to understand socialism) that the working class did not want socialism, they wanted ‘something now’. We return the jibe and ask when the Labour government is going to give it to them. We were told that ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’ and that the way to get socialism is to build it up piecemeal, adding one gain to another until some day we shall wake up and find that capitalism has imperceptibly changed into the cooperative commonwealth.
One ‘half loaf’ has already been delivered to the cotton workers by the Labour government — a 6¼ per cent reduction in pay instead of the 12½ per cent asked for by the employers. May we ask how many such half-loaves will be required to produce socialism?
From an article ‘Labour party’s main plank gone’, Socialist Standard, January 1930.
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All of the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard is now online.
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