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

688* ETHICS AND POLITICS: T* MODERNS
concessions. Just as they take the revolutionary edge off
material privation by the contrivance of the dole and the
distribution of coal and blankets, and the revolutionary
edge off spiritual discontent by endowing churches to
diffuse the Christian doctrines of meekness, unselfishness,
and satisfaction with that station of life into which it shall
please the State to call God's servants, so they take the
revolutionary edge off political discontent by series Of
legislative concessions such as the Trade Boards Acts,
the Old Age Pensions Act, the Unemployment and Health
Insurance Acts, which may be regarded in the light of
sops thrown to the working classes to dull rather than to
satisfy the appetite for revolutionary change, much as
Mrs. Squeers doped the hungry morning appetites of the
boys ofDotheboys Hall with brimstone and treacle. Political
liberty is thus represented as a prop to bolster up Capitalism
by making it tolerable. Alternatively, it is a safety-valve
through which discontent can work off the steam which
would otherwise lead to an explosion. By its means the
governing classes are enabled to represent the concessions,
which rivet more firmly the chains of Capitalism upon the
necks of the workers, as .political advances won under a
free and democratic constitution by the votes of the
people.
THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATION. DEMOCRACY
IK CRISIS. The influence which the workers have been
able to exert in the past in virtue of their possession of
political liberty, always small, is, it is said, to-day diminish-
ing. The reason is that economic concessions by the
capitalist class are possible only in a time of capitalist
expansion, when the abundant profits of Capitalism leave
something over and to spare. The social reforms which
characterized the pre-war yean of die twentieth century
were crumbs dropped from the rich man's table upon
which for a time, the poor contentedly fed. To-day, how-
ever, the era of capitalist expansion has ceased, and there
are accordingly no crumbs to drop. In those countries in