Fabian Socialism

G. D. H. Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136246043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1971. This volume explores Socialism by the author who was the Chairman of the Fabian Executive. It is written from the demand of a intepretation of Socialism in the light of the conditions crated by World War Two.

I

PERSONS AND POLITICS

SOME day, quite soon, when this war is over and the Nazis have been beaten and the terror lifted from the peoples, you and I, if we are still alive, will have to rebuild England. I say ‘England’, because I am an Englishman and feel that in England is my home and my land of heart’s desire. But, though I say ‘England’, I mean, and have to mean, much more; for how can we hope to build a happy England in an unhappy and distracted world? If I were a Scot, or a Welshman, or an Ulsterman, I expect I should think first of all of Scotland, or of Wales, or of Northern Ireland (or perhaps of Ireland as a whole). If I were a Frenchman or a German or a Russian, I should think first of my own country—of the sort of life I want to live in it, and the lives I want my fellow-countrymen to be able to lead. But, from whatever point my thoughts began, and to whatever point they came continually back, I should have to think about other countries as well as my own. For there is nothing more positive than that, of whatever country I feel myself a citizen, the fate of my country is bound up with what happens to the world at large.

I wish I did not have to think in this enlarged way; for it makes thinking very difficult. It would be hard enough to plan out a decent future for England, and to find ways of acting with my fellow-Englishmen so as to make our dreams come true, without troubling our heads about the affairs of other countries. It is none too easy a matter to make up one’s mind how England ought to be governed, or how we should set about the task of rebuilding England after the devastations of war. But enough has occurred in our own day, and is happening even now, to show us clearly that we cannot succeed if we plan for ourselves alone. We all but brought sheer destruction upon our country by not planning with others how to prevent Hitler’s aggression—that is, by our failure to form a common front of peace-loving countries strong enough to make Hitler afraid of attacking them. That failure has cost us the misery into which we are plunged to-day; and it should be plain to all of us that there can be no secure escape from such misery unless, in beating Hitler, we also make and carry out effective plans for enabling all Europe to live in peace and friendship in the coming times.

We have, then, to attend to the affairs of Europe, and of the whole world, as well as to those which are more particularly our own. But, for most of us, though this is true, the main responsibility is connected with the affairs of our own country. For we cannot, except by helping our utmost to defeat the Nazis, do much about the rest of the world, whereas we can do a great deal to affect what happens here in England. We shall do what we are called upon to do here all the better if we do it with insight into what our actions mean for the citizens of other countries, and if we act with the feeling that we are their comrades in a common task. But our chance of acting is bound to be mainly—the actual fighting apart—a chance of acting here, in our own country; and it is mainly through what we do in our own country that we can hope to affect the world.

But can we do anything? Very many men and women are inclined to say that, in times such as these, there is really nothing they can do. Of course I do not mean literally nothing; for at present most of them are working very hard. They are in the armed forces, or the home defence services, or the munition factories or mines, or the merchant marine, or in some other of the countless branches of activity that make up the war effort. Or perhaps they are carrying on with their ordinary peace-time jobs, in the knowledge that these are no less indispensable, and are working a good deal harder than usual because so many of those who used to work with them have been taken away for services more directly connected with the war.

Most of us, in one way or another, are working exceptionally hard in these days; and when we do get a few hours off we are apt to feel that we thoroughly deserve a rest. But if those who read this book feel at all like me—and I fully believe many of them do—they do not find it so easy after all to take a rest when the chance comes. For rest, in order to be really restful, demands some peace of mind. Whereas, when I try to rest nowadays, there come into my mind all sorts of worries that nag at me, and forbid me to achieve a real peace of spirit. No doubt it is possible to get rid, for the moment, of these sensations—to drive them out of the active consciousness for the time being by absorbing oneself in something else; for example, by dancing, or by listening to fine music, or by doing whatever most takes you out of yourself according to the way you are made. But that is not a satisfying answer to the problem; for no sooner is the excitement over than the worries begin again to nag at you, perhaps the more insistently because you have succeeded, for a little while, in putting them out of your mind.

Doubtless this experience presses upon some of us much more hardly than upon others, at any rate in the sense that some of us are much more aware of it. But I believe it does press, to an important extent, on nearly all of us, or at least upon all normally decent and sensitive people. It can affect us without our being clearly conscious of it, setting up an uneasiness which makes us fidgety, or spoils our tempers, or gives us a craving for excitement, or causes us to dream and to sleep less soundly than we used to do. Of this I am sure, that this kind of experience affects us most keenly when we feel lonely and, in our loneliness, afraid.

