Russia Lends a Hand—To Prop Up Capitalism
From a speech by
Dr. Benes (Minister of Foreign Affairs, Czecho-Slovakia) at the Assembly of the League of Nations: —
“It is impossible to deny that the world is passing through a very grave crisis.
“It is a crisis of ideas of morals and of religious beliefs,” he added, “a crisis in world economic affairs, in internal politics, in social conditions and systems, a far-reaching crisis in international relationships, involving threats of war and revolution of every kind.”
Speaking of Russia’s application for membership, Dr. Benes said this was a country without whose co-operation conditions in Europe and in the world as a whole could never quite return to normal. (Daily Herald, September 11th, 1934.)
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Our All-Knowing Masters
Mr. Lloyd George has some illuminating passages on the way in which official personages regard the mass of the population on whose shoulders they have been raised to eminence. The following refers to
Lord Milner and
Henry Wilson, both of whom were sent to Russia to report on conditions there during the War: —
The head of the British Delegation, Lord Milner, was by training and temperament a bureaucrat. He knew nothing of the populace that trod the streets outside the bureau. He did not despise them. He just left them out of his calculations. A study of the ways and thoughts of the crowd constituted no part of the preparation for entry into the Civil Service or for success afterwards. The more you meddled with that side of government, the less chance there was for promotion. It was for the politicians to deal with these things, and he was not and never became a politician. Henry Wilson was every inch of him— and he had many more inches than the average—a professional soldier. The soldiers were not supposed to take cognisance of the people, except the specimens who joined the army. He judged these entirely by the canons of discipline. The supreme test of discipline was saluting the officers. He saw with his own eyes that the Russian soldiers passed that test superbly. Mutiny in the army was therefore remote, and if the army could be depended upon, the “frocks” (as he always nicknamed politicians) who babbled in the Duma did not matter. He had strong political prejudices, but they were sectarian in their origin, and all irrelevant to the Russian situation. He hated Papists and Irish patriots, and he encountered neither among the Russian soldiers or civilians. So he quite independently and from another angle supported Milner in the conclusion that there was no danger of any upheaval in the immediate future. The chief missioners therefore were unanimously of opinion that although revolution was inevitable it would be postponed till after the war.
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The Drift Away from Nationalisation
It used to be an article of faith with the Labour Party that State enterprise or Nationalisation was a step towards Socialism. They ignored the numerous instances of State enterprise being a stepping-stone towards a less restricted form of capitalism. Japan was an example of the latter, as is also the Indian State of Mysore. There are signs that Russia is moving in the same direction. The following is from the Times, and relates to Mysore: —
FUTURE OF STATE INDUSTRIES.
The President of the Mysore Chamber of Commerce considers that the time has come for Bangalore to have a stock exchange of its own, instead of transactions in the many Government and joint stock securities of the State being “ largely controlled by the organised markets of Bombay and Madras.” . . . While commending the forward policy which has made Mysore a great industrial State, the President believes that the position under which the Government started and own and manage many industrial concerns should now be reviewed. He is of opinion that some at least of these State-pioneered industrial and trade concerns should be handed over to private enterprise, so that they may be further developed in the larger interests of the country. He expressed his satisfaction . . . that the policy of combining private enterprise with Government ownership and management has been happily inaugurated at the new great Mysore sugar factory. [Times, September 14th.)
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A Minimum Wage—What Then ?
Writing about the Report for 1932 and 1933 just issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Daily Herald says that thousands of farmers—
are breaking the law by paying their men less than the minimum rates of wages laid down by the County Agricultural Wages Committees. (Daily Herald, September 21st.)
This has been going on for years. Some observers estimate that probably twenty-five per cent. of the land-workers are paid less than the legal minimum rates.
The Daily Herald, and others who devote their time to securing legal enactments by which to prune, trim, restrict, regularise, improve, standardise, normalise, and otherwise tinker with the capitalist system, should take particular note of the position in agriculture, where legally fixed rates are supposed to be operative.
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Home-1934
The Conservative Party headquarters, in their monthly journal, The Elector (September, 1934), triumphantly quote an unemployed worker in defence of the Government’s residential training centres for the unemployed. The Conservatives are, of course, anxious to discredit the Labour Party’s attacks on these centres, but they were so eager that they fail to realise the full significance of the following passage: —
There’s no punishment—but a fellow can be sent home. That’s the worst thing that can happen to him. After generations of Liberal, Labour and Conservative reforms designed to abolish slums, provide homes for heroes, eliminate poverty and unemployment, and generally to make capitalism fit to live under, it is a punishment in the eyes of an unemployed man to be sent “home” !
