Guild politics; a practical programme for the Labour party & the co-operators

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

1. THE NEW PARTY AND THE NEW POLITICS . I

3. THE GENERAL OUTLINES OF PROPAGANDA . (^2^1

Chapter I The New Party And The New Politics

The Labour Party is on the verge of a very new epoch in its career. Hitherto it has been in the position of a tradesman who has scarcely made the public understand that he has opened a new shop, or where it is situated. Now the Labour Party is within a very moderate distance of the seat of government. It has a reasonable chance of being soon the governing political party in the State.

It cannot be said that it altogether owes this exciting chance in life to its own merits. It owes it to its opponents. The governing classes of Europe, the gentlemen, the generals, the bankers and manufacturers, who have hitherto ruled the great nations of the world, have apparently decided to commit suicide. It is not for us, their unhappy victims, to inquire impertinently into their motives, still less shall we try to delay their generous self sacrifice. The simple fact stands that, by a course of international and national government which has obvious affinities with the lunatic asylums (and also some resemblance to the comic operas), the statesmen and politicians of modern Europe have during the last few years announced freely to all the peoples that they do not know how to rule. The diplomatists of Europe by clumsy intrigue (which they dignified with the phrase of " policy ") reduced modern internationalism to an arena for bull fights and gladiatorial shows ; the soldiers have spent five years in levelling the ring (and the spectators) as flat with the ground as possible ; and the politicians have now devoted two more years' hard work to collecting the remains into a dust heap. It is clearly a case for suicide.

Not to intrude into ancient history, during the last seven years the ruling classes of Europe and America have conducted the affairs of the world with the childlike incapacity one might have expected from a set of third-form school children, assisted by their nursemaids. It is rough luck on the Labour Party, for it is about to step into power at the moment when the world is beginning to believe (with good reason) that half its politicians and governors are knaves, and the rest not far from fools. The situation is not improved when the latest exponents of democratic reform. Messieurs Lenin and Trotsky and their friends appear to be only a comfortless confirmation of the proverb about the frying pan and the fire. And out of the chaotic tumult of this mad Europe the Labour Party will soon have to make its voice

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heard with a new gospel to attract and soothe a distracted, people.

:. It is a somewhat ironical situation. To have waited for power so long ; to have almost touched it — just at the moment when intelligent persons are wondering whether anything could possibly be worse than another government of any kind whatsoever. Until Lenin and Trotsky tried, there was the comfort that nothing could be worse than the last — but now almost that hope has disappeared. However, that portion of human progress which is defined as " the next government " does not come as a matter of deliberate choice. The mills of destiny (whether heavenly or satanic) go on grinding, heartlessly independent of human desires ; and it is written in the sands that the next political flour from the political mill will be of the Labour kind. It is certainly the only sign of sanity on the political horizon : it is rapidly becoming the only hope of hundreds of thousands of intelligent people who do not come within the dictionary's definition of the term " Labour."

The task of the Labour Party is colossal : more worthy of a great dramatic poem than a political pamphlet. If the people of the world had any sense of justice they would tell their present governors to clear up their own mad muddles, and not soil the hands of respectable people. But admirable a thing though poetic justice may be, we cannot spare time to enforce it. To ask the politicians and diplomats to clear up England (and Europe) to-day would be like asking a madman to clean a cow-shed — he would certainly put the manure into what remained of the milk. We want safety, not picturesque revenge. If there were a stupid statesman dangling from every lamp-post in London, the work of rebuilding would still remain to be done. Besides, public contempt may be a sufficiently poetic punishment on the cocks who have been crowing on their dunghills in Europe. It will not be any programme of the politicians' kind that will make England and Europe wholesome again. Every possible combination of political buffoonery and trickery has been tried. The present system of modern capitalism has been bolstered up and restored on north, south, east, and west. Every party cry that can allure an electorate, has been shouted from every platform. The politicians have changed sides of the House ; have even taken on each other's politics as well as each other's seats. Our orthodox statesmen, in pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp called Progress, have plunged in their dark way from one bog into the next ditch. If the new Labour Party is going to save us it must be by a very different creed than any we have been offered by the gentlemen who are now so thoughtfully committing political hara-kiri — it is, alas, their first thoughtful act. The Labour programme must be something entirely new in modern political life. But it does not necessarily

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follow that it will be new to human life. The Labour Party will discover that it may not so much need a new gospel for mankind ; but rather that it must merely try to restore some of those elementary decencies of life which have always distinguished man from the unintelligent brutes.