Our worries and uneasiness can, of course, take many different shapes. Most of us are not worrying, for most of the time, about anything that is ordinarily called ‘Politics’; for ‘Politics’ play only a tiny part in the thoughts of the vast majority of men and women. Most of us are worrying chiefly about what is to happen to our own lives and to the lives of those who are dear to us—husbands or wives, children, parents and friends. We are wondering and worrying, not only what is happening to those whom we love now, or will happen to them before the war is over, but also what sort of life is in store for them when the fighting, and the munition-making, and the blitz, and the evacuation are at an end, and we all come to settling down again to a more normal way of living. We are wondering and worrying about our jobs. Will they be there for us to go back to, if we want them? Will the little shop that has been forced to close down ever reopen? Will the factory where we used to work ever want our services again? Will our house that has been destroyed be rebuilt for us just as it was, or better, or worse? Where are we likely to live after the war, and what are we likely to do? Shall we be better or worse off, either absolutely or in comparison with our neighbours? And even—What shall we want to do when the fighting is over? Will post-war England be much the same sort of place to live in as the England of the past? Or will it be different; and, if so, how?

Ordinarily, the vast majority of men and women pass their lives in a routine that changes little from week to week. In the course of their lives they make a few decisions which are of vital importance to their happiness—what trade to enter, whom to marry, whether to put up with what comes to them or take risks in the hope of improving their lot. But such decisions are relatively few, and some even of them are taken, for good or ill, almost without thought. When they have been taken, they usually settle the course of our lives for long periods, leaving us with a fixed environment to which we fit ourselves in as best we can. Most of us, for most of the time, take this environment for granted; and the older we get the smaller usually our power of varying it becomes.

At present, however, that condition no longer holds good. We may be living as much under a daily routine as ever, or even more. But the routine is not one which we expect to last. We are going on from it to something different, which may be the old routine we have left, or something akin to it, but may also be very widely apart from any way of living we have ever known. We cannot see, as we mostly think we can in ordinary times, what the future—our future—is going to be like. That gives us a feeling of being lost, in a world which has ceased to have fixed landmarks for us, or even signposts by which we can find our way.

I have suggested that this sense of being lost affects us most when we feel most alone. Now, feeling alone is a very different thing from being alone, in a physical sense. A person can feel quite horribly alone, like a child that has strayed from its parents, in the midst of a huge crowd. The loneliness that matters is not physical isolation in itself, but the absence of fellowship. In our ordinary lives we have families and friends with whom we consort, and with whom we are partners in certain settled and regular enterprises, such as keeping a home, or cultivating common tastes and interests, or furthering a common cause. But now many of us have been torn away from these familiar environments and contacts, or, even if we remain in them, feel their foundations rocking under our feet. Even if we can in all sincerity write home to say that we are feeling fine, and having a good time, on the whole, there is often at the back of our professions a gnawing doubt. What is it all leading to, after all? What is to happen to us when the Government and the Generals have done with treating us as pawns in the military game? What is it all for; and what are we for? And why should this idiotic upset have been allowed to happen?

Thus, our thoughts about our own future, about our private lives and the lives of our families and friends, lead us on to wider questions, which are ‘Politics,’ whether we call them by that name or not. But at this point loneliness is most apt to afflict us, and to prevent us from seeing or thinking straight. Men in camp or barracks will swap tales about home, show one another their kiddies’ pictures, and, in moments of confidence, pour out some of their personal perplexities to those whom they find most congenial among their fellow-exiles from home. The same thing will happen in air-raid shelters, or in factories on night-shift, when the discipline is relaxed, or, quite casually, when strangers meet on a journey and get to talking frankly with no expectation of ever meeting again. But most of this talking is about personal and private affairs, and very little, as far as I can judge, about politics. Or, rather, what political talk there is comes out of the newspapers, and is mere surface froth, and not a real exchange of opinion. Men pick up newspaper notions of what is being mismanaged here or there, of this or that Minister’s incompetence, of this or that change that needs to be made; and they pass such notions on, as small talk, without attaching any real importance to them, or regarding themselves personally as having any sort of responsibility in relation to them. Of course, this does not apply to everybody. There are politically minded individuals everywhere—in camp or barracks, on board ship, in the factories, and in the pubs. But they are a small minority; the great majority of men talk much more seriously, and think very much more seriously, about private than about public affairs.

