9.8.24
I have a real affection for Communists—and a temperate admiration. It is the sort of love that leaps forward to chasten. In a world of oafish self-complacencies set in a morass of dull submission to the chances of life it is a consolation and refreshment to find any people who realise the self-destructiveness of the present system and, however vaguely, the possibility of remaking human society upon richer and happier lines. The value of the Communist Party as an organised ferment is very high. I should like to see a properly accredited representative of the party free to air his opinions in every high school and college—particularly in the United States. Everybody in the place would be the brighter and better for his beneficent irritation.
The House of Lords entertains its leisure by passing Bills to suppress Communist Sunday Schools, and the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks in tones of horror of the teachings in these establishments. Nothing could witness more effectively to the wholesome mental stir these schools create. Most of the teaching in Anglican Sunday Schools is equally repulsive to me, but so long as they do not raid the public funds for their support I do not see why they should not teach what they like. I am English, not Anglican. My blood and traditions incline me to the utmost free speech and free teaching and free propaganda for everyone. No one is obliged to send his children to a Communist School, and I do not see why the half truth of Anglicanism should not have to face the half truth of Communism. The founder of Christianity talked a lot of Communism, but I cannot recall a solitary phrase of His to justify the existence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Yet at the same time I am doubtful whether there is much of a future for the Communist Party. I doubt whether in twenty-five years’ time there will be many Communists, under that name, below middle-age. A few nice, fierce old gentlemen will survive in smoking-rooms and cafés. The Communist movement is a part of the present world, it is a shadow cast by existing economic absurdities, it is a current reaction. In five-and-twenty years’ time the projects of a scientific Socialism will have converted and absorbed most of the youthful enthusiasm and resentful energy that now finds its expression in Communism. Communism is a phase, a bitter and sterile experiment, in the development of the Socialist idea. Socialism is its parent and its heir. The movement for the organised exploitation of the whole world in the collective interest existed before the Communist Party, and will be going on long after that party is a quaint tradition.
At present the Communist Party still dominates the government of Russia. But it does so at the sacrifice of all its constructive claims. In seven years the Russian experiment has demonstrated the intellectual sterility of the movement beyond any further dispute.
The Bolshevik Government came to power in a state of ignorant confidence, treating criticisms as a blasphemous reflection on its omniscience, insulting and persecuting every sort of Socialist outside its trained and disciplined ranks. The Government took over factories, uncertain whether it meant to run them under a quasi-military discipline or on guild lines as free communities of workers; it “smashed” money, and discovered it had no other way of computing the mutual services and obligations of men. It was touching to see Lenin in the Kremlin in 1920 struggling with childish projects for the “electrification of Russia” and unable to explain what sort of town centre, if any, his Communist Russia would possess. He had no working ideas that were worth a rap about this very obvious matter. I left him, sympathetic with him in the face of his stupendous task, but a little amazed at his extreme unpreparedness. However, if one may trust a virulent article by Trotsky that has just been published in English, he lost his temper in true Communist fashion at being asked awkward questions and resorted to Trotsky for comfort. “Ugh!” said Lenin. “What a perfect petit bourgeois!” and so restored the mental calm my entirely respectful scepticism had ruffled. For in Communist circles if you can call anyone or anything “bourgeois,” the question is settled and discussion is at an end.
The emptiness of plan, the extreme assurance, which distinguishes modern Communism is the secret alike of its attractiveness in times of social trouble and its futility in constructive effort. It does not worry the oppressed, the discontented, and the unhappy with difficult projects for human readjustment. It lumps together the complex and various disorders of social life, the muddle of human prejudices and impulses, as one malignant thing, the “Capitalist system.” Destroy this legendary monster and the Millennium will ensue. Instead of overcoming the fool in Everyman, you must obstruct, waste, sabotage all the current services of the community. Having convinced the world that nothing else will work, the dictatorship of the party will ensue. There could be no teaching more successful in a mass meeting and less useful in a bureau. It gives all the excitement and release of a revolution with none of its tiresome responsibilities.
It was Marx who created modern Communism. It is the sterile mule of Socialism and a scientific ambition. Socialism from the days of Robert Owen onward was a thing of schemes and projects. It was perpetually seeking better arrangements. Its methods were Utopian. But Marx was bitten by an ambition to rival Darwin; he was to be the Darwin of social and political science, with none of Darwin’s modesty or Darwin’s intellectual patience. He had the mind of a theologian with the pretension of a scientific inquirer, and he had the dull man’s hatred and contempt for the human imagination. His movement was to be “scientific” with all the magic that word carried half a century ago. There was to be nothing imaginative and no confounded ideals. It was all to be fatalistic. It was never going to plan what would happen because it was going to know what would happen. He and his associates produced a very sound and ample analysis of the processes of decay in the business life of the time, but with such ambitions and such repudiations they could produce no scheme of any replacement system. They have no scheme to this day. Even Russia has not taught the Communist the practical need of Utopias.
At a certain level of intelligence party Communism is a very attractive teaching indeed. Its self-assurance is very reassuring. Any human being not absolutely stupid hates to be robbed of freedom and educational opportunity before thirteen or fourteen and thrust into uncongenial and hopeless toil. Most employment is bitter for young people. At the same time people whose education is truncated so soon usually fail to develop sufficient intellectual power to understand complex industrial and financial processes. They develop an inferiority complex about such things that clamours in them for comfort.
Communism embodies that hate and provides that comfort. It points to the “Capitalist” as the oppressor and claims to furnish in a few phrases all that needs to be known. In a social system that educated everyone to sixteen or eighteen and then gave a fair wide choice of public service there would be none of that hate and that defensive aggressiveness, that suppressed suspicion of ignorance and inefficiency that makes Communist controversy so loud and rude, which has made Mr. Trotsky so loud and rude. The marshes in which the cantankerous spirit of Communism grows would be drained and evaporated. By the theory of Marx it was in the highly developed industrial system of Western Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, that the Communist Revolution would first occur. The disconcerting fact for Communists is that it occurred in Russia, where the industrial organisation was at a low level and there were eighty per cent. of illiterates. In Great Britain nobody except the enterprising people who want to raise money from imbecile dukes and rich old ladies even pretends to be afraid of a Communist Revolution.