Take a simple example from everyday life. One of the main needs of the moment is to stop profiteering. To a very large extent that was most successfully done during those Middle Ages which ignorant men have called dark. It was one of the decencies of those times that it was grossly immoral to make large profits out of one's neighbours. When a man had done that, it was taught by the Church that he should go to his priest and confess it as a foul sin ; and they had intelligent anti-profiteering legislation to see that the police could interfere if the priest failed to censure. We have but to restore the morality and the legislation (only a little modified) of the Middle Ages, and profiteering would again become a speculative and dangerous trade, instead of the most profitable and safest of liveHhoods. But this is only an incidental illustration of the theory that so much of the new Labour Party programme will be merely a return to healthier human conditions that have already existed. We must remember that the vast bulk of humanity is not so far away from decent social morality : it is only a few dirty minds that rob their fellow men, unless there is no other way of making a living. Profiteering is not normal — it is only an occasional disease.^

Perhaps we here get near the secret of the programme of the new Labour Party — if it is to have any success. Far more than a new political and economic programme, it wants first a new morality, a new taste — or it would be better to say an older morality, an older and sounder taste in art and philosophy. The world has of late gone wrong because some degenerate men began to pursue vulgar ambitions. They were more anxious to get rich than to produce sound wares. A guild of mediaeval craftsmen made it one of their first duties to appoint searchers, who examined all products to ensure that they were of a fit standard of workmanship ; the first duty of a modern joint-stock company is to appoint a board of financial gentlemen who will see that the balance sheet is above the standard of profits. That is, of course, a question of economics and commerce — but first and more fundamentally

* The word profiteer does not appear in a standard dictionary of less than twenty years ago. There has always been selfish grabbing, but we do not realise how it is only during the last few generations that profiteering has been made a deliberate profession in modern Europe. The mediaeval system had a higher morality. We have sunk again to the crude vulgarity of the Roman Republic, when, as to-day, plutocrats governed the State for their own advantage. There was plenty of selfseeking in the Middle Ages — but it had to hide itself. Now, a profiteer displays himself in the House of Lords.

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it is a question of morality. The new Labour Party, in the most practical and hard-headed of senses, must realise that a well-phrased sermon by a philosopher or a priest may be as effective as the most carefully drafted anti-profiteering Acts. A series of frank ethical prize-fights in the House of Commons, without gloves, might bring the blood to the faces of the gentlemen who represent profiteers in the national assembly. This is by no means saying that our efforts should end in trying to bring a blush to the cheeks of a moneymaking member of Parliament. Put the law on him by all means — and let it be a tight law, tight as the rope which hangs the murderer who has only spoiled one human life instead of ruining the lives of thousands. But let not the vulgar moneymakers imagine that they are going to escape with a moral lecture : for the Labour Party, as men of the world, will be concerned with the most precise of legal codes. All that is insisted on here is that the people will never be roused to demand a better legal code until they are inspired by a higher moral one than is taught by most of the politicians and the priests of to-day.

But the Labour Party is again rather unfortunate at this critical moment of its history. Not only has it come to the steps of the ruling throne at the moment when all rulers are the laughing-stock of the world ; in its own ranks it is suffering from a radical indecision as to what its own policy should be. It has gone through its youthful career on the confident assumption that what it should demand was the creation of what it shortly termed the Socialist State. The machinery of government was to be seized by Labour members out of the hands of the Capitalist members and officials, and turned to the advantage of a new social class. The Labour world was not to be so very unlike the Capitalist world except that somebody else was to get the profits. The old State was still to be there, it was merely to be used for new purposes.

However, grave doubts have crept into the minds of sceptical men. Put briefly, there is a suspicion growing that perhaps the present Government is not only bad because it is a government of rich men, but also because it is a rule of bureaucrats. There is a fear that the Socialist bureaucratic state may turn out as dangerous to liberty and popular welfare as the Capitalist State. Put briefly in the language of the present controversies, there is a struggle arising between the principles of old-fashioned State Socialism and the newer (or really older) principle of decentralised government and smaller and more self-governing industrial units. Still more briefly, it is the argument between the State Socialists and the Guild Socialists. The Labour Party may come into powi before the verdict has been given. Nevertheless, the idea is rapidly arising that what England wants is not only a new political party but also a new policy of

NEW PARTY AND THE NEW POLITICS 9

Economics. The orthodox Socialist policy is seen to be much more like the old Capitalist regime than most enthusiasts imagined.