Up to a point, women talk about politics more seriously than men. For war-time politics—food rationing, clothes rationing, and most of the forms of ‘State control’—put up more urgent practical problems to the housewives than to any other section of the people. To some extent, the ordinary rôles are reversed: women in war-time become more political, and men less. But the women too, for the most part, only exchange grumbles and expedients: most of them do not regard these things as matters about which they are called upon to act in any political way.

Man has been defined as by nature a ‘political animal’; and so in a sense he is. It is a necessity for him to live in communities; and it is very rare to find a man who can be happy when he is long alone. Solitary confinement is a most terrible punishment: men are gregarious by nature, and for most of them it is a good deal easier to speak to others than to themselves. Thinking in solitude is a highly advanced art; and for most men such thinking can go but a very little way. But ‘gregariousness’, which is natural to men, is a very different thing from ‘politicalness’, in any sense one would ordinarily attach to being ‘political’. Being ‘political’ seems to imply a disposition to take in hand positively the management of the common affairs of a group; and in this sense the vast majority of Englishmen are certainly not political, or are so only to a very tiny extent.

The consequence is that when ordinary men and women find themselves led on of necessity from thinking about their own and their families’ future to thinking about the social environment in which their lives are to be led, they are apt to feel very helpless. In a relatively stable world they were able to take this environment for granted; and most of them did. But they cannot take it for granted now, because the world they knew and lived in has, for very many of them, been torn up by the roots. They are lost and bewildered; and as they have not been in the habit of taking politics seriously, and do not know what to think about them now, they find the greatest difficulty in even beginning to exchange real ideas upon such matters with those they meet. They continue to exchange trivialities of second-hand newspaper jargon when they approach such themes. They can talk fairly easily about their personal affairs, and mean what they say, because in relation to them they know, broadly speaking, what they want and where they stand. In political matters they do not know; and the superficial talk which they exchange mostly means nothing real to them or to their hearers.

We English are, indeed, in these days an extraordinarily unpolitical people. We were not always so. There was a time when nearly every public-house in a working-class district was a centre of keen political dispute, when farmers’ ‘ordinaries’ nearly came to blows about the rights and wrongs of Whig and Tory policies, and when the voteless people was much more alive to political issues than the great majority of voters are to-day. There was a time when religion was a great political force, and ordinary men held their political opinions with a zeal which seemed to them to come from God. We English have great traditions of our past battles for political liberty, and pride ourselves on our achievements as pioneers in the democratic cause. Our Parliament is the ‘Mother of Parliaments’; and we have still a way of regarding most foreigners as vastly our inferiors in the arts of government and political freedom. But of late the zeal has gone out of us; and, taking these things very much for granted, most of us have ceased bothering our heads about them. We have come to thinking of politics, when we think at all, as the other fellow’s business, not our own. We still listen in to politicians talking about freedom and democracy; but it no longer occurs to most of us that the defence of these things is our personal and important concern. We have gone slack about politics—or had, until the war; and I do not see much sign that we have become less slack about them even now.

The explanation of this slackness is, I think, to be found partly in the very success with which, in such countries as ours, man has pursued his conquest of the powers of nature. The ability to produce wealth has increased so fast that we have, as a nation, got past the sheer scramble for the means of living which marked the earlier phases of the struggle to live; and, despite the class system, an appreciable part of the new wealth has filtered down to the main body of the people. Even in my own time there has been a quite astonishing change for the better in the material condition of the poor. There are far fewer ragged children or adults, far fewer persons going about filthy or with an evident look of under-nourishment or physical defect, far fewer ‘down and outs’ or hopeless ‘drunks’ who have lost all self-respect, far fewer tattered, draggled, anti-social objects who, if they rouse our pity, are bound at the same time to provoke the distaste of ordinary people. The lump of human misery has grown smaller; and, even more, it has become less obtrusive. It is now, except in relatively few places, nearly invisible except to those who deliberately seek it out. This change is due in part to a real diminution in the sum of wretchedness—an outcome of better wages and working conditions, better social services, and better knowledge and education. It is also partly due to the greater expertness of the modern world in tucking misery away where it need not be seen—in institutions for the sick, the disabled, the aged, and the feeble-minded, and in unvisited slum quarters of our overgrown cities. But the fact remains that the sum of sheer physical wretchedness has decreased, and that with its decrease the passion to give the bottom dog a better chance has lost much of its insistence in the minds of those who are better off: so that the very improvements that have been made weaken the social will to advance further.

