When reform fails: Oligarchy, fragmentation, and the revolutionary impulse

“ Some of you represent banking interests, some of you are the advocates of insurance interests, many of you are the advocates of railway enterprise, or have your seats to watch the interests of docks or gas companies. ”

“ By superadding this power to the injurious influence of executive patronage, self interest is awakened as far as it can be awakened by any political means, and totally expels from legislatures the publick spirit infused by election, because representatives able to distribute wealth, never forget themselves. Oligarchy and aristocracy are the natural fruits of this legislative patronage, far richer than the president's, and corrupting whole corporations and all legislative personages. ”

“ The tattle of politics was no better than the tattle of the saloons. Disraeli’s experience in the northern towns had shown him what a problem lay before any Government of England which deserved the name. The Reform Bill was now twelve years old, and political liberty, so far, had not touched the outside of the disease. London, with its cliques and parties, its balls and festivities, seemed but an iridescent scum over an abyss of seething wretchedness. Here was work for rulers, if ruling was ever again to mean more than intrigue for office and manipulation of votes. ”

“ These fragmentations begin in the personality and extend through the entire social structure--from the individual, through the family, such voluntary associations as the sports club, the trade union, the merchants' association, the educational system, the political party, the municipal or the national government.
Unrestrained and undirected social fragmentation leads to conflict, destruction, perhaps to chaos. Success in politics rests on an understanding of the chaos and its causes and an integration of conflicting forces behind specific programs and around charismatic personalities. ”

“ But the point is the agreement among practical reformers that reform means at bottom no more than moral and political purification. It may, indeed, bring with it the necessity of a certain amount of reorganization; but such reorganization will aim merely at the improvement of the existing political and economic machinery. Present and future reformers must cleanse, oil, and patch a piece of economic and political machinery, which in all essentials is adequate to its purpose. ”

“ Reform is necessary to rebuild and establish in the hearts of the whole people the Union, eleven years ago happily rescued from the danger of a secession of states, but now to be saved from a corrupt centralism which, after inflicting upon ten states the rapacity of carpet-bag tyranny, has honeycombed the offices of the Federal government itself with incapacity, waste, and fraud ”

“ The people will have reform, and it must be no sham, no juggler's trick, pleasant in word and hollow in practice. The people will have no more wretched talk of checks and counter-balancings; they will have a real, wide, bona fide measure of reform. They ask a vote for honest, resident, industrious manhood, and if you dally longer, if you trifle much further with their appeal you will be greeted with the terrible news that in obstinately and wickedly preventing reform you have been madly provoking revolution. ”

“ Alas, the battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,—a business often of enormous difficulty. ”

“ Taxation is a boastful performance for a legislature and ministry who sit without consulting the mass of the people; it is a baneful subject for a people powerless in the State. To tax a man without his concurrence, without listening to his objections, without his having any voice in the nomination of the tax leviers, is clearly robbery, and if you will not be honest, the people must refuse to be robbed. If you will not reform the representation, then the unenfranchised taxpayers will revolt. If they must not have the right to vote, they will not regard it as a duty to pay. ”

“ So society, when out of order, which it is whenever the interests of the many are regularly and outrageously sacrificed to those of the few, must be repaired, and either a reform or a revolution cleanse its corruptions and renew its elasticity. People talk of the poor laws as a grievance. Either they or a national bankruptcy, or a revolution, are necessary. The labouring 422population have not doubled in the last forty years; there are still no more than are necessary to do the work in husbandry, &c., that is indispensably required ”

“ When we survey the wretched condition of man, and the monarchical and hereditary systems of government, dragged from his home by one power, or driven by another, and impoverished by taxes more than by enemies, it becomes evident that those systems are bad, and that a general revolution in the principle and construction of governments is necessary. ”

“ Our best men, with here and there an exception, have been driven out of public life, or made afraid to enter it. Even our spasmodic efforts at reform fail ludicrously for lack of leaders unaffiliated with37 “the thing to be reformed.” ”

“ You vote to continue the infamous practice of flogging in the army, and, much as I object to the use of the lash, I would vote to introduce it amongst our fashionable M.P.'s who have paid for the votes by which their return has been ensured. If there had been no other reason for the agitation for reform in the representation of the people, it would have been found in the fact that men who have been morally convicted of bribery sit on the benches of St. ”

