CHAPTER XXIV

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY IN RECONSTRUCTION

We have followed the course of British labor in the war to the armistice upon the battlefields and the gathering of the nations at Versailles, to the British elections and the break with the war coalition, to the transition from war work to reconstruction.

The peace begins another epoch. The war witnessed the crashing down of the superstructures of the old. In the midst of it were laid the foundations of the new. Just as we as a nation shared only briefly and at the close in the inexorable strain of the conflict which reached from the grinding surfaces of the trenches far back to every rivet and strut of the social order, so we are less conscious of recoils which affect the whole fabric of European civilization now that the tension is removed. The changes while the war was on must needs have been momentous if we recognize its outcome as in great measure due, on the one hand, to the failure of centralized Prussian autocracy to carry enduring conviction among its coerced populations and, on the other hand, to the latent power for concerted action among a loosely hung group of freer, self-willed peoples. These efforts of two conflicting schemes of political government, each to hold its own vantage ground and to match the special quality which its opponent possessed at the start, could not fail to provoke profound reactions on either hand. The swing toward republicanism, revolution and liberty in Germany and Austria-Hungary once the war was over predicates shiftings towards collectivism among the Allies, as far reaching if not so swift, and as fundamental, if not in kind.

But more, we have been party to a struggle of endurance not between two opposed mechanisms, but between great groups of sentient human beings—to whose slow onward march the war was, at the start, an imperious interruption and, at the close, a great deliverance for democracy with its free choices and its blendings between old and new.

In a time of change, certain master ideas ride a population and carry it far. Prince Kropotkin has said:

There are moments in the life of mankind when certain general ideas prepared by a slow evolution of the mind get hold with an unprecedented clearness of the great masses of man. Such a moment takes place now.

The danger is that one shall write cautiously and seek to translate revolutionary force into terms of moderate social reform. To write tamely of great changes in prospect is as misleading as to write extravagantly of little ones achieved. Balanced and temperate statements of the coming reconstruction will not suffice to render the radical alteration which British labor demands. Labor feels that something prophetic is needed. From the ground up the remaking must be done. Europe is in ruins and cannot be tinkered. A restoration of the old society, with its institutions just as they stood before the war, is clearly impossible. That which has got into the minds of the people is that conscious control of life is possible.

Our chapters have been concerned primarily with the months of 1918 in which British labor laid the political and economic macadam of its new street of to-morrow. We have retraced the crossways that led up to it through the earlier years of the war and seen them reaching back to the long rough cobbled road which a vast and vaster company of men and women have paced since the industrial revolution brought into being a new estate in Western Europe made up of wage earners.

We have endeavored to sketch in broad outline three manifestations of the British labor movement in the midst of the war. They are all in the direction of an expansion of democracy of the worker's say in the governance of his work and of his nation and of the world.

The modern industrial movement in Western Europe, the movement of the organized workers in trade unions, concerns itself with the organization of producers. Its area is the day's work. It begins with wages and hours, but it reaches out to a share in management. It claims that the producer must control production. It forecasts workers' control of industry: self-government in industry. It expressed itself afresh in wartime England in the shop stewards' committees, the spread of industrial unionism, the Triple Alliance, and the joint boards. Its extreme statement (which will not find acceptance in Great Britain) is French and Italian syndicalism, which would brush aside the state and conceivably might end in a tyranny of the strongest industrial group, or in an anarchy of contending trades.

The modern political movement of labor in Western Europe concerns itself with the organization of voters. It functions through parliaments and local councils and boards. It deals primarily with man, the consumer, rather than with man, the producer. It there

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fore is a territorial-geographical association (instead of a workshop association). The members of the association live together in the industrial association they work together). The political movement concerns itself with nationalization of the means of production, the division of the national product and the distribution of wealth. Its extreme statement (which will not find acceptance in Great Britain) is German state socialism which conceivably might stifle freedom in centralized organization.

The British labor movement, driven on by the industrial impulse and the political impulse, alike, tends, in the phrase of the labor press, toward "ownership by the state and management by the workers."

For the political impulse toward collectivism, the Labour Party is the custodian. Arthur Henderson is its engineer and Sidney Webb one of its interpreters. Webb not only gave constructive craftsmanship to the formulation of labor's foreign policies, but

, with Snowden—at the opposite pole on the war issue-fashioned its proposals for radical fiscal changes. But in the domestic field, while the reconstruction plan of the Labour Party is detailed and specific in its outline of legislative minima as protection against industrial abuses, it is all but bare of reference to the structure of industrial self-defense and self-government, shop by shop, district by district, industry by industry, to the same end.

Sidney Webb is, in truth, making a last stand fight for the classic interpretation of industrial democracy, where the political state was to be sovereign, owning and conducting the forces of production, and where the unions were to be juniors in the presence of the bearded scientific expert. He tends to discount the new impulse toward workers' control in which the main drive is that labor is not to be a subordinate, but a partner. On the other hand, organized labor has come, as result of the tribunals set up by the war, to appreciate the value to itself of scientific method. In these tribunals the workers often found that they knew only the facts of their own shops or districts and turned increasingly to such authorities as Webb for the wider view.

For the industrial impulse toward producers' control in industry, there is at present no one custodian. In its local manifestations, the shop stewards are forerunners, and in the words of one of the leading labor executives of England-himself a member of a government tribunal—if a John the Baptist rose up among them they would sweep England. In the national manifestations of producers' control, Robert Smillie (of the miners), J. H. Thomas (of the railwaymen) and other industrial unionists are leaders; A. R. Orage, S. G. Hobson, G. D. H. Cole and others are its intellectual inter

preters. These last have no direct immediate "following" of votes, but their ideas are helping to swing the labor movement more and more to the “left.” They aim at a trade union congress (or, in their vocabulary, a National Guild Congress) which will be executive and legislative for man, the producer, while Parliament will execute and legislate for man, the consumer. The state which the Guild-Socialists foresee will be a machinery half industrial, half political (or, in other terms, half on a functional, half on a geographical basis).

The political movement is ill-advised in under-estimating this industrial movement in its newest manifestations. Arthur Henderson has never fully understood what David Kirkwood and the Clyde Workers' Committee were seeking to do. Some of the advocates of workers' control have an equal distrust of political methods for achieving their aims. This distrust is at times revealed in the writings, for example, of Cole and S. G. Hobson. The first labor members of Parliament failed to achieve the large things hoped for and the experience of the rank and file with labor members in the war government has been disillusioning. Political obstructions to labor will precipitate direct action industrially.

It is probable that the course of British labor in its two-fold movement will depend on the adjustment of both impulses to a new and common resultant, just as in the slow movement toward political democracy the organizing faculty of the British people has built up an Empire, while with their ingrained love of personal freedom they have kept fast hold of local self-government. It is in the interplay of these two impulses that we have evidence that British labor is drawing on collectivism, but individualism as well, in endeavoring to strike a new balance between social control and liberty.

As Arthur Henderson has said:

In opposition and presently, as we believe and hope, in office, labor will seek to build up a new order of society, rooted in equality, dedicated to freedom, governed on democratic principles.

Thus, in the political field, the outstanding lesson of the war to the British worker is that life has been conscripted by the State; therefore, property can be conscripted by the State. The Labour Party believes that taxation of incomes and profits will not yield enough to free the country from its oppressive war debt, and that any attempt to tax food or the other necessities of life will be unjust and ruinous to the masses of the people. It, there fore, demands that a graduated system of conscription of wealth shall be put into operation, to the end that capital shall cumulatively become an instrument of the common welfare.