This, however, is by no means the whole story. It does largely account for the weakening of the impulse to help the wretched; for that impulse is much more easily aroused by the actual sight of misery walking the streets than by any knowledge, got from books or speeches, of its existence. To see unfortunate children, clothed in rags and with the signs of starvation in every inch of them, was much more moving than merely to read about them, especially when it was an incontrovertible fact that their numbers had decreased. The impulses of sheer humanity did grow weaker as they were less keenly stimulated by eye and nose; and men did grow more callous to sufferings which they did not have to see. But the political outlook was never wholly humanitarian: it was an affair of rights as well as of sympathies.

Here, too, the passion waned, partly, as more and more people won the vote for which they had clamoured, and found it not so great a matter after all. The lack of a vote is a much greater stigma than the possession of it is a privilege; and, though men might rise to defend their rights if anyone threatened to take their votes away, this does not cause them to set great store by the suffrage as long as their claim to it is not challenged. Besides this cause of the waning of political passion, there has been another—the apparently settled character of the social system. It may seem strange to say this in face of the immense amount of social legislation that has been crammed into the last thirty or so years. But it is true. Up to the outbreak of war in 1914, even despite the labour unrest and the violent suffragist activities of the years just before the war, the whole social system of Great Britain did appear stable and settled to such a degree that no major change in it seemed to most people likely within the lifetime of any person then living. The war of 1914 to 1918 for a time upset this feeling of stability; but when Germany had been defeated and the British social system was seen to be left intact the feeling reasserted itself, and men came again to take it for granted that the system in which they lived would last their time, and probably their children’s too.

This was much less the case in other countries of Europe; but I am speaking here of Great Britain, and, particularly, of England. On the Continent the crisis of 1931 shook every country much more than it shook us; and with the collapse of the German Republic and the advent of Hitler the sense of insecurity became all-pervading. Great Britain, however, came through that crisis, too, almost unshaken, or, rather, unaware of the shock which British institutions had sustained. The ordinary man and woman, though they were made uneasy by the rise of Nazism and could perhaps have been stirred into effective political activity if they had been given the right lead, remained less than half conscious of what was happening, and were not roused to take any action in face of the growing peril. They remained politically apathetic, save a few, and continued to live on the old assumption of a stable environment, even if their confidence in its stability had become less.

Why did the people go on cherishing this belief that they could afford not to bother about politics, because politics could not greatly affect their lives, so long after this view had ceased to be in any sense correct? I have hinted at lack of leadership as part of the explanation, at any rate in the final phase. But why was there no leadership? I am sure the lack was due partly to the increasing extent to which ability was being drained away out of the social classes which were conscious of economic grievance, and was being transferred to administrative or technical positions within the established order. This was a natural consequence both of the changing technique of production, which called for many more skilled underlings in ‘staff’ positions, and also of the growth of public secondary education, which made it much easier for children of ability to rise to such positions out of the manual working class. These changes left the manual workers the poorer in leadership by taking away their potentially best men; and the individuals who were thus transferred to ‘management’, so far from feeling a grievance against the system which had promoted them, became in most cases its upholders. Left in the ranks of the manual workers, they would have sought to express themselves by means of political or trade union leadership: given technical or administrative status, they found self-expression in their jobs, and for the most part saw no reason for taking any part in politics. Moreover, to the limited extent to which they did take part, they tended to become conservative, because they were fairly well off as they were, or thought so, and political change looked as if it would mean being bossed by the class out of which they had risen.

This situation suited very neatly the wishes of those who stood for the defence of the established order. The ruling classes in business and politics did not want the people to become ardent Conservatives; for if they had they would have taken to trying to run the Conservative Party. The Conservative leaders wanted the people’s votes, but not their political activity between elections; and nothing could have been more convenient for them than a situation which deprived the ordinary workmen of their leaders and diverted the interests of a large proportion of the able men in the country away from politics. As long as this went on, they felt secure in their power to go on governing on ‘sound’ Conservative lines—as they have actually done.

It is, I imagine, obvious that this ability rests on one assumption—that the economic foundations of the existing order are secure. Where they are not, the outcome of a process of social selection which deprives the people of its natural leaders is not ‘sound’ Conservatism, but Fascism. For when the non-political men of ability find that economic affairs are going wrong, and that their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter I. Persons and Politics
• Chapter II. Basic Socialism
• Chapter III. Programme for Industry
• Chapter IV. A Chance for Everybody
• Chapter V. A World in Travail
• Chapter VI. Towards Democracy
• Chapter VII. Action—Now