Ought Liberals to be Communists ?

THE attraction of this book is its sincerity. Mr. Spender

tells us in the preface that, his purpose is to " put as frankly as I could my own point of view," to " portray an attitude of mind." He has depicted himself and something more ; he has drawn a mental portrait of generous youth. Every short period has a generous youth of its own ; and those of us who arc old enough to have witnessed a good many such will not be tempted to consider (as at heart youth itself always does), that the latest generation has necessarily the last word. We have learned by now that youth is seldom very wise, though always very worth attending to.

The youth of Mr. Spender's generation has had an ailing and baffling world to deal with, and it would be surprising if its spokesman could diagnose the symptoms convincingly at all points. He does not ; his lengthier analyses—e.g., of Mr. Aldous Huxley's pacifism in Chapter IV, or of Mr. Cole's views on tactics in Chapter VI—strike one as more tortuous than subtle, and apt to miss the obvious without reaching the profound. And all through his book are passages—often inconsistent with one another—where he seems to be thinking aloud in terms of a mental confusion not yet fully cleared up.

Some of the most serious factors in the modern situation are left completely out of the picture—the currency problem for one, the population problem for another. On the other

hand there is a welcome absence of mere " waste-landishness."- Mr. Spender might say with Walt Whitman : I do not snivel

that snivel the world over, That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth. Ten years ago it might have been otherwise with a spokesman of that day's youth.

Mr. Spender's broad contention is that the paths of Liberalism lead to Communism. Before the War any similar young man would have said that they led to Socialism, and as a matter of logic I think he would have been right. The goal of the Liber- alism envisaged by Mill was in truth a " classless society " ; other phraseology (such as " the abolition of privilege ")

was employed, but that is what it came to. And when equality of opportunity, or something like it, had been formally

achieved in the political sphere, it was a logical corollary that, in order to make the forms realities, a similar equality must be sought in the economic sphere. The only question was one of economic method—whether to embrace a collectivist (i.e., Socialist) solution, or a distributivist (i.e., individualist) one ; and the main achievement of the early Fabian Society was to make the first answer preferred to the second. The three chief thinkers among the early Fabians--Graham Wallas, Sidney Ball, and Sidney Webb—were all men deeply imbued with the Liberal tradition, who saw in Socialism its continuance and completion. And though, of course, the big drum whom they enrolled in their orchestra, Bernard Shaw, had never really been a Liberal at all, and beneath the thin crust of what they taught him the lava of his own violeaCe-loving instincts was seldom long kept from erupting,

their vision so far prevailed that the lire-War Liberal Party became more and more collectivist, while Keir - Hardie's X.L.P. -preserved. and developed, like Hardie himself, much out -was- most vital .in Liberalism.

Mr. Spender's attempt to build a similar bridge ..now froin Liberalism to Communism has the warranty .-of Sidney

Webb.: But whatever its future, it has. obviously not the

'acne. justification in logic. For the difference between- pre- War English-Socialism and what in 1918 the Russian Bolshevist

Party decided to christen ".Communism ." (the wokd never had this distinctive meaning before) is one not of economic end, but of political method ; and the difference is that the Communist throws the whole Liberal method on the scrip- heap, and adopts that of despotic violence—or, as:he:calls it, dictatorship—instead. Of course the mythologk: of• - the phoenix may be invoked in support of the idea that,the. way to rejuvenate a living organism is to burn it alive on afuneral pyre and .expect that the same organism, freshened and

strengthened, will spring out of its fishes. So, and so' alone, may Liberalism—or liberty—be conceived as coming About through ComMunism. But outside mythology we have: 'too little warrant for it ; and even. there the story of. Medea points eloquently the opposite and more obvious moral.

This would have been a much more cogent and compact book had Mr. Spender-seen the single point and concentrated. on it first and last.. It is, that phoenix analogy that he must prove valid, if he is to,zonyince Liberals. As it is, he only , wanders round it ; at one time, in his curiously inconsistent way, stating the case for not expecting despotism to bring forth liberty, and at another time arguing that it will. It is difficult not to think him sometimes rather a slave to phrases ; e.g., the Russian term " cell " has an extraordinary " Open,, Sesame." value for him ; though in effect it means nothing more than what we have known all our lives as a " branch." The idea that " cell " camarillas hold the key to liberty would scarcely, I think, appeal to him, had he been through any intimate experience of branch politics in a trade union. In regard to Liberalism, he does far more justice than most Communists to the value of its ideas. He has read Mill's Autobiography ; he knows something about the Philosophical= Radicals ; and to what he knows he is just—with him, as with most young men, it is where his knowledge gives out and parrot-phrases are brought in to fill the gaps that he tends to be unfair. Too often he is ludicrously unfair to what Liberalism and Democracy have done. Right at the beginning he tells us that " Democracy puts through reforms, but a hundred years of such reforms show that a reformist policy' only scratches the surface of the real forces that govern our( lives." Go back to 1837, and compare the state of the English working class at that date—whether as regards housing, or clothes, or food, or environment, or education; or recreations, or political influence, or economic influence, or access to careers, or self-esteem; or esteem by others, or personal freedom, or connubium, or many other things— with that of today ; and you will see, as a matter of objective history, that, so far from mere surface scratchings, the changes have been enormous and in effect revolutionary. Whether the methods of Communist dictatorship will ultimately do as much for the workers in Russia remains to be seen ; what is obvious is that so far the libertarian method, judged by results, has been much the more successful.

This is a very interesting book, and some sides of its interest --its concern with literature and art, for instance—can only be briefly alluded to. Mr. Spender's bete noire is romanticism, which seems to be for him an art and literature of •" escape." But I wonder whether the romantics were the only, or even the chief, " escapists." " Great art," he tells us, " is never merely an escape . . . it attempts always to resolve a conflict." What conflict does Michelangelo's figure of Night, in the Medici chapel, resolve ? We know the four lines that' Michelangelo himself wrote about it ; they breathe " escape through and through. But perhaps it is not great art ?

R. C. K. ENSOR.