Excerpt from Bolshevism: Its Cause and Cure
I am in complete agreement with this account of the great Russian experiment in Communism, and I earnestly ask for attention to its reasoning and its facts from those able and thoughtful men who are now responsible for the advance to power of Labour, as well as from those among the order of economists and capitalists who see the necessity for a deeper and more generous study of the vast industrial problem.
Let none, whether workman or employer, turn aside from this book with a hasty word that "there is no Bolshevism of any importance in the future of British Labour" - that "there is no real Communism in the official demands of Trades Union Congresses and Guild programmes." Certainly, nothing remotely like the atrocities of Lenin and Trotsky, no such despotism, cruelty, and robbery, that have reduced the great Russian people to a starving crowd, are possible here. The good sense, the high feeling, the manly honesty of British workmen repudiate all this with horror.
It would be a very superficial view to think that Bolshevism does not concern us at home. All vast social movements are the result of ideas, of theories, of hopes. Ideas, even when they are untrue, absurd and anti-social at bottom, do sometimes lead to social revolutions, provided they promise great advantages to come, and even if all this be mere illusion. A taking catchword, a sophistical phrase, a delirious experiment in bringing about a new life, carry away masses of men, however false in reason they may be, however suicidal in effect. In this way, Bolshevism, crazy tyranny as it seems to us, has gone round the world as a new industrial gospel.
For the first time, and on a gigantic scale, the gospel of Karl Marx has been put into practice with savage violence, so as to seem an "object lesson" in Labour advancement and the realisation of Labour hopes. The ruin, starvation, and death it has brought upon its victims is put aside; the futility of its hopes and the fraudulent bankruptcy of its promises are overlooked. Non-thinking masses all over the world fancy that they will get the gains without the losses, and will make its promises come true. It is the maddest gamble into which mankind ever has flung itself as for a lottery prize.
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