Peace and the Working Class
Tins is one of those rare and refreshing books which bring old political assumptions to the test of facts, and in the process clear away mountains of make-believe. It is bound to irritate the pundits of traditional socialism both in England and abroad. But only a prejudiced mind can fail to recognise its exceptional freshness, acuteness and intellectual honesty.
The Socialist Internationalism, which before 1914 claimed to hold the key to the world's peace, broke in the crisis of that ye the first touch. Its unreality is here rightly analysed. It wa bottom a middle-class, not a working-class conception. The foun and early leaders of nineteenth-century socialism were, like ii,i middle-class men, not manual workers. They claimed that theirs the workers' movement ; they affected to speak in the work name. But as soon as the workers themselves developed in the tr unions an organisation that was genuinely their own, the differe between reality and make-believe began to assert itself. So far opening their arms to Axis followers the world over, the worker each country—and especially in the advanced countries—turned excluding the products of foreign labour by Protection and foreign labourers themselves by anti-immigration laws. And other respects they stood for a tightening-up, not a relaxing, of claims of nationalism. The nation-state secured their livelih They could not be indifferent to its status in the world.
Dr. Borkenau examines in this way the historical develop of the labour attitude towards social legislation, towards Prate and towards Imperialism. Then he goes through the series policies and programmes evolved before 1914 by the Socialist In nationalists, ending with that of Jaures. One and all he sh them to have been Utopian, self-deceiving, incapable of stan any real test. Nor was there any basic harmony between th In England, for instance, labour pacifism had behind it two pacifist traditions—the Liberal and the Christian. On the Con neither counted. " In France as in Germany liberalism had a been war-minded. . . . No continental church worth mentio was pacifist, and no Socialists worth mentioning were Christi And so during and after the war the whole doctrine disintegrate the left wing evolving through Communism to an intense Rus nationalism, the right wing gravitating to Geneva, and hoping di as it had before hoped elsewhere, to get something out of noth and enjoy peace without earning it.
Valuable as his criticisms are (and it is not possible in a rel, to do justice to their detailed acuteness), Dr. Borkenau cannot f be accused of being a critic only. He does at the close devel programme for a peaceful Europe. Its keystone is an An American hegemony. It would be hegemony of a civilised tolerant type, but must yet have ample force at its back. It supposes three things—close Anglo-American co-operation, eclipse of isolationism in the United States, and a willingness the part of Continental countries to submit to it. Some m think the last the hardest to obtain ; but 1 am inclined to a with Dr. Borkenau that it is not. After this war the strong tend to defeatism and peace-at-any-price, which had led France capitulate even to the odious tyranny of Hitler, may well be mood of the Continent, and predispose it to accept peace at An American hands. The real question-mark against Dr. Borkena rather whether he may not be expecting too much of the U States. It was American isolationism, which decisively and al immediately wrecked in 1919 the chances of the League of Nan If it revives again when this war is over, it may once more rob world of hope. Meantime Dr. Borkenau's own expertise rather on the Continent, and there his analysis of the condit
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