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Hitler and Stalin.
Communists who so violently abuse British rule in India, or abuse the Nazi dictatorship for the brutal murders of June 30th, would do well to ask themselves whether the methods of the German secret police system are any worse than the methods of the Russian Ogpu. The News Bulletin of the Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee, a body which exists to defend and apologise for the Soviet Government in the English Press, contains the following statement concerning the Ogpu’s powers : —
. . . the Ogpu did have very wide powers in dealing with acts of counter-revolution and sabotage. They had power to arrest, try and sentence to exile, imprisonment, or even death, individuals suspected of these crimes without recourse to the ordinary courts of law.
If the officials of the Russian Ogpu were as hysterical and unbalanced as some of the leading Communists in this country, anybody on whom they happened to cast an eye might be suspected of anything, and their chance of disproving the suspicions would be about as good as those of the men and women shot without warning by Hitler’s thugs.
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“Original” Measures against Unemployment.
The Fascist movements still go on claiming that they have made a new and original contribution to political and economic thought. The following comes from Italy: —
Original measures to alleviate unemployment have been suggested to Signor Mussolini by the National Confederation of Fascist Industrial Syndicates, which is a department of the new corporative state.
They include the
Institution of two or more shifts during a working day,
Reduction of working hours.
Abolition of overtime.
An increase in the number of operatives to a machine,
A wider distribution of all available piece-work,
and
Restrictions in the employment of women and juveniles. (Daily Telegraph, August 1st.)
“Original” measures! Their age is only exceeded by the degree of their uselessness.
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Mr. Garvin.
Of all well-informed publicists,
Mr. J. L. Garvin is about the most abysmally and persistently ignorant regarding Socialism. This is from the Observer (September 2nd): —
SIGNOR MUSSOLINI AND SOCIALISM.
Labels in modern politics often mislead simple folk. Exaggerated interest has, therefore, been aroused by the report from Italy that Signor Mussolini has approached his former Socialist comrades to take executive office with him. Is that so surprising ? The corporative state is socialism in the simple meaning of the word.
Mr. Garvin’s last sentence is bosh, both in the simple and in all other meanings of the word.
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Who Owns London?
From an article by A. P. Luscombe Whyte in the Evening Standard (May 30th, 1934): —
Lord Howard de Walden has also been dubbed “ London’s richest landlord, with an income of £400,000 a year ” (paying for his horse Blazonry’s feed). Up till 1925 he owned 40 acres of the heart of London, stretching from Oxford Street to Euston Road, and from Oxford Circus and Regent Street eastward to Wells Street. He sold at a good time to a trust largely owned by
Sir John Ellerman at a price said to be £3,000,000. A few years before, the public had gaped at reports of his sale of a large slice of the West of London for £4,000,000. A handful of other landlords own, or have owned, considerable sections of London. Among them are Dulwich College, with two square miles, and Lord St. Germans and Sir Spencer Maryon-Wilson, to whom is attributed nearly as much.
To-day the old estates are dwindling. They are passing, acre by acre, into the hands of great trusts and companies, whose rule is often more strict and less human than that of the former manorial owners. It is only the poor individual Londoner, who lives there, who has nothing to say about his city. It isn’t his.
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Gandhi s Utopianism.
From a speech delivered by Gandhi at Amedabad on June 20th, 1934: —
“The duel between capitalists and labour is only between big words to me. . . . Both are capitalists: one has consolidated his capital and utilised it intelligently; the other squanders it recklessly. If you communists or anybody wish the destruction of capitalists we would be destroyed.
"What I really do want is a combination, mixing and unity of the two. What I want from both is useful use of wealth. When we all learn the use of wealth in a better way and teach the same to capitalists, then alone we would be able to do some useful work for India’s labourers and bring them to higher standards. This I say and propound from my fifty years’ mature experience.” Replying to other questions, Gandhi said that he was at present under a vow not to discuss politics or to criticise Government’s policy and, therefore, he could not criticise the Government for firing on Bombay strikers, etc., without violating the vow he had taken. That vow was taken in the presence of God and, therefore, he considered it invisable and sacrosanct. (Indian Labour Journal, July 8th.)
Edgar Hardcastle
