In order to examine the relationship between democracy and property, no better example could be taken than Great Britain. For in Britain we possess a much-vaunted democratic system, and at the same time practically the whole of the property of the country is in the hands of a few people who live by employing labour, whilst the vast majority of the population have to work for someone else in order to make a livelihood. According to census figures, about 90 percent of the people of Britain work for somebody else. The question of whether they shall be allowed to work or not is decided by an employer. The question of the conditions under which they work is decided by an employer. The rate of wages which they are paid is finally decided by an employer. And the employers in Britain to-day only amount to some 850,000 people. They and their families make up about 4 percent of the population. So that, in their everyday working life, in everything which determines the security of their livelihood and their standard of life, about 90 percent of the population of Britain are dependent on the will of about 4 percent. Since the majority must work to live, they must accept work when it is going. And, as the owners of property have reserves at their disposal, they can always postpone taking on workers in order to obtain terms which satisfy them. In so far as the workers organize in trade unions they can to some extent build up reserves and bargain for better conditions, but always, fundamentally, the owner of property has the advantage over the man who lives by his labour; for he has reserves of property on which to live, while the worker has very little on which to live unless he is drawing an income from selling his labour.
In the economic sphere in Britain to-day, 4 percent of the population are masters or dictators, 90 percent are servants. And the fact that the relationship of master to servant is also the relationship of property to poverty is illustrated by the figures of the distribution of the national income. The 90 percent of the population that is dependent on its wages receives about 64 percent of the national income. The 4 percent of property-owners, plus about 6 percent of independent workers, absorb annually about 36 percent of the total national income. And, of these property-owners, a very few receive a tremendous income. It is estimated by Professor Bowley that just over 1 percent of the population, the richest property-owners, received, in 1910, 30 percent of the national income. On the other hand, 94½ percent of the population received only 50 percent of the national income.
The conclusion which we arrive at, after reading these figures, is that the class of the population that owns the factories and the coal-mines, the shops, and so on, is a small minority—but a wealthy minority. The majority of the population, on the other hand, work for this minority for a small income. The minority dictate to the majority when, where, and under what conditions they shall make a living. How does this affect the whole system of government of the country?
The supreme authority in Britain—which, by the way, unlike the U.S.S.R. has no written Constitution—is Parliament. The British Parliament consists of two Houses. The so-called “Upper House,” the House of Lords, is not an elected body. It consists of the Peers of the Realm, who are appointed by the Crown, or happen to be the descendants of people who were at one time so appointed. It also includes the bishops. It represents, in fact, the wealthy section of the population, since working men do not become peers, while big landlords and employers do. The House of Lords is drawn from the small section of the community that owns property and employs labour, and not from the vast majority who own nothing and work for somebody else.
The fact that the House of Lords is not a democratic institution is generally admitted. It is even a thing which certain property-owners boast about. Professor Laski shows how, for example, “as early as 1906 Lord Balfour had told his supporters that it was their bounden duty to see that ‘the great Unionist Party should still control, whether in power or in opposition, the destinies of this great Empire.’ What he meant he revealed to the House of Commons three months later, when, on the third reading of the Liberal Government’s abortive Educational Bill of 1906, he declared that ‘the real discussion must be elsewhere’. It was an explicit claim for the right of property to rule the country whatever the will of the people, and no one who reads the utterances of eminent peers about that Budget can doubt that in their minds they felt entitled to safeguard themselves against any measure they might choose to regard as confiscatory. Mr. Asquith was right when he warned the electorate that implicit in the claim of the Lords was the threat of revolution. . . .
“There has been no essential change in the last twenty-five years. For the claim is still made that it in the function of the House of Lords to safeguard the country against a Labour Government which should seek to translate Socialist principles into terms of legislation; and all proposals made by the Conservative Party for the reform of the House of Lords have no end in view but to hinder such a Government, from legislating in the way that is open to its rivals” (Laski, The State in Theory and Practice, pp. 275-6). The House of Lords exists to defend property against the majority of the population. The House of Lords, representing a small minority of the people, is a non-democratic; and its policy, because of the interests which it represents, is anti-democratic.
But let us now consider the “Lower House,” or House of Commons. This is the elected part of Parliament, and is often claimed to be an effective means of expressing the will of the people. Now, if the House of Commons is to express the will of the people effectively, there must exist in the country an equal right for all citizens to vote, to stand for election, to support their candidates effectively, and an equal right for all citizens, on the basis of merit only, to participate in the work of administration, of carrying out the decisions arrived at by the elected Parliament. Actually, as will be shown, not one of these conditions for a really democratic parliamentary system exists in Britain at the present time.
