422 THE CLASS STRUGGLE LABORISM AND SOCIALISM 423 of the sovereign right of the people; the suppression of secret diplomacy, to be replaced by the conduct of foreign policy under the control of popular Legislatures, and the publication of all treaties, which must never be in contravention of the stipulation of the League of Nations, with the absolute responsibility of the government, and more particularly of the Foreign Minister of each country to its legislature. Only such a policy will enforce the frank abandonment of every form of Imperialism.
The fatal error in this program is that the abandonment of Imperialism is predicated upon democracy, instead of democracy being predicated upon the abandonment, or rather the overthrow of Imperialism. All the measures of democracy proposed would not in any way alter the imperialistic character of Capitalism, nor impose the abandonment of Imperialism.
This fatal error is implicit in the British Labor Party program for reconstruction after the war, Labor and the New Social Order.
The series of legislative measures, proposed as a means of immediate improvement and ultimate transformation of the conditions of society, constitutes a program that depends upon democracy as the instrument of action. It assumes a limiting of the forces of Capitalism on the basis of Capitalism itself, the penetration of Socialism into Capitalism. It is a bureaucratic program, to be introduced by bureaucrats. Reconstruction is conceived as a problem of experts, meeting in conference and proposing their plans, introduced by means of the democratization of the state and Capitalism, the co operation of classes, understanding between the classes, and the unity of democracy for the conquest of parliament and the state. Compromise, and not revolution, is to be the instrument for the transformation of society; all the classes, and not the proletariat, are to bring Socialism. British Laborism is becoming more vocal, more aggressive, perhaps, but its policy is still the policy, in tendency, of yesteryear. It is the Fabian policy, expressing itself through an independent political party. It is the old British trades unionism, emphasizing its petit bourgeois character by trying to unite democracy through an alliance with the middle class.
The program, it is true, abounds in radical phraseology. What has to be reconstructed after the war is not this or that Government Department, or this or that piece of social machinery, but, so far as Britain is concerned, society itself. The war is)
the culmination of a distinctive industrial civilization, which the workers will not seek to reconstruct. The individual system of capitalist production, based on the private ownership and competitive administration of land and capital. may, we hope, indeed, have received a death blow. This sounds well; but the tendency of the plans proposed is of a character to promote Capitalism, to intrench Capitalism. These proposals would injure the interests of this or that particular capitalist group of capitalists, but this would in no sense be calamitous, since under Imperialism the individual capitalist is subordinate to the interests of Capitalism as a whole.
The British Labor Party program represents a tendency that is characteristic of imperialistic State Capitalism, the unity of ruling class interests, and the placating of labor by means of minor reforms and by making the aristocracy of labor through Laborism a part of the governing system of things. Capitalists may suffer, but Capitalism thrives. Capitalism has nothing to fear from the struggle for the national minimum, unemployed insurance, the progressive abolition of the private capitalist, etc. It is, moreover, a policy of reconstruction on the basis of Capitalism that postpones fundamental reconstruction and strengthens Capitalism.
Reconstruction is to be a process of parliamentary struggles, of enlarging the functions of the state, of striving for that collectivism which is the ideal of the liberal middle class and the aristocracy of labor, all of which may easily be absorbed by imperialistic State Capitalism, and, in fact, promotes Capitalism and Imperialism.
Fundamental reconstruction can proceed only after the conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat. Specific reforms cannot accomplish much because the problems of reconstruction are integral in scope. International peace is made insecure by national antagonisms; national antagonisms prevail because of capitalist rivalry; capitalist rivalry multiplies antagonisms through