We have a strong suspicion that Mrs. Snowden [1] is burning with curiosity to know what we, who deny God and His commandments, understand by “honesty”. We even suspect that Mr. Henderson [2] puts this question to us not without irony, that is if irony can be at all compatible with piety.
We confess that we are not acquainted with the Absolute Morality of the Popes, either of the Church or of the University, of the Vatican or of the PSA [Pleasant Sunday Afternoon]. [3] The Categorical Imperative of Kant, the Transubstantiation of Christ, and the artistic virtues of a religious myth are as unknown to us as the old, hard and cunning Moses who found the treasure of eternal morality on Mount Sinai. Morality is a function of living human society. There is nothing absolute in its character, for it changes with the progress of that society, and serves as an expression of the interests of its classes, and chiefly of the governing classes. Official morality is a bridle to restrain the oppressed. In the course of the struggle the working class has elaborated its own revolutionary morality, which began by dethroning God and all absolute standards. But we understand by honesty a conformity of words and deeds before the working class, checked by the supreme end of the movement and of our struggle: the liberation of humanity through the social revolution. For instance, we do not say that one must not deceive and be cunning, that one must love one’s enemies, etc., for such exalted morality is evidently only accessible to such deeply religious statesmen as Lord Curzon [4], Lord Northcliffe [5], and Mr. Henderson. We hate or despise our enemies, according to their deserts; we beat them and deceive according to circumstances, and, even when we come to an understanding with them, we are not swept off our feet by a wave of forgiving love. But we firmly believe that one must not lie to the masses and that one must not deceive them with regard to the aims and methods of their own struggle. The social revolution is entirely based upon the growth of proletarian consciousness and on the faith of the proletariat in its own strength and in the party which is leading it. One may play a double game with the enemies of the proletariat, but not with the proletariat itself. Our party has made mistakes, together with the masses which it was leading. We have always quite openly acknowledged these mistakes to the masses, and, together with them we have made the necessary changes. What the devotees of legality are pleased to call demagogy is merely truth, too plainly and too loudly expressed. That, Mrs. Snowden, is our conception of honesty.
From Chapter 4 of Between Red and White (1921)
We Russian Marxists, owing to the belated development of Russia, were not weighed down by a powerful bourgeois culture. We became allied to European spiritual culture not through the medium of our miserable national bourgeoisie, but independently: we assimilated the most revolutionary conclusions of European experience and European thought, and developed them to their highest pitch. This has given some advantages to our generation. Let us declare frankly: the sincere and profound enthusiasm with which we contemplate the products of the British genius in the most varied spheres of human creative endeavour, only the more sharply and pitilessly accentuates the sincere and profound contempt with which we regard the spiritual narrow-mindedness, the theoretical banality and the lack of revolutionary dignity, which characterize the authorized leaders of British socialism. They are not the heralds of a new world; they are but the surviving relies of an old culture, which in their person expresses anxiety for its further fate. And the spiritual barrenness of these relics seems to be a sort of retribution for the profligate lavish past of bourgeois culture.
The bourgeois mind has imbibed some of the great cultural achievements of mankind. Yet at the present time it is the chief obstacle to the development of human culture.
One of the leading virtues of our party, which makes it the mightiest lever of development of the epoch, consists of its complete and absolute independence of bourgeois public opinion. These words signify much more than they at first sight seem. They need to be explained. Particularly if we bear in mind such a thankless section of the audience as the Second International. Every revolutionary thought, even the simplest truth, must be nailed down here with extreme care.
Bourgeois public opinion is a close psychological web which envelops on all sides the tools and instruments of bourgeois violence, protecting them against any incidental shocks, as well as against the fatal revolutionary shock, which, however, in the last resort is inevitable. Active bourgeois public opinion is composed of two parts: first, of inherited views, actions, and prejudices which represent the fossilized experience of the past, a thick layer of irrational banality and useful stupidity; and second, of the intricate machinery and clever management necessary for the mobilization of patriotic feeling and moral indignation, of national enthusiasm, altruist sentiment, and other kinds of lies and deceptions.