It will be the aim of this little book to set down in outline a policy for a new Labour Party and for a new Labour Economy. Politics and politicians have put themselves into such contempt that if the new men go forth to battle with the old cries or anything like them, they will be received with the contemptuous silence of a world that is disillusioned. " These rising politicians," the common man will say, " have they not always said they were something quite new, something altogether better than the old ? . . . We are tired of them all ! They may be only a new kind of rogues. There are plenty in the world . . . and they all seem to get into politics, sooner or later ... A plague on all their houses."

If Labour is to succeed in getting an army of opinion behind it, it will be by strategy and tactics which by no chance can be confused with anything else in the political field. It must declare for a new kind of legislation, for a newer social morality, which by no manner of means can be mistaken for anything else that has been offered within the memory of living men. It may turn out to be something far broader in ie& scope than Labour conceived in its more modest days.

Chapter II

There is a common belief that it is a very difficult thing to design Utopia, and that it needs a very accomplished person, such as a Lord Chancellor or a popular novelist, to do it with any success. This is quite a mistake. Almost anybody can think out a perfect plan of life for perfect beings — which is the problem of Utopia. Angels are the simplest of problems ; they always do what they are told ; and, indeed, usually do it without being told. Perfect beings do not want any government, and in the ideal State the political constitution will be of comparatively trivial importance. But it needs a real genius to find the best way of governing the ordinary humdrum people who go to football matches and spend week-ends at Brighton or Sunday on the river. Unlike the angels, such people require an enormous amount of instruction as to what they ought to do ; and it is only as a rare exception that they do it. In short, the problems of government have nothing to do with ideal persons, but almost entirely with the motley and imperfect crowd that can be passed in any street, or met in any public-house or Pall Mall club. The \ problem of government is to find a way of making |\ imperfect persons act a little more perfectly ; and the ' I first thing, strangely enough, the student has to realise / is that the essential rule of government is to teach people to do without it. The political schemer and the scientific student of society never get within sight of that abstract vision of perfection which amuses the spare hours of the Utopia-builders. The practical man of affairs who stops to worry about the perfect creature is wasting his time and confusing the issue. Let him stroll along a marketing street of a poor district on a Saturday night ; let him consider the crowd of shoppers at a West-End store, or the diners at a Piccadilly restaurant. These are the factors of his problem. He has to construct a scheme of social regulations that will not be beyond the intelligence of a colonel, or beneath the notice of a beach of holiday makers at Southend. Government is the guiding of everyday people in their everyday life.

There is one serious difficulty at the start. It must not be imagined that it is possible to argue the matter according to the rules of logic and commonsense. When the ordinary voter goes to the ballot box, he apparently leaves such encumbrances at home. A nation which returned to office the Coalition Ministry and Parliament of 1918 is clearly unable to debate political affairs on the basis of intellect. A people who believed that a ruined Germany could pay for the war ; or considered that Mr Lloyd George and his plutocratic friends would give them a well-planned peace ; such voters obviously went into the political contest with the same happy thoughtlessness with which they sing the choruses at the music-halls. It may be replied that the same electors are now busily engaged in reversing, at every political vacancy, almost every decision they made at the general election ; but it does not increase one's respect for a people's judgment to know that it is unstable as well as unintelligent. The judicial observer of popular politics gets the impression of an intoxicated man trying to recover from falling over one side of a plank by rolling over the other. The student of history is compelled by hard facts to be cynically sceptical as to the intellectual balance of the electorate. He has long ago given up any large hope of discovering a people who will give to their political decisions the ordinary care with which they count their money when they cash a postal order. They scarcely ever inquire whether the politicians give them the full value that was promised in return for their votes. The politicians have very cleverly abolished reason from their field of action ; perhaps because they realise that quiet thought would be a danger to the ideals of their political world. So, instead of being a rational debate, a General Election in England more closely resembles a scrimmage at a football match, and such cries as " Hang the Kaiser," as serious suggestions for the settlement of Europe, have the intellectual value of the war whoops of a students' rag.

A problem which has to do with very ordinaryhuman beings — which is, further, discussed on the popular lines of a sports contest — is something very far away indeed from the concerns of Utopia. To discuss such matters in terms of philosophy would be much as if a police magistrate applied the dicta of Kant to the " drunks," and the ethics of St Thomas Aquinas to the wife-beaters. The first thing the serious politician has to learn on entering politics is to consider the affairs of the vulgar crowd, which is sometimes very vulgar indeed.

