New Issue (No.100) The Spokesman founded by Bertrand Russell
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Democracy: Growing or Dying?
Editorial
by Ken Coates This is the hundredth number of The
Spokesman, so we are expected to have a birthday party. Nostalgia is
in order at such events, and we have accordingly devoted quite a large
part of this number to reproducing articles and features which involved
us, with many of our readers, in a variety of campaigns to change things
for the better. Sometimes these have succeeded, if only, say the
sceptics, in provoking our old antagonists to find new ways to make them
worse again. Sometimes they have failed, only to
stiffen our resolve to try again, when times may be more propitious for
their success. There are, of course, a number of key
concerns which have continuously preoccupied us. There has been no
possibility of forgetting, even temporarily, the desperate urgency of
the struggle for peace and disarmament. It has been quite possible, but
very regrettable, to forget the struggle for the widening and deepening
of democracy, and this possibility has been amply brought into evidence
by the progress of sundry statesmen, not to say less elevated tribunes
of the people, some of whom have opted for popular emancipation, one at
a time, me first. This kind of apostasy does discourage
people, if only temporarily. If hope springs eternal, so too does the
aspiration for effective power over the terms and conditions of our own
lives. Politicians commonly tell us that the
major social struggles are about power. ‘We need’ they say, ‘power
to prevent the next war, or to save the environment from destruction, or
to protect people from exploitation and domination.’ That is one way
of putting it, but there are dangers wrapped up in it. Power does not
come sanitised, prepacked only for good causes. Time and again there is
contrary evidence. What we really need is the annulment of power, so
that none can make wars, burn the atmosphere, or lower the people into
misery. Yet if we are to avoid the charge of piety, toothless anarchism,
empty promises, then we have to concede that the first step to a higher
freedom requires that we learn the necessary arts to stop the various
evildoers who breed for us all these wars, depredations and oppressions.
But if such steps are truly to lead upwards, then the higher freedom
itself must always remain in mind. Fittingly, we have chosen a number of
contributions by our founder upon which to thread the thoughts of our
contributors on these matters. Bertrand Russell reviewed one of our
books, Max Beer’s History of British Socialism, when it first
appeared shortly after the First World War. He highlighted Beer’s
acute perception that the English establishment could vainly attempt to
school their people in the rites of caution and conservatism, but ‘in
periods of general upheavals … the English are apt to throw their
mental ballast overboard and take the lead in revolutionary thought and
action. In such a period we are living now’. After a long and
depressing lull in their energies, it could be that we may be about to
see their strong renewal very soon. Russell’s appreciation of the roots of English socialism is exemplified in the article we have reproduced by John Hughes and Charles Atkinson. This was initially commissioned for a book to celebrate Russell’s centenary, and was published by Spokesman in 1972. Three other contributions which we
have selected from among many celebrate the movement for industrial
democracy. In one of them, Karl William Kapp draws attention to the
sharp growth in pollution which has resulted from rapid industrial
development. Kapp’s profound scholarship recalls the natural, as well
as social spoliation chronicled by Marx and Engels which accompanied
extensive air and water pollution, and gave rise to an early, and
profound concern by trade unions to encourage environmental protection.
When we published Kapp’s article in The Spokesman, we were able
to use it as a key text for a conference on Socialism and the
Environment, in which we brought together a number of specialists
including F. E. Le Gros Clark and Lord Boyd Orr, and activists such as
Colin Stoneman, Malcolm Caldwell and John Lambert, who agreed to
continue their work by establishing the Socialist Environmental and
Resources Association, which carries on to this day. Quite different but every bit as
audacious is the contribution from Mike Cooley, which starts from the
same premises, but, based on the author’s profound experience of trade
unionism in a high-tech industry, goes on to explore the prospects for
long-term development of new techniques to benefit the natural and
social environment. This great labour was stimulated by the fear of
retrenchment in the Aerospace industry, when Tony Benn invited the shop
stewards at Lucas
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