James Ramsay Macdonald
Somerville, Henry
7ii JAMES RAMSAY MACDONALD By HENRY SOMERVILLE JAMES RAMSAY MACDONALD, prime minister of the first Labour government of Great Britain, is now a guest of the United States. Americans are...
...The revisionist is to Socialism what the modernist is to Christianity...
...Britain has no rigid constitution guarded by a supreme court, and as far as her laws and constitution go, there is nothing to prevent a parliamentary majority from decreeing the abolition of private property...
...Before he was twenty he had migrated to London, worked as an invoice clerk for three dollars a week and spent every minute and penny he could spare on improving his knowledge...
...Their interests are too much like a tide flowing hither and thither, obedient to every attractive moon...
...The British Labour movement has been veering strongly to the left, mainly on account of its disappointment with the results of the first Labour government...
...He says: The laws governing the existence and growth of human society could not be understood until biological science was sufficiently far advanced to explain, with tolerable fulness of detail, the laws which regulate life and its evolution...
...And how are we to build...
...The result was that alliance of the trade-unions with Socialist organizations like the Independent Labour party which is now known as the Labour party...
...he has done more than any other man to make it and shape it...
...But it is a theory essentially conservative, and it easily lends itself to hidebound Toryism...
...Which of the roads at present possible is the right one...
...The common but erroneous explanation of this is that the Labour government was in a parliamentary minority...
...Thereafter he threw himself into political study and propaganda, and journalism became his profession...
...Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert K. Chesterton, both rather younger than Macdonald, caught the prevailing contagion at the time...
...These words were written while Macdonald lay under political eclipse...
...The trade-unions counted their millions where the Socialist organizations counted only thousands, yet Socialists like Macdonald obtained the highest offices...
...We must pass more factory legislation...
...Macdonald is not a Lloyd George...
...The conviction that superior intelligences should rule, and that he himself is a most superior intelligence, has ever stamped his attitude, and never more so than when he held the office of prime minister...
...The theory of Liberalism was good enough as long as it was mainly negative work that had to be done: 712 But this period is over, and that of social reconstruction has begun...
...His attempts to restore himself at by-elections were ignominious failures, and it looked as if he were cast out forever from British politics...
...His first important book was Socialism and Society, published in 1905...
...Macdonald then threw himself into the task of bringing the trade-unions—and their funds—into politics...
...Put it on its defense and the crowd is brutal...
...It was a master-stroke of policy...
...The masses retain the love of primitive man for gaudy ornament and sparkling plaything...
...But what is the constructive function of factory legislation...
...Macdonald was still paying court to Liberalism, but a year later he cast in...
...He strove to make a place for a Labour wing of the Liberal party...
...The social revolution may or may not come in Britain, but it will never come while Macdonald is Labour's leader...
...If we can take the British Labour party at its face value, it is not a mere alternative administration, like the Conservative party or the Liberal party, but it stands pledged to inaugurate a new social order, to wrest land and capital from private owners and vest them in the community...
...James Ramsay Macdonald is not simply the leader of the Labour party...
...As long as he is at the head of the Labour party, he will make it march slowly...
...He had to adapt his Socialism to the conservative trade-union mentality of the time, which was fairly faithfully represented by the late Samuel Gompers...
...How far will the system of capitalism bear such interference...
...of what the function of Parliament in a community is...
...Macdonald had shown himself a master-tactician, but he had not performed a miracle...
...If he had had a majority, Macdonald's policy would have been just the same...
...Macdonald was giving the Socialist movement in England a new direction and a new tactic, different from the Fabian policy of permeation and still more different from the Marxist policy of class war...
...and his way will never be far leftward...
...Keir Hardie founded the Independent Labour party in 1923...
...For society belongs to the biological type of existence because it is no mere collection of separate individuals, like a heap of sand, but a unified and organized system of relationships, in which certain people and classes perform certain functions and others perform other functions, and in which individuals find an existence appropriate to their being by becoming parts of the functioning organs, and by adopting a mode of life and seeking conditions of liberty, not as separate and independent individualities, but as members of their communities...
...His war attitude had been unpopular, and he was overwhelmingly defeated at the general election which followed the war...
...In what direction are we to move ? All change is not progressive...
...In his latest book: Socialism: Critical and Constructive, published first in 1921 and reissued last year, he writes: The mass of people are indifferent or are merely agitated...
...He exhausted all the educational opportunities of his native place, though these were not despicable, for he was helped by the dominie, and was given a pupil-teacher's job in the village school in his earliest teens...
...Marxist philosophy still held the field among the Socialist movements of Europe...
...Though he has some degree of pliability, as every politician must have, there are fairly close limits to his opportunism...
...His life has been full of romance and drama...
...He will lead the Labour party but will not be led by it...
...His passion was for science, but circumstances induced him to accept a position as private secretary to a politician at a salary of six dollars a week...
...Macdonald was politically ambitious...
...The sheer pressure of clamor and need will force us to take action...
...He had given Socialism a platform and he had made it possible for Socialists like himself to get into Parliament with tradeunion support, but he had to emasculate Socialism in order to do so...
...Americans are always interested in any man who has risen from the ranks, as Lloyd George has done, but here is a man who has risen with the ranks, who represents the passing of political power from the rich to the poor, from those who own to those who toil...
...How far will such interference open out the way of further development to society ? Macdonald set himself to demolish two rival social theories, that of individualism which was the foundation of capitalism, and that of Marxism which was the creed of the revolutionary Socialist parties...
...It declares that it will do this when it has a parliamentary majority, and the army and navy at its command...
...Yet he was utilizing class interests and class struggles in a way that the Fabians would not do...
...He retains old formulae, but gives a new interpretation— and the new interpretation is not a development, but a negation of the old doctrine...
...The opening words of the preface were: In a life the greater part of which has to be spent in the noisy and dusty arena where politics is a hand-to-hand battle, there are few opportunities given for retiring into the peaceful wilderness where one can think out the more fundamental questions of government, and see party differences justified and explained in the light of theories of what society, the state, and politics are...
...his lot with Keir Hardie...
...While he was building up the Labour party, haranguing street crowds, manipulating a caucus, fighting his enemies inside and outside the Labour ranks, he was writing a series of important books on social theory...
...Macdonald is no democrat...
...But if the words were written in a period of bitterness they are none the less sincere and characteristic...
...put it at its ease and it is prodigal in its magnanimity...
...We shall probably be asked to interfere legislatively with wages...
...Such a view of society is plainly fatal to individualism, and its insistence on the interdependence of social classes, of the need for continuity in development of a living organism, and of the adaptation of structure to function is equally opposed to cataclysmic revolutions and proletarian dictatorships...
...The Independent Labour party was a definitely Socialist organization, and it made little headway of itself...
...What plan are we to execute...
...They dream in spurts, and with the morning no remnant of the dream remains...
...He had no enthusiasm for lost causes...
...This Socialist leader is a species of aristocrat and conservative...
...The most prominent Socialist in England for nearly twenty-five years, Macdonald has been consistently employed in emptying Socialist doctrines of their content...
...It is doubtful whether he will be the next Labour prime minister...
...Macdonald knew that philosophy and policy had to harmonize...
...The childhood of the race is far behind in years, but nigh at hand in mood...
...It was almost inevitable that a young man of brains who found himself in London in 1889 should become a Socialist...
...When he was prime minister his government was more conservative than any that has ruled Britain since the time of Lord Salisbury...
...He has no doubt that a theory is indispensable to intelligent practice...
...He is of the Socialist sect called revisionist...
...He adopted as his own the biological theory of society, that society is an organism to which the individual must conform himself, and that its natural method of progress is by evolution, not revolution...
...They are responsive to suggestion and primitive in their impulses...
...Born in a fishing village in the far north of Scotland, he was reared in a two-room hovel by his grandmother...
...of what progress means, and of what its method must be...
...It was the year of the great dock strike...
...He is one of the rare individuals who are both philosophers and men of action...
...Play on its fears and it gives an immediate response, for fear still lies upon it as the shadow of the unknown and the unfamiliar within whose bounds dwell superstitution and credulity...
...He has the intellectual's contempt for the crowd...
...If it will not go his way, he will leave it...
Vol. 5 • May 1927 • No. 26