We have in this country accepted the democratic principle that the governors are to be chosen by the votes of the majority of the adult citizens. The difficulty of the situation is that it is only occasionally that the aforesaid citizens take any interest in this choice ; and when they do, they generally elect the first political adventurer who is passing by. To put it concisely : this country is in theory ruled by the man of the street — who cannot or will not take the trouble to think ; in practice it is consequently controlled by a small group of politicians, who consider very little else but their own careers and the welfare of their masters, the lords of industry and finance, who pull the wires by which the politicians dance and sing. If that is disputed, read the financial papers and the companies' balance sheets. The man who does not know that Britain is governed in the interests of the few, bears a remarkable resemblance to the kitten that has not opened its eyes.

That is the problem before the Labour Party : how to make a kitten understand. There is no suggestion here that the ordinary " plain man," as Major C. H. Douglas aptly names him, is a fool in the essentials of life and its problems. He possesses quite a lot of commonsense about the world at large ; indeed, in that department of knowledge he can give the professional philosophers a generous start and pass them long before the post. But by some strange fate — which cannot be analysed here — ^the plain man has never got any grip on politics and the art of governing great States. To find the best poHcy for the Labour Party, it is first necessary to realise that it must appeal to a great body of people who have hitherto shown very little intelligent interest in the question. It has, strangely enough, always been hard to get any response to an appeal to the self-interests of the workers. They so persistently vote for their masters in the majority of cases ; otherwise there would be a Labour majority in the House of Commons, instead of a mere fraction. What can the Labour Party do with a crowd of self-sacrificing creatures who will work themselves to exhaustion for the profit of their masters on ordinary days, and vote for the defence of these profiteers on election day ? The situation has many of the qualities of a comic opera ; but it is hard to discuss it in terms of logic. This inability to defend his political interests, this failure to control the governing machine, is not a passing phase, as a study of history will too clearly prove. The history of the human race has been largely the story of the people submissively bowing to the will of a few. And for the last few hundred years it would almost seem that they have been bowing lower and lower, instead of standing more erect. The people of Chicago, for example, are far more obedient to their magistrates and policemen than ever were the men of the Anglo- Saxon days of Alfred the Great. The history of modern civilisation is, in large part, the story of the tightening of the power of a few governors by means of a rapidly centralising machine of State.

Of course men have turned on their rulers at intervals. But it is rarely that they have succeeded in their revolt. Much of history is the story of the failure of the peoples' efforts to throw off the chains of the governing set. The Romans tried to overturn the monarchy of Rome ; they succeeded, and the city became a republic. What was one of the chief results? The rich men who controlled the new constitution seized far more of the public lands than the single king had ever touched. Is there anyone innocent enough to believe that the citizens of the United States Republic to-day are as free as were those Englishmen who fled from Charles Stuart to found that new home of liberty ? Charles never sentenced anyone to life-imprisonment because he objected to his opinions ; indeed, when Strafford talked of absolute rule his neck was promptly severed. There are many Labour leaders in prison in the United States to-day, and democracy is submissive as a sheepfold ; although there are more serious transgressions against freedom than when the Stuarts made wealthy country gentlemen pay their share of ship-money. The rebellious people have usually come out of their rebellion in a worse pickle than they were in before. Strafford was certainly an overbearing person (although his chief fault in wealthy Puritan eyes was that he tried to protect the peasants against their lords), and it may have been necessary to teach him less insistent manners ; but the main result of the Puritan Rebellion was that it put the Pitts and Grenvilles and a hundred other Whig magnates in the single tyrant's place ; and the people of England were not a penny the better for their two Revolutions of the seventeenth century, but, on the contrary, a great deal worse ; for it is more inconvenient to have a hundred bad governors than one tyrant.

