The Worker and the Community
The worker’s conception of himself in relation to the community invites a comment. As a substitute for a convincing argument that the interests of the worker are entirely separate from, and opposed to, those of the rest of the community organized on a capitalistic basis, the worker has been assiduously encouraged to develop his “class-consciousness.” If by any process of auto-suggestion he can convince himself that what tends to promote the general common weal does not tend to further the interests of Labour, but generally runs counter to them, he may more surely be relied on to adopt an attitude of militant antagonism to continuance of the present organization of industry and society. The efforts of extremists are continually directed to foment this feeling of class-consciousness until it culminates in class-warfare. I have had wide opportunities for gauging the prevalence and depth of the sentiment, and though one found it in active operation among certain groups of men on the Clyde, in Barrow, on the Mersey, and in a few other centres of advanced industrial thought, I never encountered much of it amongst the general body of working-men. They do not accept the proposition that they stand, as beings apart, in a separate category from the rest of the community. Indeed, in the latter days of the war, many Unions, recognizing the interests of their members as consumers rather than as producers, abandoned the policy of increasing wages and strongly urged the regulation of prices instead, so much did the circumstances of consumption affecting their members as citizens exceed in importance matters touching their special interests as workers.
One may carry this a stage further. In spite of the ranting of extremists that the war was an effort of capitalists to advance their own financial ends, and utterly inimical to the interests of the workers, Labour in this country stood shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the community and willingly underwent the greatest sacrifices both in the matter of military service and in regard to the suspension of Trade Union rights and customs. Had the Government at the beginning of the war courageously conscribed every person for national service, many galling disparities would never have arisen, and gross inequalities of sacrifice would have been forestalled, the aggravation of which, towards the end of the war, and not without justification, upset the equanimity of the workers and caused serious industrial upheavals. It should never be forgotten that in the early days of the war universal national service was strongly urged by prominent Labour leaders, but was killed by the cries of “Business as usual,” for which members of the Government were alone responsible.
CHAPTER XX
REFORM OF INDUSTRY INSTEAD OF SOCIALIZATION
The Three Dominant Aspirations of the Workers—Can and Ought they to be Satisfied?—The Vagueness of Labour’s Scheme of Reconstruction—The Recent Change in Labour’s Proposals—Reform of Industry v. Reconstruction.
The Three Dominant Aspirations of the Workers
The organization of industry cannot continue in its present state of instability; something must be done. The Socialist who would reconstruct industry, the anti-Socialist who would reform it, each assumes it to be necessary to satisfy aspirations of the workers that are not satisfied under conditions as they exist to-day. The three greatest aspirations animating the workers are, in their order of relative importance: first, removal of the ever-present menace of unemployment; secondly, recognition in industry of the worker’s human status; thirdly, distribution, as of moral right, of an equitable share of the product. Talk, as I did during the war on over three thousand occasions, to the ordinary working-man, those are the three basic sentiments you find swaying him. All the intricate schemes for reconstruction of industry which the fertile and fervid imaginations of the Labour intellectuals have evolved are largely unintelligible to him, and leave him unmoved and cold. He cares nothing about the delicate and subtle regimentation of industry and society as Guild Socialists would have it; he wholly fails to grasp, indeed, is acutely suspicious of, a Socialist commonwealth constructed and controlled on a vocational or functional basis. The test which he applies to such complex and conjectural conceptions is their efficacy in satisfying those three great fundamental aspirations. But that is too restricted a purview for an aspirant political party, and was astutely declared by the old parliamentary hands of the Labour movement to constitute too narrow a class-basis to support a popular appeal. Hence it was that all the non-industrial doctrinaires—and there are many of them attached to the Labour Party—were set to work to compile a new Social Contract. Scores of pamphlets have now been published descriptive of the policy of the Party on every conceivable topic—political, administrative, judicial, local government, social, and industrial—national, imperial and international. If formulation on paper of ideals of humanitarianism, and quixotic Utopianism, without any consideration of cost or practicability, is statesmanship, the Labour Party’s policy is truly admirable. It outlines in glowing splendour a wonderful new mechanism of politics, society and industry, in which every exterior part falls into place with the smoothness and precision of a model engine constructed out of a box of parts—but, like the toy, with no works inside. That this mysterious mechanism may provide in some subtle and not very obvious way, the means of securing the three fundamentals is its only recommendation in the eyes of the great mass of Labour.
If it is right to assume that the ordinary worker’s dominant desire is to obtain reasonable satisfaction of these three aspirations, and of the soundness of that assumption I entertain no doubt, for at my three thousand odd conferences and meetings with Labour during the war—at all of which accurate notes were taken of the subjects of discussion—these were the three foremost topics, two questions arise: Are these three aspirations proper ones to be satisfied? If so, how can they best be satisfied with due regard to the interests of the community?