basically, no doubt, because no one genuinely wanted any major change to
happen. The Labour leaders wanted to go on and on, drawing their salaries
and periodically swapping jobs with the Conservatives. The Communists
wanted to go on and on, suffering a comfortable martyrdom, meeting with
endless defeats and afterwards putting the blame on other people. The
left-wing intelligentsia wanted to go on and on, sniggering at the
Blimps, sapping away at middle-class morale, but still keeping their
favoured position as hangers-on of the dividend-drawers. Labour Party
politics had become a variant of Conservatism, "revolutionary" politics
had become a game of make-believe.
Now, however, the circumstances have changed, the drowsy years have
ended. Being a Socialist no longer means kicking theoretically against a
system which in practice you are fairly well satisfied with. This time
our predicament is real. It is "the Philistines be upon thee, Samson". We
have got to make our words take physical shape, or perish. We know very
well that with its present social structure England cannot survive, and
we have got to make other people see that fact and act upon it. We cannot
win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism
without winning the war. At such a time it is possible, as it was not in
the peaceful years, to be both revolutionary and realistic. A Socialist
movement which can swing the mass of the people behind it, drive the
pro-Fascists out of positions of control, wipe out the grosser injustices
and let the working class see that they have something to fight for, win
over the middle classes instead of antagonising them, produce a workable
imperial policy instead of a mixture of humbug and Utopianism, bring
patriotism and intelligence into partnership--for the first time, a
movement of such a kind becomes possible.
ii.
The fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a textbook word
into a realisable policy.
The inefficiency of private capitalism has been proved all over Europe.
Its injustice has been proved in the East End of London. Patriotism,
against which the Socialists fought so long, has become a tremendous
lever in their hands. People who at any other time would cling like glue
to their miserable scraps of privilege, will surrender them fast enough
when their country is in danger. War is the greatest of all agents of
change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings
realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual
that he is not altogether an individual. It is only because they are
aware of this that men will die on the field of battle. At this moment it
is not so much a question of surrendering life as of surrendering
leisure, comfort, economic liberty, social prestige. There are very few
people in England who really want to see their country conquered by
Germany. If it can be made clear that defeating Hitler means wiping out
class privilege, the great mass of middling people, the �6 a week to
�2,000 a year class, will probably be on our side. These people are quite
indispensable, because they include most of the technical experts.
Obviously the snobbishness and political ignorance of people like airmen
and naval officers will be a very great difficulty. But without those
airmen, destroyer commanders, etc etc we could not survive for a week.
The only approach to them is through their patriotism. An intelligent
Socialist movement will use their patriotism, instead of merely insulting
it, as hitherto.
But do I mean that there will be no opposition? Of course not. It would
be childish to expect anything of the kind.
There will be a bitter political struggle, and there will be unconscious
and half-conscious sabotage everywhere. At some point or other it may be
necessary to use violence. It is easy to imagine a pro-Fascist rebellion
breaking out in, for instance, India. We shall have to fight against
bribery, ignorance and snobbery. The bankers and the larger businessmen,
the landowners and dividend-drawers, the officials with their prehensile
bottoms, will obstruct for all they are worth. Even the middle classes
will writhe when their accustomed way of life is menaced. But just
because the English sense of national unity has never disintegrated,
because patriotism is finally stronger than class-hatred, the chances are
that the will of the majority will prevail. It is no use imagining that
one can make fundamental changes without causing a split in the nation;
but the treacherous minority will be far smaller in time of war than it
would be at any other time.
The swing of opinion is visibly happening, but it cannot be counted on to
happen fast enough of its own accord. This war is a race between the
consolidation of Hitler's empire and the growth of democratic
consciousness. Everywhere in England you can see a ding-dong battle
ranging to and fro--in Parliament and in the Government, in the factories
and the armed forces, in the pubs and the air-raid shelters, in the
newspapers and on the radio. Every day there are tiny defeats, tiny
victories. Morrison for Home Security--a few yards forward. Priestley
shoved off the air--a few yards back. It is a struggle between the
groping and the unteachable, between the young and the old, between the
living and the dead. But it is very necessary that the discontent which
undoubtedly exists should take a purposeful and not merely obstructive
form. It is time for THE PEOPLE to define their war-aims. What is wanted
is a simple, concrete programme of action, which can be given all
possible publicity, and round which public opinion can group itself.
