The Evening Star (December 7, 1945)
ON THE RECORD —
Harold Laski’s doubletalk
By Dorothy Thompson
It is seldom that one hears, from a supposedly intelligent man, the intellectual doubletalk put out by Harold J. Laski, chairman of the British Labor Party, in his address to the Nation Associates, December 3.
Mr. Laski pleaded for the end of all secrecy regarding the atomic bomb; he said “every implication of this discovery means planned internationalism, and the end of national sovereignty… war,” he said, “is the outcome of the exercise by governments of unlimited sovereignty.”
Now in order that sovereignty should go, “the interests that sovereignty protects must be recognized as outmoded.” The source of national sovereignty, and war, is a “society dominated by businessman . . . free enterprise and the market economy mean war; socialism and planned economy mean peace… Nazism, in all its forms, is the culmination of a society built upon the anarchy of free enterprise…
“The businessmen have split our society in two – the political society and the economic society. They have made the policeman the sanction of the first and starvation the threat of the second.”
And he deduces, “there is only one country in the world today where this dichotomy has been transcended” (the Soviet Union).
Now wait a minute!
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The leading exponent of its own unlimited national sovereignty is the Soviet Union. From official leaders in the United States and Britain have come proposals ranging all the way from world federation to international controls over atomic energy. On the day that Mr. Laski made his speech, Pravda sharply censured all proposals “to revise the UNO by limiting the national sovereignty of the great powers,” and in an official broadcast Moscow branded those who propose a world parliament as “Fascist.” Ergo, Ernest Bevin, British Labor’s foreign minister, and Harold Stassen are “Fascists.”
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The source of this war is not a “society dominated by free enterprise and a market economy” unless Mr. Laski agrees with Molotov’s contention on October 31, 1939, during the Russo-German pact, that the aggressors were Britain and France. Nazi Germany was not dominated by businessmen, nor was it “in all its forms the culmination of a society built upon the anarchy of free enterprise.” Its economy was entirely subservient to the party-dominated state. The worker was subservient to the employer, the employer to the party, and the means of production were subservient to state aims.
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Mr. Laski’s description of the dichotomy (highbrow for “division into exclusive spheres”) between political and economic life in the western democracies is bunk. The worker has political representation through his vote and economic representation through his trade union. That this economic representation is powerless is nonsense to anyone reading strike news.
There are other ways, however, of solving dichotomy, in which the policeman is the sanction of the first (political) and starvation the threat of the second (economic).
One is the way of the Soviet Union and its satellites, in which the executive of a party theocracy carries both the sanction of the policeman and the threat of starvation over everybody – worker, manager, intellectual and scientist.
But Laski has his own dichotomy: Laski speaking as chairman of the British Labor Party and speaking on his own.
As chairman of the British Labor Party (by the accident of seniority), Mr. Laski is fighting Moscow’s Communists in all European countries. He is campaigning against Democratic-Socialist mergers with the Communists – a process whereby the minority Communists invariably become the masters of the majority Socialists.
By one of those ironies, the same papers which carried Mr. Laski’s speech revealed that Russian censors in Vienna had blasted the Socialist Arbeiterzeitung for publishing an article by Michael Foot, British Labor M.P., in which he had asked “whether Britain must become a lackey either of the new kind of Russian imperialism or the older form of American capitalism.”
“Who gave the Arbeiterzeitung the right to print such things?” the Russian censor asked indignantly. Certainly the article was not written nor permission given or withheld by “the press that is now a branch of big business” – to quote again, Mr. Laski.
According to whatever logic there is in Mr. Laski’s argument, only the Soviet Union, in which the dichotomy leading to war has been abolished should have the atomic bomb, and all national sovereignties should be abolished except that of the USSR. This is certainly not the view of the British Labor Party. Mr. Laski is its dichotomy. Were it Communist or Russian, it would deal with the schism by banishing Mr. Laski to some equivalent of Arctic Siberia. Being democratic it will tolerate him for the length of his term, after which, if I read the signs aright, he will attempt to split it.
Meanwhile Mr. Laski has done his best to poison relations between Washington and London at the moment when financial relations are being considered by Congress. He has handed our own nationalist-imperialists their best ammunition.