WHY SOCIALISM IS SUICIDE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19443, 31 October 1925, Page 7

WHY SOCIALISM IS SUICIDE

“NATIONAL CO-OPERATION”

THE BATTLE OF CONVICTION

AN APPEAL TO MODERATE OPINION

The following are extracts from an article by Mr J. L. Garvin, which appeared in the London “Observer’* on October 19, 1924, prior to the last general election in Great Britain.

In its bearing upon the future of the nation and the Empire, this is the Great Election. For forty years there has been no deeper contest. If it goes wrong, our irretrievable decline, political and commercial, may well date from it. If it is to go right enough to restore a firm foundation for strong and progressive Government, ensuring at last a constructive and regenarating policy, Liberals as well as Unionists must look into their hearts. They must forget the mechanical grimaces, japes, and catchwords of the old party tradition. They must put away these dead things. They must confront the needs of a new and formidable age. To meet those needs, before it is too late, the next Administration ought to last for five or six years as one of the most powerful and advanced Governments that ever was formed. This is the chance. Nothing less than this should be the aim. It is now or never if wo mean that Britain and its people are not to bo the chief victims and scapegoats of the war. After six years’ fumbling our margins have been cut too fine to allow of further failure with impunity. I.—Down to Bedrock. The issues go down to bedrock. On one side there is the aggressive and disruptive force— the Socialist classtheory. They borow it from the schoolman, Marx, with all its impossible promises and paralytic effects. ’lsms on the brain, combined with hatred in the blood, are death to national creativeness. They are. the explosive mixture of two gases. Bolshevism in Russia was nothing but the explosion of the full logic of Marxism. Where it does not come to that, the Socialist class-theory is Prussian drill trying to fasten itself upon the whole plastic and elastic mass of human life. It is the barrack-system of the mind, the conscription of ideas and the goosestep of thought. The vast and various field of human production and traffic is the last sphere to which the preconceived dogmas of a rigid catechism can ever bo applied. On the other side, there is the wider, truer, abler creed of national organisation and progress on non-Socialist lines. ll.—The Question of the Age. The Socialist theory divides classes on system; by feeling and habit it is anti-capitalist in .ction; it is therefore negative and disorganising in effect; for it uses part of the national energies to neutralise the other part; it reduces the productive and competitive vigour of the whole public body. It does this although we have henceforth to face abroad, in the United States,. Germany and France alike, the new super-competition which results in all those countries from the strength and efficiency of super-capital raised to a higher power of equipment and consolidation since the war.

The German Socialists, for instance, had their chance. They could not use it. They have failed in their way as completely as the Bolshevists. They are out of it for all purposes of moulding national economic p r 'icy. They never will capture and control the social organisation. Germany with modifications, and in many respects with improvements, is going the wa; of the United States, as the American experts, found w T hen, for instance, they studied, for the purposes of the Dawes Report, the astonishing organisation of the German electrical industry. On the blind and scuffling terms we have been pursuing in this country we all suffer; but in their employment and wages, the masses of the people suffer most. The new electioneering programme calling for the nationalisation of mines and railways first as a preliminary to the nationalisation of banks and everything afterwards, is the climax of preposterous absurdity. On these lines, insular democracy, living upon imported food and raw material, but only able to pay. for these by selling at a world-price, could neither compete nor live. lll.—The True Progressives.

We can now bring this argument to a focus. Socialism stands for the class-war to be fairly opened in the next session upon the huge issue of nationalising mines and railways, and to be fought out until capital and private enterprise in all our main industries and services arc replaced by direct Labour control. For a small, densely-peopled, industrial island dependent, in face of super-competition upon world trade and world supplies, this process means suicide, perhaps slow, perhaps not so slow. Both the historic parties stand for national co-operation. They would modernise our systems of production, transport, and distribution. They would put mining, railways, and agriculture on a better footing. They would bring to an expert test at once the paramount question of cheapening costs, promoting traffic, and increasing social convenience at every point by a new national development of electrical power. So far as expert advice approved, Unionists and Liberals alike would grapple with these things and do them, if a broad, powerful, and enduring Government could be formed. It is an urgency like life and death to grapple with the national problem in this spirit. But Liberals and Unionists alike know that without the utmost vigour, confidence, and security of capital and private enterprise the problem cannot be solved. Without these, employment, wages, and the standard of life never can be raised to the highest attainable level. Never. IV —Every Citizen’s “Yea or Nay.” But every man and woman worthy of citizenship must choose. If you think that the Socialists are on the right road, for an island like ours in a capitalist and competitive world — I then make up your mind. Join them. I Work for them. But if you hold with us that Socialism for industrial Britain I means the economic death of demoI cracy and the decay of our strength

