Democratic Socialism in Britain, Vol. 10

Classic Texts in Economic and Political Thought, 1825-1952

David Reisman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138752375
• eBook ISBN: 9781000419467
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

The texts in this collection of 10 volumes demonstrate both the diversity and continuity in British theories of democratic socialism. The selection encompasses the Ricardian socialists, the Christian socialists, and the Fabian socialists. Volume 10 includes 'In Place of Fear' by Aneurin Bevan.

1
Poverty, Property and Democracy

IN many ways it would have been better for a book of this sort to have been written by a person detached from day-to-day preoccupation with political affairs. Yet, as I come to write, I begin to see that there are advantages possessed by a political practitioner like myself that are denied to anyone living a more cloistered life; for in the pattern of my own activities have been woven the main strands of the political epoch which began with the end of the great war of 1914–1918.

I started my political life with no clearly formed personal ambition as to what I wanted to be, or where I wanted to go. I leave that nonsense to the writers of romantic biographies. A young miner in a South Wales colliery, my concern was with the one practical question: Where does power lie in this particular state of Great Britain, and how can it be attained by the workers? No doubt this is the same question as the one to which the savants of political theory are fond of addressing themselves, but there is a world of difference in the way it shaped itself for young workers like myself. It was no abstract question for us. The circumstances of our lives made it a burning, luminous mark of interrogation. Where was power and which the road to it?

It will be seen at once that the question formulated itself in different fashion for us than it would have done in a new, pioneering society or in the mind of someone equipped by a long formal education. In such cases the question shapes itself in some such fashion as, ‘How can I get on?’ or, ‘What career shall I choose?’ I don’t mean by this that we were necessarily less selfish. It was merely that the texture of our lives shaped the question into a class and not into an individual form. We were surrounded by the established facts of the Industrial Revolution. We worked in pits, steelworks, foundries, textiles, mills, factories. These were the obvious instruments of power and wealth. The question therefore did not form itself for us in some such fashion as, ‘How can I buy myself a steelworks, or even a part of one?’ Such possibilities were too remote to have any practical import.

Then again, we had a long tradition of class action behind us stretching back to the Chartists. So for us power meant the use of collective action designed to transform society and so lift all of us together. To us the doctrine of laissez-faire conveyed no inspiration, because the hope of individual emancipation was crushed by the weight of accomplished power. We were the products of an industrial civilization and our psychology corresponded to that fact. Individual ambition was overlaid by the social imperative. The streams of individual initiative therefore flowed along collective channels already formed for us by our environment. Society presented itself to us as an arena of conflicting social forces and not as a plexus of individual striving.

These forces are in the main three: private property, poverty and democracy. They are forces in the strict sense of the term, for they are active and positive. Among them no rest is possible.

I imply here no narrow definition of poverty, although heaven knows there is enough of that. I mean the general consciousness of unnecessary deprivation, which is the normal state of millions of people in modern industrial society, accompanied by a deep sense of frustration and dissatisfaction with the existing state of social affairs. It is no answer to say that things are better than they were. People live in the present, not in the past. Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual. There is a universal and justifiable conviction that the lot of the ordinary man and woman is much worse than it need be. That is all I need to have admitted for my present purposes.

This discontent must be aimed at something, and naturally it is aimed at wealth and at those who, by possession of wealth, have a dominating influence on the policy of the nation. And third, there is the political democracy which put a new power in the possession of ordinary men and women.

The conflict between the forces, always implicit, breaks out into open struggle during periods of exceptional difficulty, like widespread and prolonged unemployment, and exposes the government of the day and the political constitution to great strain. Sometimes, as in Germany, the constitution breaks under it. It was not the Treaty of Versailles that broke the Weimar Constitution of Germany. It was unemployment. Hitler talked in vain when the German was in work. Loss of work is also loss of status. When Hitler raved about the low status of Germany among the nations, it was a dramatic representation of the lack of status of every unemployed worker who listened to him. It is not necessary to believe in the ‘economic man’ to accept this.