The right to be an elector in Britain to-day is enjoyed by every man and woman over the age of twenty-one, as contrasted with eighteen in the U.S.S.R., on condition that they can claim residence in a constituency for a period of not less than six months. If a citizen can claim occupation of premises in two constituencies, he can enjoy a vote in each. A property-owner, therefore, has the right to two votes if he has property in two constituencies. Further, graduates of the Universities, who are in the main drawn from the employing class and highly paid salaried workers, have two votes at elections.
There are a number of constituencies where the majority of the inhabitants are wage-earners, and yet a majority of the votes can be obtained by the property-owners because they have factories and offices in those areas in sufficient numbers to out-vote the wage-earners living there. In local government, registration as a voter goes with the ownership or renting of residential or office property, and there is no limit to the number of votes which one person may exercise in a series of constituencies. To be considered an occupier, for local government elections, persons must furnish the premises which they occupy. As a result, those who live on premises furnished by someone else have no vote. These people, in general, are wage-earners.
It is true, as far as numbers are concerned, that the total extra votes going to the propertied classes in this way is not large, and cannot outweigh the working-class influence in the country as a while. On the other hand, it is of significance as a matter of principle, for it brings out vividly the fact that the existing system of election is based, not on citizenship as in the U.S.S.R., but on the ownership of property.
In theory, every person who has the right to vote also has the right to stand for election, if nominated by eight electors. The right of anybody to stand for election, however, is deceptive, for two reasons. First, in the case of parliamentary elections every candidate must deposit £150, which is forfeited if he does not obtain a certain number of votes. Secondly, to stand for election necessitates an election campaign—that is, the effective supporting of candidates by propaganda. The Labour Party, which is not likely to make extravagant estimates on this score, considers that, in addition to the £150 deposit, which may be returned to the candidate, an additional expenditure of at least £500 is necessary to contest a parliamentary seat. A total of £650 must be laid out. It is clear that a small number of rich citizens are in a position to put up candidates in all the parliamentary seats in the country without any great material sacrifice. The vast majority of the population, however, consists of wage-earners, who must pool their meagre resources at considerable sacrifice in order to run candidates.
There are about 600 seats in the House of Commons. There are about 100,000 super-tax payers in the country, with an income of over £2,000 a year. Each one of these people could finance a candidate out of his annual income, and still have £1,200 to live on. Each of these individuals could afford, at his own expense, to contest a constituency. On the other hand, of the 19 million wage-earners, the average wage is not more than £2 5s. a week, or, £117 a year. It would, therefore, take a working man—one of the 19 million wage-earners—the total earnings of four years to finance himself, or someone else, as a parliamentary candidate. So the right to stand for election, and to carry out the necessary publicity campaign for a candidate, is enjoyed by the small class of property-owners to an enormous degree compared with the majority of the population, the wage-earners.
But it must not for one moment be thought that the work of moulding public opinion, and of preparing a state of mind that is likely to support a particular type of parliamentary or municipal candidate, is created simply by means of an election campaign. The creation of this public opinion goes on, day by day, in every public expression of opinion that reaches the eyes and ears of the people.
In Britain we still enjoy freedom of speech. But freedom of speech, to mean anything, must be effective freedom—of speech that reaches the people. The degree of freedom of effective speech in Britain to-day depends entirely on the possession of wealth. The most powerful means of influencing public opinion is the Press. In Britain, “anyone” can start a newspaper, so long as it is not “obscene,” “blasphemous,” “seditious,” or “libellous.” But the cost of printing and publishing a newspaper is vastly greater than the cost of running an election campaign. It is so great that only the very richest individuals and groups of individuals as a rule can afford to own newspapers. It is so great that no ordinary daily paper could support itself without its revenue from advertisements, which are supplied by firms which have sufficient capital to be able to advertise. Our freedom of the Press is, therefore, mainly freedom of property-owners who are rich enough to finance the newspapers, and in this way to influence the thought of the whole population of the country. Taken as a whole, the Press represents the property-owners.