Such is the general formula. But some explanatory examples are necessary. When in famine-stricken Russia, a Cadet lawyer, who with funds supplied by Britain or by France, helped in making a noose for the neck of the working class, dies of typhus in a prison, the wireless and cables of bourgeois public opinion produce a sufficiently great number of vibrations to arouse a wave of indignation in the receptive conscience of the collective Mrs. Snowdens. It is quite obvious that all the devilish work of the capitalist wireless and cables would have been useless if the skull of the petty-bourgeois did not serve as a gramophone box.
Let us take another instance: the famine on the Volga. In its present form of unprecedented calamity, this famine, at least half of it, is a result of the civil war raised on the Volga by the Czechoslovaks and Kolchak [6], that is by the Anglo-American and French capital which organised and sustained it. This drought fell upon a soil that had been already exhausted and ruined, denuded of working cattle, machinery and other stock. We, on the other hand, have cast into gaol some officers and lawyers (which we by no means hold up as an example of humanitarianism), and bourgeois Europe and America attempted then to picture the whole of Russia, with its hundred million inhabitants, as a vast hunger-prison. They encircled us with a wall of blockade, while their hired White Guard agents applied the bomb and torch to the destruction of our scanty supplies. If there is anyone who handles the scales of pure morality, let him weigh up the severe measures that we are compelled to adopt in our life and death struggle against the whole world, against the calamities which world capitalism, in quest of unpaid interests on loans, showered upon the heads of the Volga mothers. Yet the machine of bourgeois public opinion works so systematically, and with such arrogant self-righteousness, the cretinism of the middle-class represents such a valuable gramophone box, that as a result, Mrs. Snowden pours her surplus human pity out upon … the poor down-trodden agents of imperialism in our land.
Reverence of bourgeois public opinion is a more impassable barrier to the activity of social reformers than even the bourgeois laws. It may be put down as a law of modern capitalist governments, that the more “democratic”, the more “liberal” and “free” is their regime, the more respectable are their national socialists, and the more stupid the obeisance of the national Labour Party before the public opinion of the bourgeoisie. Why have an outward policeman over Mr. MacDonald [7]when there is an inward one within his soul?
Here we must not shirk the question, the very mention of which is a menace to respectability. I speak of religion. It was not so very long ago that Lloyd George called the Church the central power station of all parties and currents, i.e., of bourgeois public opinion as a whole. This is particularly true in reference to Britain. Not in the sense, of course, that Lloyd George [8] derives the real inspiration for his politics from religion, or that the hatred of Churchill [9] for Soviet Russia is due to his burning desire to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, or that the Notes of Lord Curzon are copied directly from the Sermon on the Mount. Oh no! The driving force of their politics are the very mundane interests of the bourgeoisie which put them in power. But that “public opinion” which alone makes possible the smooth working of the mechanism of governmental compulsion, finds its chief resources in religion. The legal restraint that has been put over men, over classes, and over society as a whole, as a sort of ideological whip, h merely the unadorned application of religious restraint – that heavenly whip which is held over the head of exploited humanity. After all is said and done, it is a hopeless matter to impose upon an unemployed Dockers a faith in the sacredness of democratic legality by the force of formal arguments. The first essential thing here is material argument – a policeman with a heavy club on earth, and above him – the Supreme Policeman, armed with the thunder in Heaven. But when even in the minds of “socialists” the fetishism of bourgeois legality is coupled with the fetishism of the epoch of the Druids, we get as a result that ideal inner policeman, with whose aid the bourgeoisie (at least for a time) can allow itself the luxury of approximate observance of democratic ritual.
