The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

For very many, as the War went on and increasing sacrifices of life and youth were demanded, new light was thrown upon the relations of the individual to the State. A whole generation of young Englishmen were suddenly confronted with the fact that their lives did not belong to themselves, that each owed his life to the State. But if each must give, or at least risk, everything that he possessed, even life itself, were others giving or risking what they possessed? Here was new light on the institution of private property. If the life of each belongs to the community, then assuredly does his property. The Communist State which says to the citizen, ‘You must work and surrender your private property or you will have no vote,’ asks, after all, somewhat less than the bourgeois Military State which says to the conscript, ‘Fight and give your person to the State or we will kill you.’ For great masses of the British working-classes conscription has answered the ethical problem involved in the confiscation of capital. The Eighth Commandment no longer stands in the way, as it stood so long in the case of a people still religiously minded and still feeling the weight of Puritan tradition.

Moreover, the War showed that the communal organisation of industry could be made to work. It could ‘deliver the goods’ if those goods were, say, munitions. And if it could work for the purposes of war, why not for those of peace? The War showed that by co-ordinated and centralised action the whole economic structure can without disaster be altered to a degree that before the War no economist would have supposed possible. We witnessed the economic miracle mentioned in the last chapter, but worth recalling here. Suppose before the War you had collected into one room all the great capitalist economists in England, and had said to them: ‘During the next few years you will withdraw from normal production five or six millions of the best workers. The mere residue of the workers will be able to feed, clothe, and generally maintain those five or six millions, themselves, and the country at large, at a standard of living on the whole as high, if not higher, than that to which the people were accustomed before those five or six million workers were withdrawn.’ If you had said that to those capitalist economists, there would not have been one who would have admitted the possibility of the thing, or regarded the forecast as anything but rubbish.

Yet that economic miracle has been performed, and it has been performed thanks to Nationalisation and Socialism, and could not have been performed otherwise.

However, one may qualify in certain points this summary of the outstanding economic facts of the War, it is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which the revelation of economic possibilities has influenced working-class opinion.

To the effect of this on the minds of the more intelligent workers, we have to add another psychological effect, a certain recklessness, inseparable from the conditions of war, reflected in the workers’ attitude towards social reform.

Perhaps a further factor in the tendency towards Communism is the habituation to confiscation which currency inflation involves. Under the influence of war contrivances States have learned to pay their debts in paper not equivalent in value to the gold in which the loan was made: whole classes of bondholders have thus been deprived of anything from one-half to two-thirds of the value of their property. It is confiscation in its most indiscriminate and sometimes most cruel form. Bourgeois society has accepted it. A socialistic society of to-morrow may be tempted to find funds for its social experiments in somewhat the same way.

Whatever weight we may attach to some of these factors, this much is certain: not only war, but preparation for war, means, to a much greater degree than it has ever meant before, mobilisation of the whole resources of the country—men, women, industry. This form of ‘nationalisation’ cannot go on for years and not affect the permanent form of the society subjected to it. It has affected it very deeply. It has involved a change in the position of private property and individual enterprise that since the War has created a new cleavage in the West. The future of private property which was before the War a theoretical speculation, has become within a year or two, and especially, perhaps, since the Bolshevist Revolution in Russia, a dominating issue in European social and political development. It has subjected European society to a new strain. The wearing down of the distinction between the citizen and the State, and the inroads upon the sacro-sanctity of private property and individual enterprise, make each citizen much more dependent upon his State, much more a part of it. Control of foreign trade so largely by the State has made international trade less a matter of processes maintained by individuals who disregarded their nationality, and more a matter of arrangement between States, in which the non-political individual activity tends to disappear. We have here a group of forces which has achieved a revolution, a revolution in the relationship of the individual European to the European State, and of the States to one another.

The socialising and communist tendencies set up by measures of industrial mobilisation for the purposes of the War, have been carried forward in another sphere by the economic terms of the Treaty of Versailles. These latter, if even partly carried into effect, will mean in very large degree the compulsory socialisation, even communisation, of the enemy States. Not only the country’s foreign trade, but much of its internal industry must be taken out of the hands of private traders or manufacturers. The provisions of the Treaty assuredly help to destroy the process upon which the old economic order in Europe rested.

Let the reader ask himself what is likely to be the influence upon the institution of private property and private commerce of a Treaty world-wide in its operation, which will take a generation to carry out, which may well be used as a precedent for future settlements between States (settlements which may include very great politico-economic changes in the position of Egypt, Ireland, and India), and of which the chief economic provisions are as follows:—

‘It deprives Germany of nearly the whole of her overseas marine. It banishes German sovereignty and economic influence from all her overseas possessions, and sequestrates the private property of Germans in those places, in Alsace-Lorraine, and in all countries within Allied jurisdiction. It puts at the disposal of the Allies all German financial rights and interests, both in the countries of her former Allies and in the States and territories which have been formed out of them. It gives the Reparations Commission power to put its finger on any great business or property in Germany and to demand its surrender. Outside her own frontiers Germany can be stripped of everything she possesses, and inside them, until an impossible indemnity has been paid to the last farthing, she can truly call nothing her own.