426 THE CLASS STRUGGLE LABORISM AND SOCIALISM 427 tions and action, which during the war has repeatedly repudiated the compromises of the official representatives, depends the future character of the British Labor movement. In any event, unless the bulk of the workers remain dormant, which is unthinkable, the great industrial proletariat will express itself through its own aggressive action in mass action, will acquire the consciousness and action of revolutionary Socialism; while the skilled workers, the aristocracy of labor, will in one form or another become an integral part of State Capitalism, an appendage of British Imperialism, which is the coming party, with Mr. Lloyd George as its inevitable head.
for if the war has almost abolished Liberalism and changed the face of Toryism, it has split the old Labor Party into fragments. portion Mr. George has seduced. Another part has been honestly absorbed into the work of war administration. third has had a mysterious origin in the war itself. The British Workers League is a nominal offshoot of Socialism. But its second birth is of dubious parentage. What is its financial basis?
Who finds the funds for its ample propaganda. The trade unions? Hardly. And what explains the ready hospitality of the Times and the support which the league clearly obtains in powerful circles of Capitalism? The motive is avowed. The British Workers league is regarded as a counter revolutionary body. Its merit in the eyes of the powerful men who watch and would mould the new order in the interests of capital is that it rejects free trade and adopts the program of the Paris conference (economic war after the war. further reason for treating it as a friend is that it proposes to replace the class war by a minimum wage and the abolition of restriction of output. Here, then, the driving power of the new Capitalism has been found. In exchange for a guarantee of high wages the workmen leaders are expected to take their hands off the regulator. Conscription is the basis of such a society; the soldier statesman, the master organizer, is its riatural head, and slavery to Capitalism and its own fears its form and doom.
The program of the British Labor Party will not determine its coming action, but the struggle of factions within the party each against the other. The party is not a unity. It has the aristocracy of labor, and it proposes, by its invitation to the workers of the brain, to absorb the middle class: if this combination dominates, its policy will become definitely and implacably the policy of Social Imperialism. If, on the contrary, the workers of the character of the miners and dock workers, the unskilled, prevail, then it must inevitably accept the policy of revolutionary Socialism. After all, the significance of the Labor Party program lies not in the official attitude of its representatives, but in the surge of radical feeling in the membership which compelled an alteration in the official attitude. On this up surging of radical aspiraThe theory that class antagonisms are being modified is not altogether a wrong one. Under the conditions of Imperialism, and the necessity for unity in the ruling class, the old inter class antagonisms become blurred and disappear. The industrial petite bourgeoisie, which formerly struggled relentlessly against Big Capital, has been either wiped out or has been compelled to accept the domination of Big Capital. The formerly actively struggling groups within the capitalist class have, on the whole, made peace with each other, seeking compensations for their compromises in the fabulous profits of Imperialism. The new middle class, an income and not an industrial class, is the product of concentrated, imperialistic capital, and is wholly dependent upon finance capital and Imperialism. The interests of the individual capitalist or capitalist groups are subordinated to the interests of Capitalism as a whole; the policy is to unite the ruling class, the form of expression of this unity being imperialistic State Capitalism.
The dominant Socialism has in fact accepted this modification of class antagonisms as the basis of its immediate policy. It has accepted this modification of antagonisms because it represents, on the whole, the interests of the remnants of the old petite bourgeoisie, the new middle class, and the skilled workers organized largely in the dominant unions. The history of the Socialist movement during the past twenty years, the epoch of Imperialism,