We must not, however, leave the matter at this point without drawing the necessary distinction between British conditions to-day and those of a Fascist State. In a Fascist State the workers are not permitted to run newspapers even if they can afford it. In Britain they are permitted to do so, and do so to a small degree. But shortage of capital, the fact that capitalist firms are unwilling to support workers’ papers with advertisements—the main source of revenue to the ordinary Press—and a boycott of the sale and distribution of working-class literature, make the difficulties of the workers’ Press extremely great as compared with the Press of the well-to-do. Only in 1926, when the workers throughout the country practically ceased to print the capitalist newspapers, and at the same time the Trades Councils and other workers’ organizations published their own bulletins, were there a few days when the Press of Britain was almost entirely a Press controlled by the organizations of the working class, the majority of the population. But even then the radio remained in Government hands, and was fully utilized on the side of the employers.
As with the Press, so with the ownership of the great meeting-halls of the country, and with the control of the radio. The trustees of the Albert Hall do not let it to everyone who can pay the rent. Even if a workers’ organization is able to pay, it may not be allowed the use of the hall if the owners do not approve of the purpose of the meeting. Sir Oswald Mosley could on one occasion obtain the use of the hall, while it was refused to a working-class organization shortly afterwards.
And now, having seen how the means of influencing public opinion, the means of effective propaganda, are in the hands of the minority of property-owners, let us come to the further problem— that of an elected Government which really represents the will of the wage-earners, if all the other obstacles have been overcome and such a majority has been returned to Parliament.
It should be clear that, whatever the majority in Parliament may be, any decisions of Parliament under the present system must be carried out by the Civil Service. Unless, therefore, this Civil Service is organically connected with the wage-earning majority of the population, it may show reluctance, and actually be guilty of sabotage, in carrying out the decisions of such a parliamentary majority.
But, before considering the Civil Service, one other point should be touched upon. This is the question of Education. For we have seen that a real equality between citizens, to vote and to be elected, to hold responsibility in every walk of life, and to rule themselves, depends on their having equal opportunities to develop their abilities to the full. In Britain to-day, however, they have not got this equality. For, according to R. H. Tawney, “the proportion of children leaving the elementary schools, who enter what have hitherto been known as secondary schools, is, in England and Wales as a whole, less than one-seventh, and in some areas less than one-tenth, while some three-quarters of them have hitherto entered full-time wage-earning employment at the age of fourteen” (Equality, p. 90). About 90 percent of the workers have no schooling over the age of fourteen. On the other hand, the children of the well-to-do do not go to the ordinary State elementary or secondary schools at all, but pass through an entirely different and very expensive system of private education, known, ironically enough, as the “public schools.” And we find that it is this small minority that passes through the “public schools” that commands practically all the leading positions in the social and economic life of the country and in the Civil Service.
“The evidence presented by Mr. Nightingale, who has made a statistical analysis of the social antecedents of the personnel of the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service between 1851 and 1929, suggests that this statement is true of a more recent period. Sixty percent of it, he shows, has been drawn from the eleven most exclusive public schools, while of the remaining 40 percent, well over one half attended the lesser public schools, received a military or naval education, or were educated privately or abroad.
“The unchallengeable conclusion that emerges . . . is that the British Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service have been a preserve for the sons of the aristocratic, rentier, and professional classes’” (op. cit., pp. 93-4). And, though possibly not quite so marked, this selection for the Civil Service from the small minority of the population that owns property, those who can afford an expensive “public school” education, is universal throughout. Remember that Lord Trenchard’s famous “reform” of the police force included the recruiting of more ex-public-school boys for its leading ranks. Similar efforts have been made to build up a public-school air force in recent years; and the “defence of the country” (and possibly of the rights of property against the people of the country) is also in the hands, not of representatives of the people, but of the products of Wellington and Sandhurst, the sons of those who can afford a “public school” education.
The whole Civil Service is so recruited that we have government, not by the people, but by the property-owners and their relatives. In addition, all those professions which are of particular importance to the security of property, we find, are recruited from the same small section of the population. “In the year 1926, 71 out of 80 bishops and deans for whom information is available, 139 out of 181 members of the judicial profession, 152 out of 210 highly placed members of public departments, 63 out of 88 members of the Indian Civil Service and Governors of Dominions, and 99 out of 132 directors of banks and railways, had been educated at public schools” (op. cit., pp. 94-5). The Civil Service, which has to carry out the decisions of Parliament; the bishops, who, like the Press, influence the opinion of the public; the judges; the railway directors and bank directors, together with the members of the legal profession,—are almost entirely drawn from one small class of the population. Not only, then, do the owners of the factories and mines run their own factories and mines, but they and their class may well be said to run the whole country as well.
