Notes of the Month: Two Blind Mice (1941)

From the February 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two Blind Mice

In a controversy about Russia, published in the Picture Post, father and son come to verbal blows in the persons of Professor Gilbert Murray and Mr. Stephen Murray (Councillor). We missed the professor’s contribution, but it is obvious from Mr. Stephen Murray’s reply that both were merely wrestling with words, not arguing about facts.

Thus, Mr. Murray, Junr., talks airily about the “land of Socialism,” a “state which has no exploiting class,” etc., etc.

Here are a few questions which these two protagonists would do well to ponder:

“Do the majority of Russians work for wages barely sufficient for subsistence?”

“Is there a small group of persons in Russia leading a comfortable and privileged life without the need of slaving in mines, factories, or on the land?”

“Are goods for sale at a price, and do industrial and agricultural undertakings issue a balance sheet to show whether they are being worked at a profit or loss?”

“Is there a police force, army, air force, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of repression for use at home and abroad ?”

If the answer to all these questions is “Yes,” then, gentlemen, you are looking at capitalism.

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Hitler’s New Order. 

Some good points and interesting information are provided by Mr. Edward Hulton in the Picture Post (December 21st, 1940).

Nazism, which claims to be able to operate capitalism so much more efficiently and less wastefully than its older and more easy-going brothers, is, in fact, a maze of bureaucracies. Thus, in Dr. Funk’s Ministry of Economics alone, “1,200 propagandists are daily toiling,” whilst in the city of Prague “700 price controllers have just assumed office.”

When Hitler took power in 1933 he told the Germans: “Give me four years of power and then you can judge me on the results.”

Germans, so far from being in a position to do any judging, to-day are too busy enduring “trials.”

Their “voluntary contributions” for the new “people’s car” have brought them tanks instead, and the already low working-class standards are further threatened by the Deutscher Volkswirt, on October 4th, which says:

“In order to combat the flight from the land, the town population will have to decide to lower its standard of living.”

Under capitalism, the biggest part of the population will always be discontented, and this cannot be remedied by Hitler’s spate of words nor the showy effects of the Nazi military circus.

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Who Calls The Tune? 

Unless we are very much mistaken, trouble is brewing for many trade union officials. These people, who live a not too uncomfortable life on the salaries paid to them out of working-class pockets, do not all appreciate that they are supposed to look after the working-class side in the argument about wages and working conditions. This is, in fact, what they are paid for, but many workers even seem to have forgotten it as well.

The following incident will give the point to this paragraph : —

A certain firm has not been paying the war bonus, as stipulated in the collective agreement between the employers and unions. The union official arrives at the factory, which is making great-coats for the Army, but fails to make contact with the employer. He then calls a meeting of the workers, and, instead of sympathising with the cheated workpeople, accuses them of deliberately slowing up work for revenge for the non-payment of the bonus.

And this, mind you, within the hearing of the manager!

The writer of these notes might have been moved when this union official turned from threats to pleading for more coats for soldiers who were shivering in the cold, were it not for an article in this union’s magazine describing how factories and workers were idle in this same trade for lack of orders.

* * * * *

Unequal Sacrifice

The propaganda, both here and elsewhere, designed to make workers believe that class differences matter little in war-time, that “we are all making sacrifices for the common cause,” is having an uphill fight against facts, and events that tear the argument to shreds. It is no exaggeration to state that the war, with all is black-out, is illuminating class-antagonisms more than ever. Standards of living, protection against air raids, evacuation—can anyone assert that these questions affect all members of the community alike? In the last instance, all these problems, like almost every major problem of our time, can be correctly appraised only with the gauge of class-consciousness.

As the war proceeds on its path of slaughter, these truths will become more and more apparent to the working-class the world over. What the result will be we cannot tell. At present a feature of working-class agitation for higher wages, better air-raid shelters, etc., is the pronounced part which Communists are taking in these movements.

