Revolutionaries (20 page)

However, Marx's main recipe for revolutionizing the British situation was through Ireland; i.e. by the indirect means of supporting colonial revolution and in doing so destroying the major bond which linked the British workers to the British bourgeoisie. Originally, as Marx admitted, he had expected Ireland to be liberated through the victory of the British proletariat.
⁷
From the late 1860s he took the opposite view –
namely that the revolutions in the backward and colonial countries would be primary and would themselves revolutionize the metropolitan ones. (It is interesting that at much the same time he began to have these hopes for a revolution in Russia, which sustained him in his later years.)
⁸
Ireland acted as a fetter in two ways: by splitting the English working class along racial lines, and thus by giving the British worker an apparent joint interest with his rulers in exploiting someone else. This was the sense of Marx's famous statement that ‘a nation which oppresses another cannot itself be free'. Ireland was thus at one moment the key to England – more than this to the advance of progress in the world in general:

If we are to accelerate the social development of Europe, we must accelerate the catastrophe of official (i.e. ruling class) England. This requires a blow in Ireland, which is the weakest point of Britain. If Ireland is lost, the British ‘empire' goes and the class struggle in England, which has up to now been sleepy and slow, will take more acute forms. But England is the metropolis of capitalism and landlordism in the entire world.

I have spent some time on the details of Karl Marx's attitude to the British labour movement – mainly in the 1860s and early 1870s when he was closely involved with it through the International. He wrote about it in those days not so much as a general historical analyst, but rather as a political strategist and tactician, considering concrete political situations. The situation of the 1860s has passed away for good, and nobody would claim, least of all Marx himself, that what he had to say about it in detail applies to any other period. On the other hand it is always instructive to see a marxist master-strategist and tactician at
work – and we must remember that, as Engels liked to recall, Marx was a master-tactician in the rare periods when he had the chance to be.

As it happened, he failed to ‘re-electrify the British labour movement', and this failure, as he realized, condemned the international movement to wait for very much longer, and when the movement revived, Britain and the British working class no longer played the potentially central role in it that they might have done, while Britain was ‘the metropolis of capitalism and landlordism everywhere'. As soon as he realized that the strategy of the 1860s had failed, Marx ceased to concern himself very much with the British labour movement. However, at this point we may logically turn to the other half of the question about Marx and British labour, namely the effect which Marx and his teaching had upon the labour movement in this country.

Let us first be clear on the limits – on what were probably the historically inevitable limits of this influence. It was not likely to produce a revolutionary labour movement in a country which lacked the experience and tradition of revolution, and any situations – then or later – which could be even faintly described as revolutionary or pre-revolutionary. It was not likely to produce a mass labour movement inspired and organized by marxism, because when marxism appeared on the scene, a powerful, well-organized, politically influential labour movement already existed on a national scale in the form of trade unionism, consumers' cooperation and Liberal–Labour leaders. Marxism did not precede the British labour movement. It was not even coeval with it. It appeared a third of the way through its lifetime to date. It is no use looking abroad and observing that marxism played or plays a much larger part in the labour movements of some countries than in ours, because, since history does not develop uniformly, we cannot expect the same developments everywhere. The peculiarity of Britain is that it was the oldest, for a long time the most successful and dominant,
and almost certainly the stablest capitalist society, and that its bourgeoisie had to come to terms with a proletarian majority of the population long before any other. The influence of marxism has been inevitably circumscribed by this situation.

On the other hand we could expect marxism to play an important part in the formation of that new – or renewed – stage of the British worker's class-consciousness, which led them to abandon confidence in the permanence and viability of capitalism, and to place their hopes in a new society – socialism. We could expect it to play an important part in forming the new ideology, the strategy and tactics of a socialist labour movement. We could expect it to create nuclei of leadership, political vanguards if you like – I am using the term in a general sense here and not only in the specific leninist sense. How large or important these were, how significant the part they played within the larger movement, might be uncertain and unpredictable. In other words, we could have expected marxism to have a significant, but almost certainly not a decisive influence in shaping the British labour movement of the twentieth century. This is a pity, but that is another question. We may perhaps be reconciled to this relatively modest role of marxism if we look at some continental movements in which the influence of marxism was initially far greater, so much so that the entire labour movement took the form of marxist social-democratic mass parties, but nevertheless these movements were basically as moderate and reformist as the British, if not more so; for instance in Scandinavia.

Now in the two respects which I have singled out, the influence of Marx was unquestionably great – much greater than is commonly realized. Ideologists of right-wing labour have searched desperately for alternative founding fathers of British socialism, from John Wesley to the Fabians, but their search has been vain. Methodism in particular, non-conformist protestantism in general, have undoubtedly coloured a lot of the
British labour movement, and in a few special cases such as the farm labourers and some of the miners, provided both a framework of organization and a cadre of leaders, but their contribution to what the movement thought and tried to achieve – to its socialism – has been minimal. The contribution of Marx has been capital, if only because Marx's analysis is the only socialist analysis which has stood the test of time. The archaic British forms of socialism – Owenism, O'Brienism, etc. did not revive, though an essentially ‘agrarian' analysis of capitalism long remained influential. Fabianism, in so far as it had a specific analysis of capitalism (e.g. the specific economic theory of the
Fabian Essays
) never got off the ground. It survived and became influential merely as a more ‘modern' formulation of what moderate labour leaders had always done, namely pursuing piecemeal reforms within the framework of capitalism.

