Jump to content

Page:John Turner Walton Newbold - Marx and Modern Capitalism (1918).pdf/21

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

shows by deeds, not words, its ruthless and unscrupulous nature.

Let the working class challenge the capitalist class on the floor of the House of Commons (and in the municipal council chambers of the land) and seek to wrest from it the mastery of the State. Let it test the sincerity or correctness of those political democrats who assure us that it is only necessary to make the voice of the people heard with sufficient emphasis and the State will prove to be themselves. Let us see how the State will direct "the whole civil and military forces of the Crown," how it will instruct Scotland Yard to act, how it will make use of the Law Courts, and how it will ensure that the whole Whitehall Bureaucracy shall confirm the theory that "the State is the People." Let it put to the test the specious professions of the politicians of capitalist democracy. But, lest these professions should be found wanting, let it be ready to show those gentry that it stands immediately behind its elected delegates and that they are only the spear-head thrust across the Bar of the House by the workers, who keep firm and vigorous hold of the shaft of Industrial Unionism.

Then, if "the executive committee" displays any inclination to temporize, let the workers give the shaft a twist. If that proves inadequate, let them exercise "the Right to be Lazy" so that "the executive committee" may continue to deliberate on an empty stomach. The Social Revolution has more to win by the workers staying in bed than by fighting at the barricades.

Organisation and Education.

So much for political action, a function purely destructive. Industrial action, the action of the industrial organisation of the workers, must be determined from time to time by the conditions under which it has to be exercised. The need of the hour is to find some way of bringing together the workers, now combined together by crafts which are obsolete, by trades which are disappearing, in sectional unions which no longer conform to the range or area of production, in federations to encounter federations of masters who have since merged their businesses. More and more, the capitalist class combines its membership and organises its business of profit-making into a union of exploitation and a single system of absorbing labour-power. The workers must

21