“ Gerrymandering, a narrow and complicated franchise, bribery and corruption on a gigantic scale, the wholesale use of troops and gendarmes to prevent opposition voters from reaching the polls, the cooking of electoral rolls, illegal disqualifications, sham counts, official terrorism, and in many cases actual bloodshed—such are but a few of the methods which preserve a political monopoly in the hands of a corrupt and increasingly inefficient racial oligarchy, in a country where the absence of the ballot places the peasant peculiarly at the mercy of the authorities. ”

“ Subsequent events have shown the impossibility of maintaining harmony between the Houses by a single creation of peers, for had a batch of Lord Grey's supporters been given seats in the Lords in 1832, the House would have been heavily Conservative again within a generation.
The difficulty to-day is not so much that the peers are permanently out of accord with the nation, as that they are bound to one of the two parties into which the country is divided. A mere reduction in the size of the Tory majority would do little or no good ”

“ In oligarchies, on the contrary, it is wrong to support those who are in administration against the people. The oaths also which they take in an oligarchy ought to be contrary to what they now are; for, at present, in some places they swear, "I will be adverse to the common people, and contrive all I can against them;" ”

“ Agitation only unsettles: it does not settle; and it means the incompetence of a Government. You must ‘create public opinion instead of following it; lead the public instead of always lagging after and watching others.’
“... What, then, is the duty of an English minister? To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by force.... It is quite evident that, to effect this, we must have an Executive in Ireland which shall bear a much nearer relation to the leading classes and characters of the country than it does at present. ”

“ The central fact of all this present trouble is that distrust. There is only one way in which our present drift towards revolution or revolutionary disorder can be arrested, and that is by restoring the 54confidence of these alienated millions, who visibly now are changing from loyalty to the Crown, from a simple patriotism, from habitual industry, to the more and more effective expression of a deepening resentment. ”

“ And though in private conversation people frequently criticise governmental incapacity, and say that politics is rotten, and that politicians and office holders are corrupt, they seldom or never go as far as to question the principle of manhood suffrage, but seem to think that political corruption and incapacity are necessary incidents of all government, or at least of all democratic government. ”

“ But, if it be true, that our political institutions harmonize with, and are sustained by slavery, then the sooner we exchange them for others the better. I am aware, that it is said, both at the North and at the South, that it is essential to the preservation of the Union. But, greatly as I love the Union, and much as I would sacrifice for its righteous continuance, I cannot hesitate to say, that if slavery be an indispensable cement, the sooner it is dissolved the better. ”

“ Manchester, Birmingham, Bolton, Sheffield, Preston, and most of the manufacturing towns, returned Liberals. On the whole, the Government had a small majority of the five hundred English members. In Scotland, however, the Reform Act had wrought a complete revolution, and the mass of the electors so long excluded from political power used the privileges they had obtained with great zeal in favour of the party to which they were indebted for their enfranchisement. The whole of the burghs, twenty in number, returned Liberal members. ”

“ It was, to borrow a phrase used by Mr. Gladstone in another connexion, not a book, but an event. We must consider it in its proper setting of time and circumstance.
The beginning of 1869 was a great moment in our political and social history. Ever since the enthusiasm which surrounded the Reform Act of 1832 had faded away in disappointment and disillusion, the ardent friends of freedom and progress had been crying out for a further extension of the franchise. The next Reform Bill was to give the workmen a vote; and a Parliament elected by workmen was to bring the Millennium. ”

“ Everything which has been done, has increased the influence of the people. Blow after blow has been directed against those classes which were once the sole depositaries of power. The Reform Bill, the Emancipation of the Catholics, and the Repeal of the Corn-laws, are admitted to be the three greatest political achievements of the present generation. Each of these vast measures has depressed a powerful party. The extension of the suffrage has lessened the influence of hereditary rank, and has broken up that great oligarchy of landowners, by which the House of Commons had long been ruled. ”

“ Childs, "to a point where the average man will vote intelligently without giving to politics more attention than he does at present." "Voting a straight ticket is not a matter of party loyalty so much as of not knowing what else to do, and split tickets will become common as soon as the list is reduced to a point where each candidate becomes in the mind of the voter a definite personality instead of a mere name on a long list. To make public office conspicuous can only be accomplished by making it stand out in solitude before the gaze of the voter. ”