In so far as the British labour movement developed a theory about how capitalism worked – about the nature of capitalist exploitation, the internal contradictions of capitalism, the fluctuations of the capitalist economy such as slumps, the causes of unemployment, the long-term tendencies of capitalist development such as mechanization, economic concentration and imperialism, these were based on the teachings of Marx, or were accepted in so far as they coincided with them or converged with them.

In so far as the British labour movement developed a programme for socialism – based on the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and rather later, on planning, it was once again the basis of a simplified marxism. I am not claiming that the entire ideology of the movement was so based. It is clear, for instance, that some very important parts of it, e.g. the attitude to international questions and peace or war, were based substantially on an older and powerful liberal-radical tradition. Nor am I claiming that the ideology of all parts of the movement was so based. Its right-wing leaders, especially when
they got anywhere near government office, always looked for some alternative source of economic inspiration drawn from bourgeois liberalism – whether in the form of the free-trade orthodoxy of the Lib-Labs and Philip Snowden, the
LSE
-type marginalism of the Early Fabians, or the Keynesian analysis of the Labour Party ideologists since 1945. But if we go down to the grass roots – to the men and women who canvassed for elections, who collected dues and led industrial movements at shop and factory level, and so on: their theory, and very often their practice, were much the same as that of the members of officially marxist organizations; and the other way round. I do not say that they got this theory from reading
Capital
or even
Value, Price and Profit
, any more than the sort of sub-Freudianism which is the basis of American conversations about personal problems is necessarily based on a reading of Freud. Their theory derived from Marx insofar as they were socialists, because the basic theory of socialism, at least in the respects I singled out above, was the one formulated in a marxist manner; generally it must be admitted, a very simplified manner. In one way or another this had become part of their political lives.

This was natural, because marxism – or at all events some sort of simplified version of marxism – was the first kind of socialism to reach Britain during the revival of the 1880s, the one most persistently propagated by devoted pioneers at a thousand street corners, and the one most persistently and ubiquitously taught at a thousand classes run by socialist organizations, labour colleges or freelance lecturers; and because it had no real rival as an analysis of what was wrong with capitalism. It was also natural, because the marxist organizations formed and still form by far the most important school for the militants and activists of the labour movement, and this is in spite of the sectarianism which has often plagued them. This is perhaps most obvious at the real grass roots of the British movement, in the unions. From the days of the young John Burns and Tom Mann, to those of the
militants of today, marxist organizations of one kind or another have provided the education of the union activists. It has been one of the greatest historic weaknesses of the old
ILP
, and of its successor, the parliamentary Labour left, that it has had and has such feeble roots in the industrial movements. Conversely, taking account of their relatively modest size, the marxist organizations – whether
SDF
, Socialist Labour Party, the Communist Party, etc. have had a disproportionately large influence among the union activists. It is true that many of these changed their political opinions as their careers advanced, but if we are talking about Marx's influence, we cannot leave even them out of account.

It would be easy to illustrate the disproportionate influence of Marx, and of the relatively tiny organizations of marxists, on the wider labour movement. The marxist organizations themselves have often underrated it, because they have measured it not against reality, but against their ideal of a marxist mass labour movement; whereas in fact their historical importance has been as groups of cadres or potential cadres, of leaders and brains rather than of followers. Their importance has so far lain not so much in converting vast masses of workers into members of a mass marxist movement or the acquisition of voters, but in their role within a great, politically and ideologically heterogeneous but powerful class movement bound together by class-consciousness and solidarity, and increasingly also by the anti-capitalism which the marxists were the first to find words for when socialism revived in the 1880s. Because this movement has so often fallen short of their expectations, they have often been disappointed in it. But that disappointment was also often due to unrealistic expectations. The General Strike was a magnificent demonstration of the movement's strength; but it was not, and was not even faintly within sight of being, a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.

However, just because the expectations of marxists have so
often been unrealistic, they have sometimes obscured the realistic ones. Because the lack of success of marxists has so often been due to factors beyond their or anyone else's control, they have sometimes overlooked the failures which might have been avoidable. Marx's own failure in the 1860s was inevitable. Historians may well conclude that no conceivable wisdom, tactical brilliance or organizational effort was likely to bring about the realization of Marx's strategic hopes at that point; though this does not mean that they were not worth pursuing. On the other hand many of the errors of the British Social Democrats were avoidable, though perhaps historically likely. That peculiar combination of sectarianism and opportunism which Lenin recognized in the
SDF
and which is the occupational risk of so many marxist organizations operating under conditions of capitalist stability, is not inevitable.

The
SDF
ought to have played a much larger part in the trade union revival of the 1880s, if it had not dismissed trade unions as ‘mere palliatives'; its own militants were wiser. The British marxists – with the exception of the
SLP
– failed to grasp, let alone to lead, the great labour unrest of 1911–14, though this was the first occasion since the Chartists when masses of rank-and-file British workers not only organized on a large scale, but also demonstrated strong anti-capitalist sentiments, and even some evidence of that revolutionary spirit which Marx had called for. They left the leadership mainly to syndicalists and other members of what we would today call the ‘new left', though of course many of these – Tom Mann is the best example – had gone through the school of marxism and were to return to marxist organizations. The reason for this failure was the opposite to ‘impossibilist' sectarianism. It was due to the failure to discern a new phase in the political consciousness of the workers behind the emotional phrases, the unorthodox and often rather unimpressive theorizing, the irrationalism and what a later generation was to call the ‘mindless militancy' of the new
movement. As it happens the war and the Russian revolution once again saved the British Socialist Party from some of the results of its errors.