Frank Kitz
Source: Commonweal, 4th June 1887 p.181
Publisher: Socialist League
Transcription/Markup:Graham Seaman, 2023
Public Domain: Please credit Marxists Internet Archive as your source.
The increasing strength of the Socialist party in these islands, and the activity of our revolutionary propaganda, is bearing fruit amongst the masses of our industrial population, and, as a consequence, the hostility or indifference of a few years back is now changed for a sympathetic and attentive attitude.
Our missionaries, however, have no light task in striving to awaken in the minds of the workers a true sense of the magnitude of the evils of our present society, and the necessity of a thorough revolutionary change. As a capitalistic writer has said recently anent a labour question: "If the work was unfitted for them, they have become fitted for the work." And this "survival by fitness;" or, in other words, moral degradation, has been achieved by middle-class supremacy in production and the great industry — " the Press."
When grasping dimly the ideas preached by our advocates, the anxious enquirer puts the query, "How will you bring it about?" or, "We must have some one at top." If a stage further advanced, the querist asks, "How are we to bring it about?" and that, in short, is the question in the minds of teachers and listeners alike. We have to raise the moral tone of a class who have always looked for amelioration, or indeed emancipation, at the hands of their masters acting as legislators, and deluded by political catchwords, have joined the party strife going on between manufacturer and land thief. The non-political policy of abstention from voting inculcated by the Socialist League simply opens up to the workman the possible alternative of bloodshed, and whilst he sanctions the hideous butcheries, perpetrated to extend the Empire, and even offers up himself and kin as victims, to be slain and maimed in bondholders' wars, he shrinks with horror and dismay from the prospect of having to shed blood to free his own country from the domestic enemies who have made it a hell upon earth to the workers.
Confronted with this state of feeling, it is not surprising that some should try to reach the mass by the usual means, and talking down to their hearers, seek in Parliamentary agitation an easier way of rousing the people.
In their heart of hearts the advocates of Parliamentary action do not believe that any real good will ever come to the people from such action, and they confessedly only seek this line of action from policy and not principle. I hold it is highly immoral to tell the mass that their emancipation can be achieved by means which must fail. When one looks at the incidents of Parliamentary strife, the huxtering, the pestering lobbyists, the traps and pitfalls laid by the legal crew who have shipping and railway enterprises to promote, it may be asked, "Can an honest man preserve his integrity in such an atmosphere?" When Bradlaugh pleaded at the Bar of the House against his exclusion therefrom, he covered the House with praise as an honourable assembly with time honoured traditions. The revolutionary Socialists whom the "gentleman" styles fools or worse, judging the House both by its past tradition and present pretensions, will say that it is a monstrous anomaly, a swallower up of public liberties, an aggregation of the most sinister interests in the country, a legislative assembly, whose legislative capacity is based upon the most fradulent pretence of representation, even majority rule, for a majority in the House, as most division lists show, represents the minority outside. An assembly moreover whose Acts have caused wholesale misery and bloodshed, the spoliation of peoples abroad, and preservation of domestic abuses and monopolies at home. An appeal to such a body is but the hope deferred that maketh the heart sick, and will lead to the bitterest disappointment.
In our local and municipal elections, however, I see an opportunity for Socialistic work without, I think, loss of principle. In nearly all our local and civil bodies the bourgeois reigns supreme, and this is mainly due to the apathy of the working-class, who allow cliques of selfish, cheating traders to monopolise what power of local government is left to the people. Ancient liberties, vast sums of money, and public estates are maladministered by these gradgrinds and market riggers. Is it not possible to arouse enthusiasm on matters that lie at our doors, without incurring the charge of being reactionary? the revolution is inevitable, and it is possible to hasten its advent, and give it shape and form, by contesting every inch of ground now occupied in local bodies by the bourgeois. The Socialist who, in every locality, would ransack the archives in search for records of ancient public rights, lapsed through ignorance and apathy, or, of robbed trusts, would unearth such a mass of middle-class rascality as would bring the class war near its culmination. The foul records of our city and its guilds has shown that enough wealth is wasted in its corrupt hands to supply the educational and material wants of the greater portion of the Metropolitan poor.
Let the Socialist enter these coteries as the champion of ancient liberties, and with a mandate from his constituents to widen their scope, until they include the control over land, and means of production, instead of now merely to determine the site of a dust-bin or lamp-post, or sell contracts. Let him also violate, on every possible occasion, the legal claim of the central authority to control local liberty of action, and strive, with his associates, to break down the monstrous pretensions of the Imperial power, and bring every municipality and local authority where the Socialist element prevails, into defiant collision with the huge overgrown monster of Imperial centralisation, and the first attempt to coerce by imprisonment or violence will be the signal for the revolution.
Where the local circumstances exclude the mass from representation upon these bodies, let their councils be disturbed by irruptions of the unenfranchised "outsiders." In making these suggestions I am guided by a desire first, to give our party something to whet its appetite with work that will hold it together, with a distinct aim wherein no loss of principle is needed. The early history of the French communes and mercantile cities of Italy and Flanders shows that of old the middle-class in their insurrections against feudalism won their civic enfranchisement from prince and knight with artisan help and blood; and our own municipal institutions have been won from a titled aristocracy by a mercantile one; the working-class have ever been the pawns in the game, the bourgeois has triumphed over the aristocrat, and is already on the downward incline, let us hasten his downfall and use the institutions he has won with the help of our class, as the thin end of a wedge that will split up modern society, and lead to the establishment of free federated communes in the place of the life suffocating criminal centralisation of to-day.
F. Kitz.