The Fruits of Victory. Norman Angell
by physical coercion. But we have also seen that just as the attempted use of coercion in the international field, though ineffective to exact necessary service or exchange, can and does produce paralysis of the indispensable processes, so the ‘power’ which the position of the miner gives him is a power of paralysis only.
A later chapter shows that the instinct of industrial groups to solve their difficulties by simple coercion, the sheer assertion of power, is very closely related to the psychology of nationalism, so disruptive in the international field. Bolshevism, in the sense of belief in the effectiveness of coercion, represents the transfer of jingoism to the industrial struggle. It involves the same fallacies. A mining strike can bring the industrial machine to a full stop; to set that machine to work for the feeding of the population—which involves the co-ordination of a vast number of industries, the purchase of food and raw material from foreigners, who will only surrender it in return for promises to pay which they believe will be fulfilled—means not only technical knowledge, it means also the presence of a certain predisposition to co-operation. This Balkanised Europe which cannot feed itself has all the technical knowledge that it ever had. But its natural units are dominated by a certain temper which make impossible the co-operations by which alone the knowledge can be applied to the available natural resources.
It is also suggestive that the virtual abandonment of the gold standard is playing much the same rôle (rendering visible the inefficiency of coercion) in the struggle between the industrial that it is between the national groups. A union strikes for higher wages and is successful. The increase is granted—and is paid in paper money.
When wages were paid in gold an advance in wages, gained as the result of strike or agitation, represented, temporarily at least, a real victory for the workers. Prices might ultimately rise and wipe out the advantage, but with a gold currency price movements have nothing like the rapidity and range which is the case when unlimited paper money can be printed. An advance in wages paid in paper may mean nothing more than a mere readjustment of symbols. The advance, in other words, can be cancelled by ‘a morning’s work of the inflationist’ as a currency expert has put it. The workers in these conditions can never know whether that which they are granted with the right hand of increased wages will not be taken away by the left hand of inflation.
In order to be certain that they are not simply tricked, the workers must be in a position to control the conditions which determine the value of currency. But again, that means the co-ordination of the most complex economic processes, processes which can only be ensured by bargaining with other groups and with foreign countries.
This problem would still present itself as acutely on the morrow of the establishment of a British Soviet Republic as it presents itself to-day. If the British Soviets could not buy food and raw materials in twenty different centres throughout the world they could not feed the people. We should be blockaded, not by ships, but by the worthlessness of our money. Russia, which needs only an infinitesimal proportion relatively of foreign imports has gold and the thing of absolutely universal need, food. We have no gold—only things which a world fast disintegrating into isolated peasantries is learning somehow to do without.
Before blaming the lack of ‘social sense’ on the part of striking miners or railwaymen let us recall the fact that the temper and attitude to life and the social difficulties which lie at the bottom of the Syndicalist philosophy have been deliberately cultivated by Government, Press, and Church, during five years for the purposes of war; and that the selected ruling order have shown the same limitation of vision in not one whit less degree.
Think what Versailles actually did and what it might have done.
Here when the Conference met, was a Europe on the edge of famine—some of it over the edge. Every country in the world, including the wealthiest and most powerful, like America, was faced with social maladjustment in one form or another. In America it was an inconvenience, but in the cities of a whole continent—in Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria—it was shortly to mean ill-health, hunger, misery, and agony to millions of children and their mothers. Terms of the study like ‘the interruption of economic processes’ were to be translated into such human terms as infantile cholera, tuberculosis, typhus, hunger-œdema. These, as events proved, were to undermine the social sanity of half a world.
The acutest statesmen that Europe can produce, endowed with the most autocratic power, proceed to grapple with the situation. In what way do they apply that power to the problem of production and distribution, of adding to the world’s total stock of goods, which nearly every government in the world was in a few weeks to be proclaiming as humanity’s first need, the first condition of reconstruction and regeneration?
The Treaty and the policy pursued since the Armistice towards Russia tell us plainly enough. Not only do the political arrangements of the Treaty, as we have seen, ignore the needs of maintaining the machinery of production in Europe[15] but they positively discourage and in many cases are obviously framed to prevent, production over very large areas.
The Treaty, as some one has said, deprived Germany of both the means and the motive of production. No adequate provision was made for enabling the import of food and raw materials, without which Germany could not get to work on the scale demanded by the indemnity claims; and the motive for industry was undermined by leaving the indemnity claims indeterminate.
The victor’s passion, as we have seen, blinded him to the indispensable condition of the very demands which he was making. Europe was unable temperamentally to reconcile itself to the conditions of that increased productivity, by which alone it was to be saved. It is this element in the situation—its domination, that is, by an uncalculating popular passion poured out lavishly in support of self-destructive policies—which prompts one to doubt whether these disruptive forces find their roots merely in the capitalist organization of society: still less whether they are due to the conscious machinations of a small group of capitalists. No considerable section of capitalism any where has any interest in the degree of paralysis that has been produced. Capitalism may have overreached itself by stimulating nationalist hostilities until they have got beyond control. Even so, it is the unseeing popular passion that furnishes the capitalist with his arm, and is the factor of greatest danger.
Examine for a moment the economic manifestation of international hostilities. There has just begun in the United States a clamorous campaign for the denunciation of the Panama Treaty which places British ships on an equality with American. American ships must be exempt from the tolls. ‘Don’t we own the Canal?’ ask the leaders of this campaign. There is widespread response to it. But of the millions of Americans who will become perhaps passionately angry over that matter and extremely anti-British, how many have any shares in any ships that can possibly benefit by the denunciation of the Treaty? Not one in a thousand. It is not an economic motive operating at all.
Capitalism—the management of modern industry by a small economic autocracy of owners of private capital—has certainly a part in the conflicts that produce war. But that part does not arise from the direct interest that the capitalists of one nation as a whole have in the destruction of the trade or industry of another. Such a conclusion ignores the most elementary facts in the modern organisation of industry. And it is certainly not true to say that British capitalists, as a distinct group, were more disposed than the public as a whole to insist upon the Carthaginian features of the Treaty. Everything points rather to the exact contrary. Public opinion as reflected, for instance, by the December, 1918, election, was more ferociously anti-German than capitalists are likely to have been. It is certainly not too much to say that if the Treaty had been made by a group of British—or French—bankers, merchants, shipowners, insurance men, and industrialists, liberated from all fear of popular resentment, the economic life of Central Europe would not have been crushed as it has been.
Assuredly, such a gathering of capitalists would have included groups having direct interest in the destruction of German competition. But it would also have included others having an interest in the restoration of the German market and German credit, and one influence would in some measure have cancelled the other.
As a simple fact we know that not all British capitalists, still less British financiers, are interested in the destruction of German prosperity. Central Europe was one of the