I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we
need. The first three points deal with England's internal policy, the
other three with the Empire and the world:
1. Nationalisation of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries.
2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax free income
in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.
3. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines.
4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war
is over.
5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured
peoples are to be represented.
6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other
victims of the Fascist powers.
The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims quite
frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a
Socialist democracy. I have deliberately included in it nothing that the
simplest person could not understand and see the reason for. In the form
in which I have put it, it could be printed on the front page of the
DAILY MIRROR. But for the purposes of this book a certain amount of
amplification is needed.
1. NATIONALISATION. One can "nationalise" industry by the stroke of a
pen, but the actual process is slow and complicated. What is needed is
that
the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the
State, representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes
possible to eliminate the class of mere OWNERS who live not by virtue of
anything they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share
certificates. State-ownership implies, therefore, that nobody shall live
without working. How sudden a change in the conduct of industry it
implies is less certain. In a country like England we cannot rip down the
whole structure and build again from the bottom, least of all in time of
war. Inevitably the majority of industrial concerns will continue with
much the same personnel as before, the one-time owners or managing
directors carrying on with their jobs as State employees. There is reason
to think that many of the smaller capitalists would actually welcome some
such arrangement. The resistance will come from the big capitalists, the
bankers, the landlords and the idle rich, roughly speaking the class with
over �2,000 a year--and even if one counts in all their dependants there
are not more than half a million of these people in England.
Nationalisation of agricultural land implies cutting out the landlord and
the tithe drawer, but not necessarily interfering with the farmer. It is
difficult to imagine any reorganisation of English agriculture that would
not retain most of the existing farms as units, at any rate at the
beginning. The farmer, when he is competent, will continue as a salaried
manager. He is virtually that already, with the added disadvantage of
having to make a profit and being permanently in debt to the bank. With
certain kinds of petty trading, and even the small-scale ownership of
land, the State will probably not interfere at all. It would be a great
mistake to start by victimising the smallholder class, for instance.
These people are necessary, on the whole they are competent, and the
amount of work they do depends on the feeling that they are "their own
ownership of land (probably fifteen acres at the very most), and will
never permit any ownership of land in town areas.
From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property
of the State, the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that
the State is THEMSELVES. They will be ready then to endure the sacrifices
that are ahead of us, war or no war. And even if the face of England
hardly seems to change, on the day that our main industries are formally
nationalised the dominance of a single class will have been broken. From
then onwards the emphasis will be shifted from ownership to management,
from privilege to competence. It is quite possible that State-ownership
will in itself bring about less social change than will be forced upon us
by the common hardships of war. But it is the necessary first step
without which any REAL reconstruction is impossible.
2. INCOMES. Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a minimum wage,
which implies a managed internal currency based simply on the amount of
consumption goods available. And this again implies a stricter rationing
scheme than is now in operation. It is no use at this stage of the
world's history to suggest that all human beings should have EXACTLY
equal incomes. It has been shown over and over again that without some
kind of money reward there is no incentive to undertake certain jobs. On
the other hand the money reward need not be very large. In practice it is
impossible that earnings should be limited quite as rigidly as I have
suggested. There will always be anomalies and evasions. But there is no
reason why ten to one should not be the maximum normal variation. And
within those limits some sense of equality is possible. A man with �3 a
week and a man with �1,500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures,
which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches
cannot.
3. EDUCATION. In wartime, educational reform must necessarily be promise
rather than performance. At the moment we are not in a position to raise
the school-leaving age or increase the teaching staffs of the elementary
schools. But there are certain immediate steps that we could take towards
a democratic educational system. We could start by abolishing the
autonomy of the public schools and the older universities and flooding
them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability. At
present, public-school education is partly a training in class prejudice
and partly a sort of tax that the middle classes pay to the upper class
in return for the right to enter certain professions. It is true that
that state of affairs is altering. The middle classes have begun to rebel
against the expensiveness of education, and the war will bankrupt the
majority of the public schools if it continues for another year or two.
