We haven’t got enough money yet to achieve the revolution. We haven’t even got within measurable distance of our first £1,000. Shame on us, our second month’s list actually falls a bit short of the first instead of showing an increase. This is not as it should be. Since the first list was published the need for funds has become even more imperative, for there is now a pretty general expectancy of a General Election about the end of the year, and should this materialise our part in it will be largely determined by the condition of this Fund.
The importance of this election can hardly be exaggerated. For over four years the people of this country have lain bound and gagged while almost every conceivable cruelty and outrage has been practised upon them. Their silence, enforced by brutal Acts of Parliament, has been claimed as acquiescence in and support of the orgy of slaughter upon which our masters have been spending us so lavishly. Every cry for peace has been crushed down by the bully’s bludgeon ; every manifestation of working-class international fraternity has been repressed by the hirelings of the “champions of liberty” ! Now they talk of proffering us a General Election, securely hedged around, as they think, so that no dissenting murmur against the butchery of working-class millions shall be heard in the land, and in order that on the day of reckoning they may claim that they acted in this bloody business according to the popular wishes, that no voice was raised against them when they put the question of their policy to the test of the polls, and that therefore every poor war-orphan had been robbed of its father’s care, and every war-widow of her husband’s support and protection, and every war-bereaved mother of the hope and comfort of her declining years, by the popular assent, wish, and demand.
It is up to us, who have so bitterly opposed the war from the very commencement, to frustrate this cunning design and prevent the filthy war-mongers from succeeding in this latest attempt to exploit their helpless victims. No electoral appeal to the people has been made in over four years of stupendous butchery ; we must see to it that the butchers do not snatch at the last moment an unanimous assent from their quivering victims. We owe it to our Cause to make our protest heard ; we owe it to our class to put on record at the ballot that only tyrannic repression has prevented the word of fellowship going out to all the stricken ones on those wretched battlefields.
Every endeavour should therefore be made to swell the Fund to the utmost during the next few months.
That's the August 1918 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
ReplyDeleteI thought I'd actually include the list of donations to give a flavour of the members and supporters of the SPGB who were about at the time.
Barltrop in The Monument always maintained that the party was decimated by the war. That the organisation was considerably smaller in 1918 because members had either dropped out, been conscripted, imprisoned or, in many cases, forced underground but though smaller in 1918 there's no denying that there was a definite hard core of support at that time. Barltrop downplayed how resilient the SPGB was coming out of WW1.