When speaking of the treasonous and betrayals of the social reformers, we by no means desire to assert that they are all, or a majority of them, merely bought. If so, they would never do for the serious role set to them by bourgeois society. It is even unimportant to guess the extent to which the vanity of a middle-class man might feel flattered by becoming an MP in a loyal opposition, or even a member of the Imperial Cabinet, although there is a good deal of that sentiment, of course.
Suffice it to say that the same bourgeois public opinion which in days of quietude permits them to be in the Opposition, at a decisive moment, when the life or death of bourgeois society is at stake, or at least its most important interests – in a war, a rebellion in Ireland or in India, the great coal lock-out, or the Soviet Republic in Russia – proved capable of forcing them to take the political position which was necessary to the capitalist order. Without wishing in any way to attribute to the personality of Mr. Henderson any titanic features that it does not possess, we may confidently assume that Mr. Henderson as the head of the “Labour Party” is a supremely important asset to bourgeois society in Britain. For in the heads of the Hendersons the fundamental elements of bourgeois education and the fragmentary scraps of socialism are welded into one by the traditional cement of religion. The question of the economic emancipation of the British proletariat cannot be seriously put as long as the labour movement is not purged of such leaders, organizations, and moods, which are the embodiment of the timid, cringing, cowardly and base submission of the exploited to the public opinion of the exploiters. The inward policeman must be cast out before the outward policeman can be overthrown.
From Chapter 10 of Between Red and White (1921)
The protest of a number of the clergy of Great Britain against the preferment of charges against the former patriarch Tikhon [10], addressed to the Soviet Government, makes it necessary to give the following clarifications.
From a Draft of Soviet government reply to a protest by a number of
British church leaders dated 3rd June 1922 and first published in Izvestia 8th June.
The document is reproduced by kind permission of
the International Institute for Social History.
For comparison I’ve brought along one British and one American newspaper. Many of you have probably seen them. [Voices: We haven’t]
Here’s The Times newspaper, a big paper, curse it. [Laughter, applause] It is the main organ of the British press, a Conservative newspaper which supports any government on matters of foreign policy, whether Liberal, Conservative or MacDonald’s so-called Labour government which however has conducted a conservative foreign policy and domestic policy. This is the issue for just one day with 32 pages and the paper is printed in brevier and nonpareil.
Today I asked a comrade to count up how much this would come to if transferred into our Pravda. On six pages in Pravda, there are 270,000 printed characters, but here on 32 pages there are 2,300,000 i.e. 8¾ times more. What a lot of lies that makes! [Applause] You will ask: where do they find such an amount of material every day? How many “Burkors” [11], must they have? [Laughter]
So allow me to show you: the first, second and third pages are set in the smallest type, here the advertisements are printed, without screaming headlines or wasting unnecessary space, yet a model of order with a strict plan so that it’s very easy to find any advertisement.
Then comes a page devoted to the law report. On various occasions I’ve spoken and written that public education must also include attentive coverage of what goes on in the courts because the court shows the seamy side of society. In the courts we have a reflection both of our day-to-day life and our whole process of construction but an inverted reflection as it were. However, coverage of the courts is done badly in our press: we have neither enough space nor the necessary know-how.
Next, on two pages of The Times comes the sport – of every kind: who spilt whose blood at boxing; football takes up a huge space; and finally every vixen hunted by a lord will find its biography here. [Laughter, applause) Next comes parliament, again in very small type, nonpareil, two pages, receiving about the same attention as football and boxing, then home affairs compact and packed in tightly.
Next comes what we call “miscellany”. Next, commerce, here’s that page, theatre, a page, foreign news – just a page, but in the number of characters these pages count for two of Pravda’s.
This middle sheet here forms what we would call simply a newspaper. Here you have foreign affairs, here the main news of the previous day and here features, leaders and anything else. Next a continuation of the most important news. These four pages form the core of the paper. But there are 28 pages besides them!
Let’s go on. Here again are “various” reports from all over the world. I will not describe them in any more detail. Here are the pages of illustrations, photographs and so on, sharp and far better than in our weeklies and monthlies, yet this is a daily printed by the rotary method. Here is finance and the Stock Exchange, company reports, business, share prices, commodity markets, then shipping and so on, and then the last pages with advertisements.