The evacuation is also producing certain minor changes. But there is a
danger that some of the older schools, which will be able to weather the
financial storm longest, will survive in some form or another as
festering centres of snobbery. As for the 10,000 "private" schools that
England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve nothing except
suppression. They are simply commercial undertakings, and in many cases
their educational level is actually lower than that of the elementary
schools. They merely exist because of a widespread idea that there is
something disgraceful in being educated by the public authorities. The
State could quell this idea by declaring itself responsible for all
education, even if at the start this were no more than a gesture. We
need gestures as well as actions. It is all too obvious that our talk of
"defending democracy" is nonsense while it is a mere accident of birth
that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the education
it deserves.
4. INDIA. What we must offer India is not "freedom", which, as I have
said earlier, is impossible, but alliance, partnership-in a word,
equality. But we must also tell the Indians that they are free to secede,
if they want to. Without that there can be no equality of partnership,
and our claim to be defending the coloured peoples against Fascism will
never be believed. But it is a mistake to imagine that if the Indians
were free to cut themselves adrift they would immediately do so. When a
British government OFFERS them unconditional independence, they will
refuse it. For as soon as they have the power to secede the chief reasons
for doing so will have disappeared.
no less than for England. Intelligent Indians know this. As things are at
present, India not only cannot defend itself, it is hardly even capable
of feeding itself. The whole administration of the country depends on a
framework of experts (engineers, forest officers, railwaymen, soldiers,
doctors) who are predominantly English and could not be replaced within
five or ten years. Moreover, English is the chief lingua franca and
nearly the whole of the Indian intelligentsia is deeply Anglicised. Any
transference to foreign rule--for if the British marched out of India the
Japanese and other powers would immediately march in--would mean an
immense dislocation. Neither the Japanese, the Russians, the Germans nor
the Italians would be capable of administering India even at the low
level of efficiency that is attained by the British. They do not possess
the necessary supplies of technical experts or the knowledge of languages
and local conditions, and they probably could not win the confidence of
indispensable go-betweens such as the Eurasians. If India were simply
"liberated", i.e. deprived of British military protection, the first
result would be a fresh foreign conquest, and the second a series of
enormous famines which would kill millions of people within a few years.
What India needs is the power to work out its own constitution without
British interference, but in some kind of partnership that ensures its
military protection and technical advice. This is unthinkable until there
is a Socialist government in England. For at least eighty years England
has artificially prevented the development of India, partly from fear of
trade competition if Indian industries were too highly developed, partly
because backward peoples are more easily governed than civilised ones. It
is a commonplace that the average Indian suffers far more from his own
countrymen than from the British. The petty Indian capitalist exploits
the town worker with the utmost ruthlessness, the peasant lives from
birth to death in the grip of the money-lender. But all this is an
indirect result of the British rule, which aims half-consciously at
keeping India as backward as possible. The classes most loyal to Britain
are the princes, the landowners and the business community--in general,
the reactionary classes who are doing fairly well out of the STATUS QUO.
The moment that England ceased to stand towards India in the relation of
an exploiter, the balance of forces would be altered. No need then for
the British to flatter the ridiculous Indian princes, with their gilded
elephants and cardboard armies, to prevent the growth of the Indian trade
unions, to play off Moslem against Hindu, to protect the worthless life
of the money-lender, to receive the salaams of toadying minor officials,
to prefer the half-barbarous Gurkha to the educated Bengali. Once check
that stream of dividends that flows from the bodies of Indian coolies to
the banking accounts of old ladies in Cheltenham, and the whole
sahib-native nexus, with its haughty ignorance on one side and envy and
servility on the other, can come to an end. Englishmen and Indians can
work side by side for the development of India, and for the training of
Indians in all the arts which, so far, they have been systematically
prevented from learning. How many of the existing British personnel in
India, commercial or official, would fall in with such an
arrangement--which would mean ceasing once and for all to be "sahibs"--is a
different question. But, broadly speaking, more is to be hoped from the
younger men and from those officials (civil engineers, forestry and
agricultural experts, doctors, educationists) who have been
scientifically educated. The higher officials, the provincial governors,
commissioners, judges, etc are hopeless; but they are also the most
easily replaceable.
That, roughly, is what would be meant by Dominion status if it were
offered to India by a Socialist government. It is an offer of partnership
on equal terms until such time as the world has ceased to be ruled by
bombing planes. But we must add to it the unconditional right to secede.
It is the only way of proving that we mean what we say. And what applies
to India applies, MUTATIS MUTANDIS, to Burma, Malaya and most of our
African possessions.
5 and 6 explain themselves. They are the necessary preliminary to any