’ and greatness at last—then again make up your mind. For their own sakes, no less than for the rest, combat them. Resist the beginnings that are in plain onset. Fight them now by every clean means with every fibre of your being. Sink everything else to defeat this hypnotic craze*—this enormous anti-social superstition—which has led directly to Bolshevism in Russia, and indirectly to Fascism in Italy; which has held up the European march of constructive democracy for the better part of half a century; which has divided and thwarted the progressive forces everywhere; which though void of the power to establish any successful system of its own, has destroyed or diminished Liberalism wherever it has spread and fortified reaction. V.—The Socialist Old-Clothes Shop. It is not a fresh and vital inspiration, as is imagined by many generous and hasty enthusiasts who desiro to embrace the latest spirit of the age. It is in our day as stale and obsolete as it was always artificial, cumbrous, and dull. It is not tho creed of tomorrow. It is the thing of an old yesterday. After more than half a century of sterile agitation it is found incapable of performance in the country of its origin. British political and

economic movements have usually been original. No worse misfortune ever happened to democracy at the height of its power and in its utmost need, than when our Labour Party was led to array itself in the second-hand suits and cast-off garments from the oldclothes shop of German economics. Vl.—The “Now or Never.” But let there be no mistake. The strength of the Labour Party in the mass with all its vivid delusions is the strength of vehement ardour and profound sincerity. We say again that it is a battle, and a great battle, of belief. Between mind and mind the issues, as we said, go down to bedrock. These differences of thought and conviction between the Socialists and the rest of us, are as clear, honest, and irreconcilable as ever were debated since Parliamentary Government began. Any man who puts it lower by suggesting that Socialists in the lump are bad, debases the moral < urrency of public life. The sincerity of Socialism and the glow of its insubstantial vision are what make the seriousness of the controversy. The Labour Party, here as elsewhere, may be checked or thrown back from time to time, though that has still to be seen. They never can be arrested finally, except by the equal energy of the majority of the nation in a sounder creed. Between the class-struggle which we call national suicide, and the cause of national co-operation which would combine all our creative forces to make a greater Commonwealth, you must henceforth be one thing or the other. With your whole decision you must have one or the other faith, one or tho other principle, or else you are a wavering or indifferent neutral in a moral war and are leaving your country to drift by evading your decided duty as a citizen.

For the Great Election what is the practical moral? It is very soon shown. If tho Labour Government were confirmed in office, the temporising policy of the last session could not be resumed. Socialism proper would become at once the centre of the public question. Wo would bo asked to nationalise tho mines and railways, and if that were carried, we would be asked “in a concatenation accordingly,” to go on to the nationalisation of shipping and the banks. What would be the results to business confidence, credit, trade and employment in this jeopardised country, the

gentle or savage reader may be left to conceive. If any Liberal really wants this, then his business, or hers is to join the Labour Party for good and to work for it exclusively in this election. But everybody knows that there can be no stability for Government and Parliament on the basis of that programme or of any Labour policy whatever. The conditions of the last session cannot exist again. Vll.—Unionist Reciprocity. Therefore those who are not Socialists ought to work and vote at this election in a definite way. Electors, if there is any health in them, will bo either Socialist or non-Socialist. In this crisis there ought to be no question of abstention, or for giving a sort of backstairs vote, or for giving any vote except for reasons of predominant principle and conviction.