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nous more-austerity warnings of the leaders, who seem to have retained
nothing from the brilliant flow of Churchillian rhetorics except the
sweat-and-toil motif. The irony of the situation is, that while the higher
income classes (down to the skilled worker and small shopkeeper) suffer
acutely from the leveling-down process, the lower income classes are
not conscious of "going up." For their benefits are relative, not absolute:
that is to say, rationing does not give them more food, but merely pre–
vents their getting even less; government-controlled building rehouses
only a fraction of the bombed-out per year and merely prevents all
building material from going to the rich; and so on. The objective
impoverishment of the country makes it inevitable that the hardships
caused by socialist policy are real, the benefits mainly theoretical. The
consequence of all this is a growing apathy and resignation. As a sym–
bol of contemporary Britain the lion and unicorn could be replaced
by the varicose veins of the British housewife after six years of queueing.
But as neither Tories nor Stalinites have any attractive alternative to
offer, the keynote of the people's mood is resentment, not revolt; except
for a few, so far isolated episodes-squatting, small mutinies against
demob-delays overseas, and a series of unauthorized strikes-about
which more below.
After eighteen months of Labor rule it is of course too early to
draw conclusions. But it is not too early to point out two basic factors
among the confusing multitude of threads. One is an objective, one a
subjective factor, and both are relevant to socialist theory.
The first consideration is, that apparently socialist movements
are doomed always to ascend to power under the worst possible objec–
tive conditions. This, on the one hand, provides socialists with the
ready excuse that the theory should not be judged by experiments
carried out under such handicaps. The Paris Commune was handicapped
by war, siege, and famine; the Soviet system was tried out first in the
most backward country of Europe, the Weimar Republic carried the
economic and psychological burden of Versailles which broke its back.
British Labor inherited the hostility of all colored people, the bad inter–
national reputation of past imperialist policy, and above all, a country
economically on the verge of ruin; thus, once again, the experiment
cannot provide conclusive evidence for or against the theory. It would
only become conclusive, the theorist argues, if the experiment could
be tried in a rich, modern industrial country secure from external
aggression-the USA, for instance.
It seems to me that this argument puts the cart before the horse.
You cannot expect any ruling class to hand in its resignation, nor the
masses to listen to radical propaganda, while all goes well; there must
be an "objective revolutionary situation" to get things going-in other
