Looking Back and Looking Forward (1940)

From the June 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the midst of the present titanic struggle in France and Belgium it appears to the majority of people that the past and the future are alike matters that can be left alone. Every energy, every thought, must, they say, be concentrated on the present; and with the impatience of those who are in the fight they are resentful that anyone should be concerned with past causes and future consequences. Socialists can appreciate the attitude of mind, for, we have felt similar impatience for years with the opponents of Socialism. For years the Socialist has had to put up with the apathy or wrongly directed zeal of the great majority. Before 1914, and right up to the outbreak of the present war, Socialists have been trying to get the workers of all countries to realise that, without a fundamentally different and better basis for the social system, there never would be or could be any safeguard against, poverty and war. But we who were on the job of showing the only way of escape were not listened to. We had to put up with the people who were “not interested in politics,” or who thought they knew of short cuts or easier roads, or who privately said they agreed with the S.P.G.B. but publicly put a different case because of the alleged ignorance and hopelessness of the working class.

We remember the Communists and their many Labour Party admirers who suddenly discovered, 20 years ago, that dictatorship—and its likely accompaniment, civil war—were the golden road to Socialism. In face of scornful taunts that we were out of date we replied that Socialism and democracy are indissolubly linked together, and that those who preached dictatorship would inevitably provoke reactionary terrorism. The Bolshevists cannot escape their major responsibility for the rise of Fascism.

We remember, too, the blind guides who thought they saw Socialism sweeping Europe because of the Labour and Labour-Coalition Governments set up in many countries after the war. We were told that “Over a large part of Europe definitely Socialist administrations are actually in office, and the principles of Socialism are avowedly accepted as the basis of social and economic reconstruction.” (Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in Preface to “A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain,” Fabian Society, 1920.)

The answer to this illusion was plain to see even in the journals which fostered it. The Daily Herald in 1919 had sent a correspondent, Madeline Doty, to study conditions in “Socialist” Germany. She interviewed, among others, a well-known German woman Socialist, a close friend of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, and said to her: “The world talks of a Socialist Republic in Germany.” This was her answer: “It is a lie. There isn’t an atom of Socialism. The Monarchy has gone, a Republic has come; but it is a capitalist Republic, a capitalist Republic that is more deadly and relentless than the Monarchy.” (Daily Herald, July 30th, 1919).

We remember again the legion of Labour Party supporters, including men now in the Cabinet, who preached pacifism, disarmament and appeasement; who, in face of our insistence that it was a dangerous illusion founded on a complete misreading of the world we live in, declared that if only German capitalism were treated generously there would be prosperity, stability and international reconciliation. The S.P.G.B. maintained unceasingly that neither greater armaments nor disarmament, neither punitive peace terms nor a policy of loans and concessions and a League of Nations, would alter essentially the basic forces driving to conflict. The S.P.G.B. continued to preach its only “ism,” Socialism, never on any occasion lending support to sentimental illusion and dangerous dreaming, and all the time we had to put up with the scoffing of the open enemies and misguided would-be friends of Socialism.

We are, of course, now asked to face the charge that we, too, failed in our effort to get the workers to realise the true nature of the situation confronting them. True, we failed in our task. The workers were not ready. They had too many and too persuasive leaders preaching the comfortable doctrine of the short and easy way to Socialism, against which we were almost powerless. But with our unanswerable case fortified by the experience of the past 20 years, and the present tragic outcome, what should we do ? Give up the struggle ? Stop pointing out the truth ? Plainly, No. The world needs the Socialist message more urgently than ever before. Let us rather determine that, to the best of our ability, old false doctrines in a new disguise shall not again be allowed to take root. Let us recognise with Sir William Beveridge there is need of a new idea; that “in view of the failure of the peace settlement of 1919, and of the despondency created by it in many minds, there is need of some new idea for the next peace. …” (Speech to Manchester Reform Club, reported in Manchester Guardian, January 31st, 1940.) Let us, however, determine that that demand for a new idea in the workers’ minds shall not be met, as Sir W. Beveridge proposes, with the sterile idea of Federal Union, but with the one fruitful conception for the human race, the idea of Socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle