First published: The Left News, February 1941
Transcribed: by Portal E.M. Cioran
HTML mark-up: by Zdravko Saveski
One of the easiest pastimes in the world is debunking Democracy. In this country one is hardly obliged to bother any longer with the merely reactionary arguments against popular rule, but during the last twenty years 'bourgeois' Democracy has been much more subtly attacked by both Fascists and Communists, and it is highly significant that these seeming enemies have both attacked it on the same grounds. It is true that the Fascists, with their bolder methods of propaganda, also use when it suits them the aristocratic argument that Democracy 'brings the worst men to the top', but the basic contention of all apologists of totalitarianism is that Democracy is a fraud. It is supposed to be no more than a cover-up for the rule of small handfuls of rich men. This is not altogether false, and still less is it obviously false; on the contrary, there is more to be said for it than against it. A sixteen-year-old schoolboy can attack Democracy much better than he can defend it. And one cannot answer him unless one knows the anti-democratic 'case' and is willing to admit the large measure of truth it contains.
To begin with, it is always urged against 'bourgeois' Democracy that it is negatived by economic inequality. What is the use of political liberty, so called, to a man who works 12 hours a day for £3 a week? Once in five years he may get the chance to vote for his favourite party, but for the rest of the time practically every detail of his life is dictated by his employer. And in practice his political life is dictated as well. The monied class can keep all the important ministerial and official jobs in its own hands, and it can work the electoral system in its own favour by bribing the electorate, directly or indirectly. Even when by some mischance a government representing the poorer classes gets into power, the rich can usually blackmail it by threatening to export capital. Most important of all, nearly the whole cultural and intellectual life of the community - newspapers, books, education, films, radio - is controlled by monied men who have the strongest motive to prevent the spread of certain ideas. The citizen of a democratic country is 'conditioned' from birth onwards, less rigidly but not much less effectively than he would be in a totalitarian state.
And there is no certainty that the rule of a privileged class can ever be broken by purely democratic means. In theory a Labour government could come into office with a clear majority and proceed at once to establish socialism by Act of Parliament. In practice the monied classes would rebel, and probably with success, because they would have most of the permanent officials and the key men in the armed forces on their side. Democratic methods are only possible where there is a fairly large basis of agreement between all political parties. There is no strong reason for thinking that any really fundamental change can ever be achieved peacefully.
Again, it is often argued that the whole façade of democracy - freedom of speech and assembly, independent trade unions and so forth - must collapse as soon as the monied classes are no longer in a position to make concessions to their employees. Political 'liberty', it is said, is simply a bribe, a bloodless substitute for the Gestapo. It is a fact that the countries we call democratic are usually prosperous countries - in most cases they are exploiting cheap coloured labour, directly or indirectly - and also that Democracy as we know it has never existed except in maritime or mountainous countries, i.e. countries which can defend themselves without the need for an enormous standing army. Democracy accompanies, probably demands, favourable conditions of life; it has never flourished in poor and militarised states. Take away England's sheltered position, so it is said, and England will promptly revert to political methods as barbarous as those of Rumania. Moreover all government, democratic or totalitarian, rests ultimately on force. No government, unless it intends to connive at its own overthrow, can or does show the smallest respect for democratic 'rights' when once it is seriously menaced. A democratic country fighting a desperate war is forced, just as much as an autocracy or a Fascist state, to conscript soldiers, coerce labour, imprison defeatists, suppress seditious newspapers; in other words, it can only save itself from destruction by ceasing to be democratic. The things it is supposed to be fighting for are always scrapped as soon as the fighting starts.
That, roughly summarised, is the case against 'bourgeois' Democracy, advanced by Fascists and Communists alike, though with differences of emphasis. At every point one has got to admit that it contains much truth. And yet why is it that it is ultimately false - for everyone bred in a democratic country knows quasi-instinctively that there is something wrong with the whole of this line of argument?
What is wrong with this familiar debunking of Democracy is that it cannot explain the whole of the facts. The actual differences in social atmosphere and political behaviour between country and country are far greater than can be explained by any theory which writes off laws, customs, traditions, etc. as mere 'superstructure'. On paper it is very simple to demonstrate that Democracy is 'just the same as' (or 'just as bad as') totalitarianism. There are concentration camps in Germany; but then there are concentration camps in India. Jews are persecuted wherever fascism reigns; but what about the colour laws in South Africa? Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth. These parallels can be extended indefinitely. But the implied argument all along the line is that a difference of degree is not a difference. It is quite true, for instance, that there is political persecution in democratic countries. The question is how much. How many refugees have fled from Britain, or from the whole of the British Empire, during the past seven years? And how many from Germany? How many people personally known to you have been beaten with rubber truncheons or forced to swallow pints of castor oil? How dangerous do you feel it to be to go into the nearest pub and express your opinion that this is a capitalist war and we ought to stop fighting? Can you point to anything in recent British or American history that compares with the June Purge, the Russian Trotskyist trials, the pogrom that followed vom Rath's assassination? Could an article equivalent to the one I am writing be printed in any totalitarian country, red, brown or black? The Daily Worker has just been suppressed, but only after ten years of life, whereas in Rome, Moscow or Berlin it could not have survived ten days. And during the last six months of its life Great Britain was not only at war but in a more desperate predicament than at any time since Trafalgar. Moreover - and this is the essential point - even after the Daily Worker' s suppression its editors are permitted to make a public fuss, issue statements in their own defence, get questions asked in Parliament and enlist the support of well-meaning people of various political shades. The swift and final 'liquidation' which would be a matter of course in a dozen other countries not only does not happen, but the possibility that it may happen barely enters anyone's mind.
It is not particularly significant that British Fascists and Communists should hold pro-Hitler opinions; what is significant is that they dare to express them. In doing so they are silently admitting that democratic liberties are not altogether a sham. During the years 1929-34 all orthodox Communists were committed to the belief that 'Social-fascism' (i.e. Socialism) was the real enemy of the workers and that capitalist Democracy was in no way whatever preferable to Fascism. Yet when Hitler came to power scores of thousands of German Communists - still uttering the same doctrine, which was not abandoned till some time later - fled to France, Switzerland, England, the USA or any other democratic country that would admit them. By their action they had belied their words; they had 'voted with their feet', as Lenin put it. And here one comes upon the best asset that capitalist Democracy has to show. It is the comparative feeling of security enjoyed by the citizens of democratic countries, the knowledge that when you talk politics with your friend there is no Gestapo ear glued to the keyhole, the belief that 'they' cannot punish you unless you have broken the law, the belief that the law is above the State. It does not matter that this belief is partly an illusion - as it is, of course. For a widespread illusion, capable of influencing public behaviour, is itself an important fact. Let us imagine that the present or some future British government decided to follow up the suppression of the Daily Worker by utterly destroying the Communist Party, as was done in Italy and Germany. Very probably they would find the task impossible. For political persecution of that kind can only be carried out by a full-blown Gestapo, which does not exist in England and could not at present be created. The social atmosphere is too much against it, the necessary personnel would not be forthcoming. The pacifists who assure us that if we fight against Fascism we shall 'go Fascist' ourselves forget that every political system has to be operated by human beings, and human beings are influenced by their past. England may suffer many degenerative changes as a result of war, but it cannot, except possibly by conquest, be turned into a replica of Nazi Germany. It may develop towards some kind of Austro-fascism, but not towards Fascism of the positive, revolutionary, malignant type. The necessary human material is not there. That much we owe to three centuries of security, and to the fact that we were not beaten in the last war.
But I am not suggesting that the 'freedom' referred to in leading articles in the Daily Worker is the only thing worth fighting for. Capitalist Democracy is not enough in itself, and what is more it cannot be salvaged unless it changes into something else. Our Conservative statesmen, with their dead minds, probably hope and believe that the result of a British victory will be simply a return to the past: another Versailles Treaty, and then the resumption of 'normal' economic life, with millions of unemployed, deer-stalking on the Scottish moors, the Eton and Harrow match on July 11th, etc., etc. The anti-war theorists of the extreme Left fear or profess to fear the same thing. But that is a static conception which fails even at this date to grasp the power of the thing we are fighting against. Nazism may or may not be a disguise for monopoly capitalism, but at any rate it is not capitalistic in the nineteenth-century sense. It is governed by the sword and not by the cheque-book. It is a centralised economy, streamlined for war and able to use to the very utmost such labour and raw materials as it commands. An old-fashioned capitalist state, with all its forces pulling in different directions, with armaments held up for the sake of profits, incompetent idiots holding high positions by right of birth, and constant friction between class and class, obviously cannot compete with that kind of thing. If the Popular Front campaign had succeeded and England had two or three years ago joined up with France and the USSR for a preventive war - or threat of war - against Germany, British capitalism might perhaps have been given a new lease of life. But this failed to happen and Hitler has had time to arm to the full and has succeeded in driving his enemies apart. For at least another year England must fight alone, and against very heavy odds. Our advantages are, first of all, naval strength, and secondly the fact that our resources are in the long run vastly greater - if we can use them. But we can only use them if we transform our social and economic system from top to bottom. The productivity of labour, the morale of the Home front, the attitude towards us of the coloured peoples and the conquered European populations, all ultimately depend on whether we can disprove Goebbels's charge that England is merely a selfish plutocracy fighting for the status quo . For if we remain that plutocracy - and Goebbels's pictures is not entirely false - we shall be conquered. If I had to choose between Chamberlain's England and the sort of régime that Hitler means to impose on us, I would choose Chamberlain's England without a moment's hesitation. But that alternative does not really exist. Put crudely, the choice is between socialism and defeat. We must go forward, or perish.
Last summer, when England's situation was more obviously desperate than it is now, there was a widespread realisation of this fact. If the mood of the summer months has faded away, it is partly because things have turned out less disastrously than most people then expected, but partly also because there existed no political party, newspaper or outstanding individual to give the general discontent a voice and a direction. There was no one capable of explaining - in such a way as would get him a hearing - just why we were in the mess we were and what was the way out of it. The man who rallied the nation was Churchill, a gifted and courageous man, but a patriot of the limited, traditional kind. In effect Churchill said simply, 'We are fighting for England,' and the people flocked to follow him. Could anyone have so moved them by saying, 'We are fighting for socialism'? They knew that they had been let down, knew that the existing social system was all wrong and that they wanted something different - but was it socialism that they wanted? What was socialism, anyway? To this day the word has only a vague meaning for the great mass of English people; certainly it has no emotional appeal. Men will not die for it in anything like the numbers that they will die for King and Country. However much one may admire Churchill - and I personally have always admired him as a man and as a writer, little as I like his politics - and however grateful one may feel for what he did last summer, is it not a frightful commentary on the English socialist movement that at this date, in the moment of disaster, the people still look to a Conservative to lead them?
What England has never possessed is a socialist party which meant business and took account of contemporary realities. Whatever programmes the Labour Party may issue, it has been difficult for ten years past to believe that its leaders expected or even wished to see any fundamental change in their own lifetime. Consequently, such revolutionary feeling as existed in the leftwing movement has trickled away into various blind alleys, of which the Communist one was the most important. Communism was from the first a lost cause in western Europe, and the Communist parties of the various countries early degenerated into mere publicity agents for the Russian régime. In this situation they were forced not only to change their most fundamental opinions with each shift of Russian policy, but to insult every instinct and every tradition of the people they were trying to lead. After a civil war, two famines and a purge their adopted Fatherland had settled down to oligarchical rule, rigid censorship of ideas and the slavish worship of a Fuehrer. Instead of pointing out that Russia was a backward country which we might learn from but could not be expected to imitate, the Communists were obliged to pretend that the purges, 'liquidations', etc. were healthy symptoms which any right-minded person would like to see transferred to England. Naturally the people who could be attracted by such a creed, and remain faithful to it after they had grasped its nature, tended to be neurotic or malignant types, people fascinated by the spectacle of successful cruelty. In England they could get themselves no stable mass following. But they could be, and they remain, a danger, for the simple reason that there is no other body of people calling themselves revolutionaries. If you are discontented, if you want to overthrow the existing social system by force, and if you wish to join a political party pledged to this end, then you must join the Communists; effectively there is no one else. They will not achieve their own ends, but they may achieve Hitler's. The so-called People's Convention, for instance, cannot conceivably win power in England, but it may spread enough defeatism to help Hitler very greatly at some critical moment. And between the People's Convention on the one hand, and the 'my country right or wrong' type of patriotism on the other, there is at present no seizable policy.
When the real English socialist movement appears - it must appear if we are not to be defeated, and the basis for it is already there in the conversations in a million pubs and air-raid shelters - it will cut across the existing party divisions. It will be both revolutionary and democratic. It will aim at the most fundamental changes and be perfectly willing to use violence if necessary. But also it will recognize that not all cultures are the same, that national sentiments and traditions have to be respected if revolutions are not to fail, that England is not Russia - or China, or India. It will realise that British Democracy is not altogether a sham, not simply 'superstructure', that on the contrary it is something extremely valuable which must be preserved and extended, and above all, must not be insulted. That is why I have spent so much space above in answering the familiar arguments against 'bourgeois' Democracy. Bourgeois Democracy is not enough, but it is very much better than Fascism, and to work against it is to saw off the branch you are sitting on. The common people know this, even if the intellectuals do not. They will cling very firmly to the 'illusion' of Democracy and to the Western conception of honesty and common decency. It is no use appealing to them in terms of 'realism' and power politics, preaching the doctrines of Machiavelli in the jargon of Lawrence and Wishart. The most that that can achieve is confusion of the kind that Hitler wishes for. Any movement that can rally the mass of the English people must have as its keynotes the democratic values which the doctrinaire Marxist writes off as 'illusion' or 'superstructure'. Either they will produce a version of socialism more or less in accord with their past, or they will be conquered from without, with unpredictable but certainly horrible results. Whoever tries to undermine their faith in Democracy, to chip away the moral code they derive from the Protestant centuries and the French Revolution, is not preparing power for himself, though he may be preparing it for Hitler - a process we have seen repeated so often in Europe that to mistake its nature is no longer excusable.