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PARTISAN REVIEW
American workingman, with his high wages, his motor car and
his wireless set, snugly entrenched behind the Hawley-Smoot
tariff; are the aristocracy of labor, enjoying a standard of life
unknown to the ryot, the coolie and the peon. ·
The statement that the problem lies "not in the national but
in the international sphere" is the reverse of the truth if we are to
take the Charter seriously when it proclaims "freedom from want"
as the major objective; for then an
internal
reorganization of the
economy of each nation along socialist lines presents itself as the
first step towards an international order free from want, and the
"tough problem" is how to get this internal change. But the Char–
ter is hypocritical in putting freedom from want first. That
first
comes the preservation of the present economic system is shown by
its omission of Wilson's Fifth Point, promising justice to colonial
peoples. The Charter mentions "the right of all peoples to choose
the form of government under which they will live," but Churchill
hastened to make it clear that this applies to peoples subjugated by
the Nazis, not by the British. "The joint declaration," he stated in
Parliament, "does not qualify in any way the various statements
of policy which have been made from time to time about develop·
ment of constitutional government in India, Burma or any other
part of the British Empire."
(N.Y. Times,
Sept. 10, 1941)
Thus Viscount Esher, with refreshing cynicism, makes explicit
the concealed assumptions of the Charter, and shows what will
have to be done to give the backward lands freedom from want
under the present order.
There is nothing very new in his prog·
nosis; Hobson and Lenin long ago demonstrated that the high liv–
ing-standard of the British labor aristocracy depended on the ex·
ploitation of the Indian and other colonial masses. That this long·
familiar axiom should now come as something of a shock, like an
obscenity in church, indicates how thick the atmosphere of official
optimism and hypocrisy has become.
The picture Esher draws of the English and American work–
ingclasses sacrificing their relatively high standards of living for
the benefit of the ryot, the coolie and the peon, is, of course,
ironical. Social classes do not behave in any such altruistic fashion.
The colonial question is one issue on which, even in formal declara·
tions, the Tories and the British Labor Party present a united front.
In the official report on Post-War Reconstruction, drawn up by
Dalton, Morrison, Laski and other leading spirits, which was pre·
sented to the Party's annual conference a month ago, we read:
