GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF COMMUNISM 687
such right of criticism is a luxury of which he has neither
the wish nor the energy to avail himself. What he craves
is a full stomach, not a free tongue. Lacking the former,
he has neither the wit nor the inclination to make use of
the latter. It is no doubt true that the worker possesses the
right to vote every five years for the less unsuitable of the
two grossly unsuitable persons who appear in his con-
stituency at election time out of the blue, or descend upon
it from the clouds of the party head-office. But of what
value so the criticism runs arc this freedom and this
right toa man whose only alternative to starvation is to
sell himself body and soul to an employer for thirty shillings
a week? As Bernard Shaw puts it, in the Preface to his
play, The Apple Cart, "the voters have no real choice of
candidates: they have to take what they can get and make
the best of it according to their lights, which is often the
worst of it by the light of heaven".
LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY AS THE OPIUM OF
THE PEOPLE. So far, the argument has been content
to dismiss political democracy and the liberty of thought
and speech, which is the most valued achievement of
democracy, as figments without substance. In the works
of some writers, however, it takes a wider sweep and
denounces them as definite impediments to the achievement
of the economic equality which is the goal of Communism.
Thus communist writers have been apt to
represent political liberty as a drug which disguises from
the exploited proletariat its true condition. Their argument
runs as follows:
Political liberty means in practice the right of voting
every five years, sometimes oftener, for a representative
whom one has not selected. The votes so cast either have
some influence or they have none at all. In the former
event, the influence is just enough to enable the workers
to extort from ,the governing classes concessions sufficient
to stave off revolution. The English governing classes, it
is said, show a preternatural cunning in making these