With the property-owners running the Civil Service and the professions, having all the means at their disposal for broadcasting their ideas to the whole population, and the wealth necessary to hire or own the meeting-halls and newspapers, it is not surprising to find that the work of Government itself remains in the hands of these people. R. H. Tawney writes: “The association of political leadership with birth and wealth is a commonplace of English history; but it is not always realized how little that association was weakened after the advent of what is usually regarded as the age of democracy. Professor Laski, in his instructive analysis of British Cabinets between 1801 and 1924, has shown that, for nearly two generations after the Act of 1867 had enfranchised the urban working classes, the greater part of the business of government continued, nevertheless, to be conducted by a small group of owners of great properties, who were enabled by their economic advantages and social connections to step into the exercise of political power with a facility impossible to ordinary men. Of 69 Ministers who held office between 1885 and 1905, 40 were sons of nobility, 52 were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and 46 were educated at public schools; while, even between 1906 and 1916, 25 out of 51 Ministers were sons of nobility” (op. cit., p. 92).
A further limitation of British democracy must now be mentioned. It has already been shown how a small class of property-owners dominates elections, dominates Governments, and dominates the Civil Service. Figures have also been cited to show how the directors of the banks, the railways, and, of course, the armament firms, are also all drawn from the same small class of the community. Therefore, any Government that is ever elected under existing conditions is likely, as a result of all the political influence of property, to represent only to a comparatively small degree the real interests of the majority of the population of the country, the working people. If, in any situation, such a Government is returned to Parliament, pledged to a policy in the interests of the working people, of socialism, and real democracy, then numerically this representation will not do justice to the real interests which it represents, since all the propaganda and social influences are working for the under-representation of such interests.
Once in power, such a Government would have to face up to the fact that the leading ranks of the Civil Service were against it. And sabotage by the Civil Service, even to the point of armed rebellion by the military leaders, as in Spain, is no small menace. But, in addition, such a Government would have to face the active opposition of the property-owning-class, as personified in the bank directors, railway directors, and factory-owners throughout the country. And the power of these people over any Government is tremendous, because they can threaten completely to hold up the economic life of the country if their demands are not satisfied. The bankers in the world to-day, though competing amongst themselves, can combine their forces to bring pressure to bear upon the most important Governments. They can move funds from one country to another, and cause financial crises. They can force elected Governments to resign.
In our discussion of the new Constitution of the U.S.S.R. we saw that the Supreme Council, directly elected by the people, is being given increased powers, whereas the powers of its Presidium are very strictly limited. It should be noted here that in Britain precisely the opposite tendency is operating—a tendency for Parliament, dominated by the parties representing the property-interests, to delegate its authority to small groups who become directors in their own sphere. In this respect “Orders in Council” play an important part.
In his General Strike, R. Page Arnot writes:
“Let us turn to the form of government known as King in Council. Its origin and history are still a subject of investigation, but at one time the King in his Privy Council appeared to be about to supplant the Parliament. . . . During the Napoleonic Wars, the Privy Council was once more used as a formidable engine of government, and, by the famous Orders in Council, Pitt and his successors were able to meet Napoleon with swift and arbitrary decrees. After the Napoleonic Wars, the position of the form of government known as the King in Council had been clearly defined, and it was possible to regard it as a reserve instrument to meet great occasions.
“Of these, the greatest occasion was the outbreak of war in 1914. The declaration of war was followed by the passing of the Defence of the Realm Act, by the first clause of which power was given to His Majesty in Council to take the necessary measures to secure the safety of the realm. These powers, primarily exercised through the Privy Council in the shape of Orders in Council, were transferable to each Government Department; which thus acquired the power to legislate by the simple method of publishing its regulation in the London Gazette” (p, 12).
After the war the Defence of the Realm Act was replaced by an Emergency Powers Act by which, in a “state of emergency,” Orders in Council would automatically become law. In this way any parliamentary majority can in fact institute an open dictatorship if it wishes to do so—that is, if it ever finds it expedient to declare a “state of emergency.” Such a state is likely to be declared primarily in connection with labour difficulties.
It is not often realized by the ordinary person that in Britain laws can be made also by the judges. There are two kinds of law in Britain: Statute Law—consisting of Acts of Parliament; and Case Law, consisting of all the decisions of the judges on the interpretation of these laws in actual cases that have arisen. If, in a particular case, a judge interprets the law in a particular way, this case then becomes a precedent, and the interpretation itself becomes law. Since the judges are, as has been seen, drawn from the ranks of the small minority of property-owners, such “interpretations” of the law naturally tend to operate in the interests of property in any circumstance that arises.
