the war but now co-operating instead of competing. The technical basis of capitalist concentration of industry has been provided and, in the hurry and scurry of making the apparatus of the war that was going to still for ever the ghost of Socialism, the capitalists have given to it the body and substance wherein its soul can and must become real.
Again, as the nation in arms, and, latterly, the alliance of nations in arms, through a common financial control and a single purchasing agency, have replaced the thousands, if not millions, of small, unsystematic, unrelated orders for all kinds of commodities by a combined system of orders, capitalist industry has become, in increasing measure, one gigantic service supplying the needs of the greater part of the civilised world.
The governments—who are, after all, but the executive committees of the owners of land and capital masquerading in the guise of the "impartial" State as the disinterested "public" authority—have compelled the "captains of industry" to put their houses in order, have taken over the direction of great sections of their businesses, opened up new departments, appointed controllers, and have, to a varying degree, abolished or restricted private management and enterprise. They have permitted the capitalists to go on drawing profits out of the undertakings which they are permitted to continue to own, though these persons no longer perform, or are even deemed to be performing, a useful function in these nationalised, semi-nationalised and demi-semi-nationalised concerns. The private capitalist owns, but the organised capitalists—the State—have come to control industry. This is an important stage in the social revolution which follows logically and naturally upon the transformation which has been taking place in the technical basis of wealth production.
The war, which for us is a dramatic and revolutionary episode in the evolution of economic and political systems, is by no means the shipwreck of our hopes, but a development which we must seek to understand in order that we may turn its results and its lessons to the advantage of the working class. To those who object to this attitude of mind let me say that for us there can be no ethic and no ideal higher than the interest of the revolutionary working class. That is the cardinal principle, the present day truth which we have to impress upon every section of the Labour and Socialist Movement. That is the philosophy of Socialism on which
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