“ It is the necessary nature of a political party in this country to avoid, as long as it can be avoided, the consideration of any question which involves a great change. ”

“ Restoration is always revolution; but in this case it was not so much the old government as the old governor that was restored. The oligarchy made its appearance newly equipped in the armour of the -tyrannis- which had been overthrown. As the senate had beaten Gracchus from the field with his own weapons, so it continued in the most essential points to govern with the constitution of the Gracchi; though certainly with the ulterior idea, if not of setting it aside entirely, at any rate of thoroughly purging it in due time from the elements really hostile to the ruling aristocracy. ”

“ If once we step outside the circle of legality, however, we find extremely confused, conflicting, and even unfair states of moral opinion regarding corruption. Public anger at some exposed villainy of this sort is apt to be both blind and exacting. Reform movements directed against corrupt abuses are no more free than are regular political organisations from partisan misrepresentation and partisan passion. ”

“ What seemed to be an easy transferal to more competent shoulders of the national responsibility for the economic welfare of the country has proved to be a betrayal of the national interest.
Fiscal reform alone will, however, never enable Great Britain to compete more vigorously with either the United States or Germany. The diminished economic vitality of England must be partly traced to her tradition of political and social subserviency, which serves to rob both the ordinary and the exceptional Englishmen of energy and efficiency. ”

“ Reviewing what the reform party of this age aimed at and obtained, we find that it undoubtedly exerted itself with patriotism and energy to check, and to a certain extent succeeded in checking, the spread of decay—more especially the falling off of the farmer class and the relaxation of the old strict and frugal habits—as well as the preponderating political influence of the new nobility. But we fail to discover any higher political aim. The discontent of the multitude and the moral indignation of the better classes found doubtless in this opposition their appropriate and powerful expression ”

“ It was indeed necessary that all these things should come to pass to make the Revolution possible. It was necessary that the system of private and class tyranny called private capitalism should fill up the measure of its iniquities and reveal all it was capable of, as the irreconcilable enemy of democracy, the foe of life and liberty and human happiness, in order to insure that degree of momentum to the coming uprising against it which was necessary to guarantee its complete and final overthrow. ”

“ A new form of economic organisation will necessarily require a new form of political structure. And, whether the change be accomplished suddenly, by a revolution, or slowly, by the way of a gradual evolution, the two changes, political and economic, must go on abreast, hand in hand. ”

“ I have sufficiently emphasised and shall further emphasise the profound truth that every Civil Revolution is 257theological at bottom, because, at bottom, it must be based upon a divergence of philosophy: a divergence between the philosophies of the old order and the new. A chance test of philosophy thrown at random into the Revolutionary movement had separated men suddenly and was rifting the State asunder; for a fortnight Paris raged upon the Nationalisation of the Church. ”

“ This is why we consider that in political economy the first chapter to be studied is the chapter on consumption—not that on production; and when a revolution breaks out, the first duty to attend to, will be to remodel consumption, so that shelter, food, and clothing should be assured to one and all. ”

“ In_a_word, Signposts urged the intelligentsia to face the religious problem. A purely political revolution is futile, said the writers, for it can have, no more than political consequences; such consequences are not worthy objects of desire, for the aspirations towards them is based upon false philosophy and false sentiment. ”

“ We have labeled the official rhetoric of that system 'corporate liberalism.' —U.S. imperialistic ventures have served to radicalize the dissenters. —It is essential to translate 'anti-draft consciousness' into an understanding of the social and political manifestations of imperialism. —The function of a revolutionary in a pre-revolutionary period is to move people into action, to raise their revolutionary and class consciousness, to move them into new forms of action besed on a new consciousness. —For to lead means: to be able to move masses. ”

“ The revolutionary action coming from the people must coincide with a movement of revolutionary thought coming from the educated classes. There must be a union of the two." Note the vagueness of the concepts. Ideal current=revolutionary thought=bourgeoise=cultured classes; and again, activity=the masses=peasants and proletarians=the people=the economic situation. The concurrence of activity and thought seems to be ascribed by Kropotkin to a mere happy chance. The whole conception is inaccurate and obscure. The cultured classes participate in revolutionary action as well as the people. ”

“ Now here indeed is a special "struggle against the political police" required, a struggle that can never be conducted by such large masses. as usually take part in strikes. Such a struggle must be organised, according to "all the rules of the art," by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. The fact that the masses are spontaneously entering the movement does not make the organisation of this struggle less necessary. ”