Whatever be the remedy for the political troubles of mankind, one thing at least is certain. It will not be a sudden cure. It has taken the human race many tens of thousands of years to drop unnecessary tails and leave off living in trees : after these countless aeons of progress we are still in such confusion that

(with enough raw material and tools and labour power to rebuild London), we seem almost totally unable to erect the few odd houses that fell into arrears during the Great War. If that is the degree of intelligence after centuries of progressive civilisation, does anyone hope that we would make a rapid jump if we had a revolution next week ? That the hard workers, with so little time for historical reading, should still have hopes of a revolution would be excusable. But it will be observed that it is rarely this class that asks for a violent rebellion. Revolutions have almost always been the work of the more leisured middle and upper classes ; and a little closer inspection will reveal the further fact that so many of these ardent souls were — let us use a frank phrase — " on the make." Of course, in some cases they have been perfectly sincere ; they only lacked the brain power necessary in order to understand that all the facts of history and human psychology and economics are against them. These gentlemen who advocated blood and violence have often been those who were discontented with their own progress in the governing set ; they wanted more personal power, and hoped that a successful revolutionary wave might wash them higher up the beach. It requires courage to tell the poor that they cannot be saved, except by their own constructive work, and that all the knocking down in the world will not build anything. Revolution is the political adventurers' last card : that childish phrase, " the dictatorship of the proletariat," in practice has meant too often the dictatorship of the adventurers. It has made the fame of many strong men ; the only thing it has never won is the salvation of the people. The French Reign of Terror did not make the people of France free : it only made Napoleon an Emperor.

This does not mean that the Labour Party must accept the moderate concessions offered by Liberals and Conservatives. It does not mean that it should not have a very assertive policy violently opposed to almost all that the privileged parties offer. It does not mean that the Labour Party should compromise with any other party at election time. The Labour Party should fight both Radical and Tory every time they show themselves in the electoral field. But it does mean that the working classes must be made to understand that by no political or revolutionary jugglery can they get to their paradise. The work of government, like every other part of human growth, is a process of building-up which cannot be dodged round by the fine phrases of revolutionary orators. There is no short road to freedom, as there is no short cut to knowledge. Of course it is possible to find a Labour road which will be short compared with our present governors' roads, which are deliberately going in the opposite direction. The Labour Party must preach the Class War, thereby meaning an attack on the class that selfishly desires its own good at the expense of its neighbours — and the definition may put many of the " revolutionary " leaders in the autocrats' ranks, and put many an aristocrat on the side of the people.

The title of this essay will be taken to mean, and is intended to mean, a policy for the Labour Party as a national parliamentary body. The parliamentary Labour Party maintains that it is the final summing up of the whole Labour movement : and if it did its work properly it would have the right to that position. Indeed, until that claim is justified by success, there will be something radically wrong with the Labour movement ; it will be going about in a headless form. So far the Labour Party has not proved its case. The parliamentary group is not leading Labour ; it might often be said to arouse rebellion against itself rather than impose discipline ; judging from popular comment, one might sometimes believe that the parliamentary Labour leaders will be torn to pieces by their followers, long before they are shot as revolutionaries by the War Office. It would be unfair to cast all the blame for slowness on the men in Parliament ; yet, at the same time it is perfectly healthy that the followers outside should be impatient, and even noisy, in their clamorous remarks. Each side has its strong arguments. It is the business of the workers as a whole to say very loudly and clearly what they want — ^to sum up their ambitions in their fullest form and on their loudest note. It is the function of the parliamentary Labour Party to express, not the final demand, but to put into concrete and practical form all that is possible for the moment. It is the duty of the crowd outside to express its ideals ; it is the duty of the parliamentary executive to discover how many of those ideals can be accomplished to-morrow or next week ; and the precise shape which the reform should take. The extremists may indulge in the delights of discussing their hopes ; the Labour Party should show its sympathy by reducing those hopes to the evaporated essence of commonsense and cold possibilities.

The main duty of the parliamentary Labour Party is to find a concise plan of reform which it can seriously ask the House of Commons to accept during the next session. It must never put itself in the weak strategical position of discussing Utopia, when the House can quite reasonably reply that it has nothing to do with that land of dreams. The fact is, of course, that the House very rarely is seeking practical reform ; on the contrary, it spends most of its time endeavouring to avoid it. But that gives the Labour Party the opportunity of proving that it is the only practical party in the assembly. When, for example, the Liberals and Tories bring in a Profiteering Bill, which has as much chance of holding up the profiteers as of holding up the traffic in the street, then the Labour Party's business is to make its opponents look ridiculous as idle dreamers and hopeless bunglers. Again, it may admit quite frankly that Utopia is a long way off ; but it will be perfectly within its duty in declaring, with the utmost decision, that (just to comfort us during the weary days of waiting) it intends to impose a death-duty of twenty shillings in the pound on all property above a very modest sum. That would stop the accumulation of great fortunes — ^the gravest danger to the State, the root of tyranny.