540 THE CLASS STRUGGLE BRIDGING THE GAP 541 individualist system of capitalist production and the social and political subordination of the toiling masses. In national affairs the party broad aim is to secure for the producers by hand or brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership, of the means of distribution and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service. Our programme of reconstruction starts from the assumption that the industrial system of capitalist production has broken down. It was discredited by its results before the war; it was superseded when war came because it proved to be impossible to adapt it to national needs in time of war. But an economic system which degraded and demoralized its victims in times of peace and was found to be useless in time of war stands totally condemned. To attempt to restore it would be madness. Organized democracy does not want to restore it. We want to see industry organized on the basis of democratic control, with consequent elimination of profiteering, whether by individual capitalists or by great interests in more or less open alliance with the state. Neither State Capitalism nor State Socialism is our object, but rather, industrial democracy.
This is pretty straight talk, coming from the source it does, and while there may be some trivial inconsistancies, the concluding phrase means everything. And in the last analysis it will not be Henderson, but the mass of English workers who must decide how soon they will have industrial democracy.
Harold Spender, coming to the rescue as first aid to capitalism, also tackles the momentous subject, and comments on the Labor Party after war programme (which, it is plain, he misinterprets in part) as follows. Broadly and roughly speaking, it is not so much a legislative programme as the sketch of a Socialist Utopia. The present control of the state over railways and mines is to be extended to every industrial function of the community. Unhappily for the Labour Party, such new tastes of State control as the country is at present enjoying are proving very bitter in the mouth. recent tour through the South Wales coal fields has revealed to me that the only emotion which assuages the acute and deplorable difference between employers and employees is a growing common hatred of State control. The working classes are drifting even perilously away from their old ideals of state Socialism. The cry of the South Wales miners, for instance, is no longer, the mines for the State, but the mines for the miners.
Spender cites these instances to bring his class to a realization of the danger that confronts it, and then proceeds, to his own satisfaction, at least, to prove that somehow the calamity will be averted.
The increasing revulsion on the part of the workers to State control, seems to be the decisive factor that will bridge the gap over what would otherwise be a long arduous and painful era of State Socialism.
There are many other examples that could be given to show. 1) that European labor, especially English, with which we are more in touch, is rapidly being disillusioned in regard to the desirability of State control, and that it will make a concentrated fight against it, or for the accompaniment of democratic management, with the termination of the war. 2) that the general idea is becoming more and more in favor of industrial democracy as the one and only solution for working class emancipation.
As for the agencies that work most effectively toward this end, all the evidence goes to show that the class conscious spirit is the most important, even more so than a labor movement well versed in the academics of Socialism, as desirable as this might be, and as necessary as the principles are.
The former has been the bedrock of the Russian Revolution.
The theoretical foundation was always considered the strength of the German movement, and without underestimating the conditions it faced and had to contend with, we at least know that it takes something in addition to a theoretical policy to fight and win in the Class Struggle.
The spirit class spirit uncompromising and invincible, must be there.