The fact is that the Germans had already started to turn away from him as unemployment began to decline. A little later and he would have failed. The Weimar Republic had survived the Versailles Treaty. It could not survive both the Versailles Treaty and unemployment for six or seven million Germans. The decisive factor was the unemployment.¹

The issue therefore in a capitalist democracy resolves itself into this: either poverty will use democracy to win the struggle against property, or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy. Of course, the issue never appears in such simple terms. Different flags will be waved in the battle in different countries and at different times. And it may not be catastrophic unemployment. There may be a slower attrition as there was in Britain before the war, but poverty, great wealth and democracy are ultimately incompatible elements in any society.

This is the answer to so many people who see freedom in a vacuum. A free people will always refuse to put up with preventable poverty. If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution. The problem of how to prevent these three forces from coming into head-on collision is the principal study of the more politically conscious Conservative leaders. How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.

In so far as politics is a struggle between competing ideas and ideals, these accrete around one or other of the three forces. As a general rule the combatants are aware only of the ideas and ideals which actuate them, and this fact enables them to generate passion and to become capable often of ennobling self-sacrifice and altruism. But all the time these qualities are mobilized in the service of the dynamic thrust arising from the interplay of the dominating forces working around and through them.

To contend that this is a cynical view of the part played by individuals in politics is to deny the possibility of a systematic study of the behaviour of groups of individuals acting together in society. When we make such generalizations about past behaviour it is called social science. Why should it be called cynicism or mechanistic determinism when the same method is used to explain what is happening around us at the moment? Or does it mean that the essence of idealism is to be ignorant of why we do what we do, when we do it?

I am not asserting that when social reformers are moved to ease the distress of poor people they are thinking of the minimum concession necessary to preserve the rule of wealth. What I do contend is that the suffering of the poor was ignored while they lacked the power and status to insist on alleviation.

One experience remains vividly in my memory. While the miners were striking in 1926 a great many people were moved to listen to their case. Certain high ecclesiastical dignitaries even went so far as to offer to mediate between the mine owners and the miners. They were convinced that the terms the coal owners were attempting to impose upon the miners were unreasonable and would entail much suffering and poverty for hundreds of thousands of miners’ homes. Their efforts failed. The miners were beaten and driven back to work under disgraceful conditions.

For years these conditions continued. But were those high Church dignitaries moved to intervene then ? Not at all. For them the problem was solved. It had never consisted in the suffering of the miners, but in the fact that the miners were still able to struggle and therefore create a problem for the rest of the community. The problem was not their suffering but their struggle. Silent pain evokes no response. The social reforms of the twentieth century are a consequence of the democratic power of the masses and not of increased enlightenment. Enlightenment has grown with the emergence of political freedom and it will diminish if freedom declines.

Political democracy brings the welfare of ordinary men and women on to the agenda of political discussion and demands its consideration.

Fascism and all forms of authoritarian government take it off the agenda again.

The political high priests of wealth-privilege are acutely conscious of the unbridgeable antagonism between private wealth, poverty and political democracy. They are never statesmen conceiving it to be their duty to advance society beyond the poverty age. Their job as they see it is to beguile democracy into voting wealth back into power at each election. For this they adapt their language and shape their plans. When the people are behaving as they wish them to behave, they say complacently: The British people are sound at heart.’ When the people look like turning them down they begin to see the ‘defects of democracy as a permanent system of government’, and warn us that ‘we must distinguish between freedom and licence’. When we do as they want us to do, it is freedom. When we suit ourselves, it is licence.

The function of parliamentary democracy, under universal franchise, historically considered, is to expose wealth-privilege to the attack of the people. It is a sword pointed at the heart of property-power. The arena where the issues are joined is Parliament.

The atmosphere of Parliament, its physical arrangements, its procedure, its semi-ecclesiastical ritual, are therefore worth careful study. They are all profoundly intimidating for the products of a board school system who are the bearers of a fiery message from the great industrial constituencies. The first essential in the pioneers of a new social order is a big bump of irreverence.

The past lies like an Alp upon the human mind.’ The House of Commons is a whole range of mountains. If the new Member gets there too late in life he is already trailing a pretty considerable past of his own, making him heavy-footed and cautious. When to this is added the visible penumbra of six centuries of receding legislators, he feels weighted to the ground. Often he never gets to his feet again.

