New Model Labor

WHAT ARE WE TO Do?--John Strachey --Random House ($3).

To the accusation that Marxist theoreticians are as dour as they are unintelligible, the favorite Red comeback is the case of John Strachey. Cousin of the late Lytton Strachey, heir to an English baronetcy, former M.P. who in 1931 quit the Mac-Donald coalition government to join the Reds, John Strachey is a softly athletic six-footer who lectures in tails. Smoothtongued, witty, he has made himself a favorite with middle-class lecture audiences, while his Coming Struggle for Power (1933), the first and only "Party line" bestseller, made him a reputation as the nearest thing to a popularizer of the nearly unpopularizable Karl Marx.

What Are We to Do?, a study of the "rise and fall" of the British labor movement, is an urbane, inquisitional chronicle of missed opportunities, compromises, retreats, timidities, defeats. These all are traced to one original sin: The adoption by British labor of the "British" evolutionary, "substitute" socialism taught by the Fabians under Sydney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, instead of the "scientific socialism" of Karl Marx. The Fabians were not consciously malicious or cowardly, says Strachey, they were merely ignorant, got their socialist wires crossed because they did not know what a capitalist State was all about. They said the State was "a great league of consumers," hence worked with the Government when they thought its politicians "good," sulked when they considered them "bad." Marxists said the State was a purely class instrument--"good" politicians were only capitalist politicians wearing democratic rouge. The State, says Strachey, is like a revolver--bad in the hands of a robber, good in the hands of those repelling the robber.

It is this thought which must, says Strachey, animate "The New Model" Labor Party of England and the U. S. At present, he confesses, The New Model is mostly in rough pencil sketch. But he is immensely confident in his expectation of shortly going into mass production. For the U. S., all that is now needed is to create a Labor Party, enroll a couple of hundred thousand more Communists to start the Labor Party off on the Left foot.

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