That’s what a daily issue of The Times is like. If you think that this is a record-breaking paper in size, then you’re wrong. In this respect America leaves Britain far behind at least in quantity. [Voice: what about quality?]
In the quality of the technique The Times is superior to all papers. In respect of vulgarity, sensations, and playing upon the basest feelings, the Americans probably hold the record, though it is difficult to decide this exactly. During the recent General Strike in Britain the government’s paper was printed on just four pages, I will show it to you, but what a vast quantity of compressed lies it contained! ...
You must not forget that in Britain, where there are dozens of bourgeois newspapers with wider circulations than The Times, there’s only one daily “Labour” paper and that’s a MacDonaldite one, that is, if not belonging to the bourgeoisie itself then to its political henchman.
This alone fully explains why it so happens that. the bourgeoisie can manage without censorship and have a “free” press, at least in normal times when there is no General Strike, no civil war and no international war.
Why have censorship if you have the printing works, the writers and the paper wholly and completely in your hands? In “peace” time this is more than enough, for the property-owners’ press is an organized conspiracy to safeguard the interests of the landlords and capitalists. This press has its internal censorship. Every bourgeois journalist has a gendarme sitting inside him so that an external one is unnecessary ...
This same Times and all the rest of the British press experienced a few difficult days not so long ago. That was during the General Strike, which by its very fact showed that the “freedom” of the press, like all other freedoms apart from the press itself, rests upon a specific industrial basis, upon the continuity of the proletariat’s labour and turns to dust with the interruption of this continuity.
All the bourgeois papers were replaced by one government paper. It came out like this, in four pages. The government requisitioned all the paper for itself, thereby demonstrating that “freedom” of the press is not a paragraph of the constitution but a matter of possessing the material resources. An instructive lesson for the British proletariat!
Here now is the News of the General Council [12] – four little pages. It wasn’t however, because they had only four little pages that they suffered such a defeat. On four small pages you can say a lot. In 1917 Pravda was ever so small, but what a revolution it produced, first in minds, then in relationships. It’s all a question of what you say!
So here in the paper of the strike there reigned the spirit of conciliation, kow-towing, submissiveness and cowardice and therefore the strike suffered such a defeat.
During the strike there was one incident which must be of interest not only to printers but also to our reporters. The compositors on the Daily Mail, one of the most villainous papers in the world (and that’s saying something!), suddenly refused to set a leading article aimed against the strike and written in a mad dog’s saliva. [13] The greatest excitement and indignation throughout public opinion up to and including MacDonald! “What, interference with editorial business, an infringement of the freedom of the press!”
So what then is their freedom of the press? The freedom of the press is the undisputed right of the bourgeoisie to print with workers’ hands in “their” printing works on “their” paper everything that is directed against the interests of the people, whereby the attempt by the workers to intervene in the matter and declare that today, on the day of the General Strike, we typographical slaves refuse to print your slander against the proletariat, is condemned and assailed as an attack on the freedom of the press!
The strike was quite big enough, despite its defeat, to lay bare to the bones the whole fraud of British democracy.
It would be a fine thing if in every workers’ club in Britain and in every trade union premises there was on the wall this issue here of the Daily Mail published in Paris on the day of the start of the strike.
Here is the leader printed under the headline For King and Country. After it, a second article For the Freedom of the Press. A pompous, emotive, patriotic, militant tone. “Days of great ordeals are beginning. Moscow is raising up the working class against Britain, the King, the country and the freedom of the press.” (This, comrades, is the same Daily Mail that accuses our trade unions of sending not their own money but that of the Soviet government to the British miners in order to wreck the British economy.)