For several reasons this is bad business from the workers’ point of view. In the first place, Communist subservience to the rulers of Russia will make it much easier for the demands to be refused.

For the same reasons, workers must be warned that, should the policy of the Kremlin change and they decide for a rapprochement with the British Government, Communists here and elsewhere will not hesitate to drop their present role as “guardians” of working-class interests, as they did in pre-war France.

Socialists are not merely concerned to further working-class interests, whatever their character, in war or peace, but above everything, to stimulate workers into thinking, learning and working for the ending of capitalism. Compared to this task all else is secondary.

* * * * *

“A Great Man”

“That he is a great man I do not deny, but that, after 18 years of unbridled power, he has led your country to the horrid verge of ruin, can be denied by none.” (Daily Herald, 24th December, 1940).

Mr. Winston Churchill, on Mussolini, in the recent B.B.C. broadcast to the Italians.

What a peculiar idea of “greatness,” Mr. Churchill, and indeed, the whole of his class must have ! To keep working-people chained to their miserable lives, to deny them the opportunity of thinking and speaking for themselves, and then to drive them to kill and be killed ! If these tasks can only be performed by “great” men, then the sooner the world is run by the “little” men the better it will be for the welfare of humanity.

The really useful things in this world are done by the working-class. The provision of food and clothes, the work of cleaning and healing, and the thousand-and-one different services without which life would be impossible, are simply taken as a matter of course by our ruling gentry. But creatures of bombast, of abnormal ego and the gift of the gab, whom circumstances, plus the intrigue of propertied interests, and a backward population elevate to positions of power, are admired and feted, even in the midst of the slaughter they helped to bring about.

* * * * *

Press-Gangs For Democracy ! 

As to Mussolini’s personal qualities, an illuminating story is told by Mr. Beverley Baxter, M.P., in the South Wales Echo, (December 17th, 1940).

Mr. Baxter was dealing with Mussolini’s early history, when, after activities in the pacifist and labour movements of Italy, he turned into a recruiting agent for the Allied cause. This is what Mr. Baxter says: —

“When the disaster of Caporetto overcame the Italians, Mussolini had been invalided out of the Army and was running a violent newspaper of his own in Milan. In addition to that, he was feeling his way politically, and had organised gangs in the city who had their own methods of persuasion.

“The Italian army was in almost complete disruption, and thousands of deserters streamed back to the towns. The British General Staff were in a desperate predicament. Somehow, the Italians must be made to go back and fight.

“I shall now reveal what has never been published before. A certain English officer of high rank, acting with a shrewdness that is wholly commendable, saw Signor Mussolini. When the talk was ended the Englishman owned the newspaper and Mussolini had agreed to do everything with his pen, and his gangs to get the deserters back into the war.

“How much did it cost?—I forget …”

* * * * *

The Vision of the Press

Problems arising out of air raids have revealed the capitalist class at their most inhuman. Their Press, also, has shown a callous disregard for the intelligence and feelings of their working-class readers.

Here are two particularly glaring examples of this : —

When the night raids first began in a comparatively mild form, and people stayed up all night as a consequence, the News Chronicle came out with a number of articles “proving” by “experts” that sleep was not essential, or that people could get sleep standing up in buses and trains on their way to work. To make their readers feel really happy about the lack of sleep, they enumerated all the famous people, like Napoleon and Julius Caesar, who, it was claimed, never slept more than an hour or two.

The inference being, perhaps, that with similar lack of sleep, you, too, could become like these historic personages.

A similar gratuitous insult was proffered to its readers by the Daily Express.

To divert people’s attention from the lack of 100 per cent. protection against air raids (and, of course, war itself), this paper was running a campaign to “turn the young men out of the tubes.”

Fortunately, this incitement to the working-class to turn in on itself and eject working-class males between the ages of fifteen and fifty on to the bombed streets failed miserably.

Socialists recognise that the capitalist Press have their own axe to grind, the point is, that it usually descends on workers’ heads.

Sid Rubin