His first impression is that he is in church. The vaulted roofs and stained-glass windows, the rows of statues of great statesmen of the past, the echoing halls, the soft-footed attendants and the whispered conversation, contrast depressingly with the crowded meetings and the clang and clash of hot opinions he has just left behind in his election campaign. Here he is, a tribune of the people, coming to make his voice heard in the seats of power. Instead, it seems he is expected to worship; and the most conservative of all religions — ancestor worship.

The first thing he should bear in mind is that these were not his ancestors. His forebears had no part in the past, the accumulated dust of which now muffles his own footfalls. His forefathers were tending sheep or ploughing the land, or serving the statesmen whose names he sees written on the walls around him, or whose portraits look down upon him in the long corridors. It is not the past of his people that extends in colourful pageantry before his eyes. They were shut out from all this; were forbidden to take part in the dramatic scenes depicted in these frescoes. In him his people are there for the first time, and the history he will make will not be merely an episode in the story he is now reading. It must be wholly different; as different as is the social status which he now brings with him.²

To preserve the keen edge of his critical judgement he will find that he must adopt an attitude of scepticism amounting almost to cynicism, for parliamentary procedure neglects nothing which might soften the acerbities of his class feelings. In one sense the House of Commons is the most unrepresentative of representative assemblies. It is an elaborate conspiracy to prevent the real clash of opinion which exists outside from finding an appropriate echo within its walls. It is a social shock absorber placed between privilege and the pressure of popular discontent.

The new Member’s first experience of this is when he learns that passionate feelings must never find expression in forthright speech. His first speech teaches him that. Having come straight from contact with his constituents, he is full of their grievances and his own resentment, and naturally, he does his best to shock his listeners into some realization of it.

He delivers himself therefore with great force and, he hopes and fears, with considerable provocativeness. When his opponent arises to reply he expects to hear an equally strong and uncompromising answer. His opponent does nothing of the sort. In strict conformity with parliamentary tradition, he congratulates the new Member upon a most successful maiden speech and expresses the urbane hope that the House will have frequent opportunities of hearing him in the future. The Members present endorse this quite insincere sentiment with murmurs of approval. With that, his opponent pays no more attention to him but goes on to deliver the speech he had intended to make. After remaining in his scat a little longer, the new Member crawls out of the House with feelings of deep relief at having got it over, mingled with a paralysing sense of frustration. The stone he thought he had thrown turned out to be a sponge.

I would not have bothered to describe this typical experience of a working man speaking in the House of Commons for the first time were it not characteristic of the whole atmosphere. The classic parliamentary style of speech is understatement. It is a style unsuited to the representative of working people because it slurs and mutes the deep antagonisms which exist in society.

It was not until the General Election of 1929 that a British parliament was elected on the basis of complete adult suffrage. The historical function of Liberalism was to achieve the sovereignty of the people in Parliament, and having done so, to seek to confine parliamentary activity to a miminum. The Liberal revolution found power concentrated in the hands of the great landlords, rising in hierarchical ascent to the Crown. As the ownership of property became dispersed, with the rise of urban development, a corresponding dispersal of political power seemed the obvious and natural course. Once that had been accomplished, Liberalism was emptied of its historical purpose.

Thomas Jefferson was keenly aware of this.* The franchise and all that went with it was the political articulation of private property held in comparatively small quantities. In its idealistic pronouncements Liberalism asserted the right of the people to be consulted in the making of national policy, but in its practical application it was the assertion of dispersed against concentrated property power. The history of the development of the franchise in Britain is conclusive proof of this. Once the Liberal Party had established itself in Parliament it was in no hurry to extend the franchise. Indeed, from that point onwards, the unenfranchised were merely a counter in the electoral battles between the Conservatives and the Liberals. This, along with the traditional tenacity of masculine values, explains why a Liberal government opposed the feminine franchise. Women as such were apparently not people.

• *Sec S. K. Padover, Jeffe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction by David Reisman
• Aneurin Bevan
• content1
• Introduction by Jennie Lee
• 1 Poverty, Property and Democracy
• 2 The Role of the Legislature-Active or Passive?
• 3 Modern Man and Modern Society
• 4 Private Spending v. Government Spending
• 5 A Free Health Service
• 6 The Transition to Socialism
• 7 Social Tensions
• 8 World Leadership
• 9 Raw Materials, Scarcities and Priorities
• 10 Democratic Socialism