In concluding this examination of the power of the property-owners in the British State—and Britain is not untypical of those democratic States where the private ownership of the means of production and of propaganda remains unchecked— it is worth pointing out that for the British Empire as a whole the degree of democracy existing in Britain is far from typical. In describing the Soviet State, we saw how every nation enjoys the right to self-determination, and how there is complete equality of every nation within the Union. In the British Empire, on the contrary, the democratic rights of the inhabitants of Great Britain are not shared by the far greater population of India. Not only within the British Empire have we not got the rule of the nation which has a majority of the population, which is India; but we have the actual subjection of that nation so that its people enjoy no greater democracy than did the people of Tsarist Russia. When, therefore, we draw comparisons between the power of property in Britain and the new democracy of the U.S.S.R., let us not forget that property behalves comparatively democratically in Britain itself and the situation of the Indian and other peoples under British rule is far more akin to the lot of the peoples of the Tsarist Empire.
Enough has now been said to establish the relationship between private property and democracy. When we recall the situation existing in the U.S.S.R. at the present time, and compare it with Britain, we see that every democratic feature of the Soviet system that would be new to Britain is a derivative of one fact—the abolition of the power of property.
When, in early 1918, the Russian printing presses were transferred from the hands of their private owners to the organizations of the working people, this act symbolized all that the Soviet system stands for in opposition to the democracy of capitalism. But even under capitalism the limit to the enjoyment of democratic rights by the people is not rigidly fixed. In 1926 for a few days during the General Strike the British printing workers refused to issue the main newspapers of the country, while the Trades Councils and other workers’ organizations poured out news bulletins on a scale never exceeded before or since. In those few days Britain had a Press which predominantly represented the working people, and which, for a short and exceptional period, did not represent the views of a handful of rich Press lords.
In the year 1920, when the British Government was preparing to declare open war on the Soviet Government of Russia, the workers set up Councils of Action throughout the country with the slogan “Hands off Russia!” The democratic demands of the working people were put forward so forcibly that the Government, though utterly unsympathetic, was forced to take notice, and armed intervention against the Soviets was brought to an end. In the same year, in a speech in Russia, Lenin said: “The whole of the English bourgeois Press wrote that the Councils of Action were Soviets. And it was right. They were not called Soviets, but in actual fact they were.”
In Britain, as in Russia, the workers have always the possibility, by uniting their forces and fighting for better conditions, to restrict the disproportionate might of the property-owners, and thus to introduce more and more effective democracy. If we look back at the Russian Revolution we find that the Soviets actually seized power only when they were faced with two clear alternatives: either a military dictatorship, instituted by the owners of the land, the factories, and the mines; or the seizure of power by the most powerful organizations of the people, the Soviets, and the suppressing of the power of the property-owners in the interests of real democracy.
While, in Britain to-day, it is perfectly true that any elected Government of the people may be blackmailed by the bankers and sabotaged by the Civil Service if these representatives of the property-owners do not approve of its policy, it is equally true that any Government which represents the interests of the property-owners may be prevented from carrying out an anti-working-class policy by the direct action of the working-people themselves. The fact that the bankers and Civil Servants operate to-day behind the scenes to ensure that official policy shall be in the interests of property is all the more reason why the working people must act in an organized way to force the Government and the bankers and the Civil Servants to act more favourably to the people. And, so soon as the working people of the country are organized in such a way as to force their will on a property-owners’ Government, or on property-owners that oppose a people’s Government, they are beginning to make democracy more real and more effective.
In the Communist Manifesto Marx says: “The first step in the workers’ revolution is to make the proletariat the ruling class, to establish democracy.” This was the task which the Soviet Revolution in Russia set out to fulfil, and it has not been unsuccessful. But the democracy of to-day has only been won as a result of a united struggle by the whole people. The new democracy only survived because it had the united support of the workers and peasants of the various nationalities within the country, coupled with the support of the working people of other countries. The fact that it has survived for twenty years means that others can learn from its example. To-day the actual experience of the 170 million people that inhabit one-sixth of the earth has shown how real democracy can be, once the power of private property is finally broken. The inhabitants of the U.S.S.R. are proving in practice that the workers can rule themselves, and raise their living standards, without the help of the employers, whereas, on the other hand, the property-owners can never live without the forces of the working people, the forces making for real democracy and liberty. In this lies the guarantee of the ultimate victory of democracy over property.