“ It's not a question of a spectacle but of the revolutionary practice of the proletariat. There can be no revolutionary practice without theory nor can there be revolutionary theory without practice. The revolutionary theory that corresponds to present conditions is expressed by the slogan: We must move from the February Revolution to the October Revolution. The practice that corresponds to present conditions is expressed by the slogan: We must form Workers' Councils in every mine, every factory, every construction site and every military regiment. ”

“ Revolutionary theory is not spontaneously generated by political practice. Considerable human effort is required, particularly the efforts of those immediately involved in political work. Waiting for theory somehow to emerge from the grass roots (or descend from the heavens) amounts to little more than an antitheoretical copout. ”

“ Without it, the despair of many in the movement will increasingly be felt in the separation of politics from struggle. Militancy without politics will move us away from the conscious direction of our movement. —To have a unified centralized organization it is necessary to have a common revolutionary theory which explains, at least generally, the nature of our revolutionary tasks and how to accomplish them. ”

“ As a matter of fact, it is possible to "raise the activity of the masses of the workers" only provided this activity is not restricted entirely to "political agitation on an economic basis." And one of the fundamental conditions for the necessary expansion of political agitation is the organisation of all-sided political exposure. In no other way can the masses he trained in political consciousness and revolutionary activity except by means of such exposures. ”

“ We should recognize that repression itself will bring us new allies offended by the erosion of accustomed freedom, and that the urgent task of our movement is to work directly with those who have rebelled. —If any such movement is to succeed, it must develop a long-range perspective that will aid in building a constituency. ”

“ But without a revolution, socialism cannot be enforced. It requires this political act, so far as it has need of the process of destruction and dissolution. But where its organizing activity begins, where its proper aim, its soul, emerges, there socialism casts away the political hull. ”

“ The main thing is whether we are still to have the old machinery of government saturated through and through with routine and inertia, and connected by thousands of threads with the capitalist class; or shall it be broken up andreplaced by something altogether new? The essence of revolution is not that a new class shall govern by means of the old governmental machinery, but that it shall smash up this machinery and govern by means of a new machine. ”

“ I hold it, that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world, as storms in the physical. ”

“ A revolution{117} is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become habitual the country in which they take place is going down-hill. ”

“ All revolutionary attempts only furnish new justification for the violence of Governments, and increase their power.
But even if we admit the impossible—that a revolution in our time could be crowned with success—then, in the first place, why should we expect that, contrary to all which has ever taken place, the power which has overturned another power can increase the liberty of men and become more beneficent than the one it has overthrown? ”

“ Whilst political revolutionary sentiment increased and spread throughout the country, there spread in addition an unpolitical anarchy, manifesting itself in murders and in the theft of public and private moneys. Thereby political agitation was rendered extremely difficult, above all for the revolutionary parties. ”

“ Political liberty is to be met with only in moderate governments: yet even in these it is not always met with. It is there only when there is no abuse of power: but constant experience shews us, that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it; he pushes on till he comes to the utmost limit. Is it not strange, though true, to say, that virtue itself has need of limits?
To prevent the abuse of power, it is necessary that by the very disposition of things power should be a check to power. ”

“ They understood that for liberty, justice, and equal laws, it is as necessary that Democracy should restrain itself as it had been that it should restrain the Oligarchy. They resolved to take their stand once more upon the ancient ways, and to restore the order of things which had subsisted when the monopoly of power had been taken from the rich and had not been acquired by the poor. ”

“ It is by the aid of scoundrels you arrive at tyranny. Whither tend those who combat them? To the tomb and immortality! Who is the tyrant that protects me? What is the faction to which I belong? It is yourselves! What is the party which, since the commencement of the Revolution, has crushed all other factions—has annihilated so many specious traitors? It is yourselves; it is the people; it is the force of principles! This is the party to which I am devoted, and against which crime is everywhere leagued. I am ready to lay down my life without regret. ”

“ Before the nation is roused to its danger, the oligarchical object is often obtained; and then the oligarchy, entrenched in power, count upon the nation to defend them from their original and revolutionary allies. If they succeed, a dynasty is changed, or a Parliament reformed, and the movement is stopped; if the Tories or the Conservatives cannot arrest the fatal career which the Whigs have originally impelled, then away go the national institutions ”