But here is what is particularly remarkable. This most profoundly moral newspaper which intervenes on behalf of the King, the country and the freedom of the press prints just in front of this very regal article, here in these two columns, right under the nose of King and country, dozens of bawling advertisements for houses of ill-repute in Paris which exist for the delight of the noble public with fat wallets.
Just imagine, in this newspaper on the day of great “national ordeal” when this paper utters especially rabid abuse at Moscow and the working class, right here on the first page are these enticing advertisements for night entertainments, fleshpots for the lords who have fled to Paris in a jitter.
This patriotic newspaper gathers its sinless revenue both from the defence of King, country and the freedom of the Press and from houses of ill-repute. [Applause]
From a speech to the All-Union Conference of Agricultural Workers, 28th May 1926
(For Quality, Against Bureaucratism, For Socialism!)
1. Ethel Snowden (1880-1951), British socialist and feminist campaigner, member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), wife of Philip Snowden.
2. Arthur Henderson (1863-1935), a leader of the British Labour Party, who rallied the party to support World War I and became a government minister. He later served as Home Secretary in the first Labour government (1924) and Foreign Secretary in the second Labour government (1929-1931).
3. Pleasant Sunday Afternoon – societies formed in the 1880s by non-conformist sects to bring unreligious workers around the church through social activities. [Author’s Note]
4. Curzon, George Nathaniel (Lord Curzon) (1859-1925) – Aristocrat educated at Eton and Oxford. Viceroy of India 1898-1905; strengthened the apparatus of colonial rule, partitioning Bengal and fortifying the North-West Frontier against a threat from Tsarist Russian imperialism. Became an earl in 1911, joined Lloyd George’s War Cabinet in 1916; Foreign Secretary first under Lloyd George in 1919 and then under Bonar Law and Baldwin, 1922-24. A leader of the right wing of the Conservative Party in this period, he combined traditional hostility to Tsarist Russia with his class loyalty to act as an arch-enemy of Soviet Russia, against which he carried out endless diplomatic manoeuvres.
5. Lord Northcliffe (1865-1922), powerful British newspaper and publishing magnate, became Britain’s Director of Propaganda during the latter part of the World War I.
6. The Czechoslovak Corps was a force made up of Czech and Slovak prisoners of war in Russian captivity in order to fight against the Centralo Powers in World War I. After the Russian revolution it was arranged that they should be transferred via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostock for transport to the Western Front. En route in May 1918 they were incited by French agents to seize the Trans-Siberian Railway as part of an attempt to overthrow the revolutionary government. They were eventually evacuated in 1920. – Alexander Kolchak (1874-1920), Russian admiral and leader of the counter-revolutionary White forces in Siberia, captured and executed in 1920.
7. Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Scottish Labour politician, member of Independent Labour Party (ILP), adopted pacifist position during World War I, prime minister in the first (1924) and second (1929-1931) Labour governments, defected in 1931 with Philip Snowden and Jimmy Thomas to form National Government with the Conservatives after the Labour government split on the question of cutting unemployment benefits, served as prime minister until 1935.
8. David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Welsh Liberal politician, responsible as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) for the introduction of old age pensions, unemployment benefit and sickness benefits; prime minister from 1916 to 1922.
9. Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British politician, started as a Conservative, switched to the Liberals in 1904, returning to the Conservatives in 1924, served as minister in various positions in both Liberal and Conservative governments; served as prime minister 1940-1945 und again 1951-1955.
10. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1917 to 1923. He had been held in custody by the Soviet authorities for actively opposing the confiscation of precious objects by the government. A number of British church leaders had sent a protest to the Soviet government “against the persecution of the Russian Church in the person of its Patriarch, Tikhon”. The Soviet reply was sent to diplomatic representatives in several European countries on 3rd June 1922.
11. A play on the word Rabkor (worker-correspondent) implying a “bourgeois correspondent”.
12. The newspaper issued by the General Council of the TUC was in fact called British Worker.
13. It was the machine operators and not the compositors who refused to work on the leading article.
Last updated on: 2.7.2007