Muffled Drums

REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION OF OUR TIME -- Harold J. Laski--Viking ($3.50).

We are in the midst of a period of revolutionary change that is likely to be as profound as any in the modern history of the human race. We shall not understand its inner nature unless we recognize it to be as significant in its essentials as that which saw the fall of the Roman Empire. . . .

Victory will not change the outlook. Professor Laski prophesies. The war's end will find the American industrial machine enormously expanded and in danger of remaining unused for lack of effective demand. And Socialist Laski jumps to the conclusion that, if this machine remains in private hands, the movement toward an American imperialism will be swift. World War II is a battle against counterrevolution, a battle in which the collapse of Hitler and Mussolini will mean no more than the end of an important stage in clearing the decks for a new society.

Says Laski, there is a single, inevitable choice: a peaceful revolution by consent, or a repetition at home of the bloody Russian revolution, with its aftermath of suffering and repression. Violence there will be, but it is equally likely to come from the ruling classes of Britain and the U.S. as from leftist revolutionaries.

Black and Red. Harold Laski, prominent in the British Labor Party, representative of a small, intellectually influential section of British socialism, an enthusiastic advocate of state planning, sets down this ghastly prospect at length, and in an audacious style well suited to the foreboding of his thoughts. This book (his 20th) is as rich in controversy as it is sweeping in its outlook. Its dark alternatives strike the essential optimism of the American mind with considerable force.

Twenty-three years ago the Harvard Lampoon turned against Laski one of the most violent attacks ever directed against a faculty member in America. However much that first experience formed his views of the U.S., Harold Laski has not since then seen American life in brighter colors than black and red. This brilliant son of a leader of British Jewry, a socialist from his schooldays, with his radical views hardened by Oxford's snobbishness ("It was the first experience I had of the intensity of class division in England"), began his career writing editorials for Labor's Daily Herald. In World War I he was rejected for military service. His stormy visits to the U.S., his bitter criticisms of Republican administrations, his standing as an authority on America in Britain and on Britain in America, the force with which he states definitively views that other state planners express obliquely, give him and his works a consequence that his opponents cannot ignore.

For Professor Laski is as much political tactician as prophet. He believes that with the war's end popular readiness for extreme measures and experiment will fade. But where conservatives see this as a return, at least in part, to the traditional freedoms of enterprise, with a release of creative impulses that state control shackles, Professor Laski labors under the desperate fear that the end of experiment will mean a reaction of exhaustion and apathy. He insists that capitalist economy be removed while the war is in progress; if it is not, he believes that nothing can prevent disillusionment, upheaval and violence. "Totalitarian war compels men to live on the heights [where] they can see vistas which become obscure once more when, as the challenge is overcome, they descend again into the valley. . . . Great leadership would take advantage of [the present] mood."

The Present Mood? In his view no government on earth has attained a respectable measure of democracy: they have all forfeited democracy--willingly (the U.S., Great Britain), forcibly (Germany, Italy), by necessity (Russia). At the beginning of the 20th Century the old equilibrium of middle-class society vanished; society needed "a diet of great reforms." The overwhelming necessity for their appearance and the dread of the frightening consequences that might follow their introduction created the atmosphere of apathy, fear, timidity, bewilderment, in which, during the prewar years, democracy's citizens lived.

A basic element in the creation of this poisonous atmosphere is an economic system that can expand no more.

In Great Britain there emerged "one system of education for the rich and another for the poor."

In the U.S. "the margins of opportunity" --the expanding economy of a huge continent--"ended in 1919." The U.S., says Laski, began to take on many aspects of British life.

The Russian Revolution, "the most colossal event in history since the Reformation," was the forerunner of revolutionary changes still due in the Western world. Despite its merciless dictatorship, its leaders' intense will to power and intense suspicion of any outlook which deviates from their own, if Russia "is able to show that the private ownership of the means of production is unnecessary," it will have opened a new and creative epoch in human experience.

Freedom v. the State. After the war, says Professor Laski, counterrevolutionary big business will be too strong to be controlled by trustbusting. The simple system of natural liberty urged by those who demand a return to traditional individualistic business ceased to be workable almost a century ago.

If ownership of the means of production is not transferred from private to state hands, says Laski, Anglo-American union will mean only a strengthening "of Anglo-American imperialism."

What Laski regards as minimum requirements, which will help without bringing about a permanent solution: a world federal reserve system; world organization of aviation; European unification of railroads, road transport, high-tension electricity; an international court; an international legislature "in which all states will be entitled to representation on equal terms''; an executive body with "considerable ordinance-making power"; a permanent civil service. These measures will not, in Mr. Laski's opinion, be enough. For lasting reform, he advocates: state control of foreign trade, the supply of capital and credit, the Bank of England, the commercial banks, insurance companies and the building societies; state control and ownership of transport, fuel and power--and land.

This, he truly says, is not yet full socialism. The proposals are a foundation only upon which a socialist state could be built.

Professor Laski's concrete proposals are stoical, open no new vistas of infinitely greater material progress accompanied by and springing from a greater range of human freedom within the traditional systems of economy and politics. His work reflects acutely the growing disappointment of British radicals, who had hoped that the emergency of the war years would force the Churchill Government to take extreme measures in the control and nationalization of private property.

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