Foreign News: Official Philosopher?

Without waiting for Prime Minister Attlee to return from Potsdam, Professor Harold J. Laski, Labor Party chairman, rushed into an arresting description of the Labor Government’s aims. First the Bank of England will be nationalized (see BUSINESS). Then the Labor Government will tackle coal, power, steel and transport. Said Laski: “You can’t plan economically without control of the central bank. A government which is not responsible for the operation of credit is not master in his own house.”

He added: “England was conquered twice in its history, once by William the Norman in 1066, and again by Montagu the Norman in 1931.” (Until 1944, Montagu Collet Norman was Governor of the Bank.)

The Labor Government would also:

¶ “Socialize” all of Britain in an “orderly, straightforward fashion.”

¶ Revise Britain’s foreign policy in order to rid the world of the “faded monarchies and obsolete social systems” of Europe.

¶ Revise Britain’s colonial policy to help free India for the Indians and Palestine for the Jews.

¶ “Help unite the workers of the world.”

Cried Laski: “We’ve placed the people in power. . . . It’s part of a world revolution … the Fourth Estate, the common people, have opened the barriers which shut them out. . . . This is a day indeed to echo the famous sentence: ‘We have nothing to lose but our chains and a world to win.’ “

Who Is Harold? Who was the man, who at the moment when British socialism had scarcely begun its momentous job, broadcast views so sure to disturb moderate Britons? To some, slim, aloof Professor Laski is just an “inoffensive scholar” (19 books and innumerable articles). To some, he is socialism’s No. 1 intellectual soapboxer. To others, in his own words, he is a combination Guy Fawkes and Trotsky, a “reincarnation of Palmer, the Poisoner.”

Officially, Laski is chairman of the Labor Party’s National Executive Committee (a rotating position). He has been close to Prime Minister “Clem” Attlee (whom Laski considers too conservative), has prestige with Labor’s rank & file (who are proud of their “posh” professor), has even greater influence on Britain’s leftist intellectuals. But many Labor Party members dislike Laski for his “intellectual snobbishness,” his impatience with trade-union “bread & butter questions” of today, his preoccupation with the Marxist power problems of tomorrow.

What the Sirens Sang. Harold Joseph Laski was born (1893) in drab, industrial Manchester, but not to drabness: he was the son of a well-to-do Jewish merchant. As a youth, he was enchanted by those sirens of British socialism, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who were warbling their Fabian lays over the bleaching bones of Karl Marx. At Oxford, Laski joined the Fabian Society, campaigned for woman suffrage, was a brilliant student in his spare time. When World War I came, Laski disapproved, but tried to enlist. He was turned down because of a weak heart. He went to lecture at Canada’s venerable McGill University, there got himself thoroughly disliked for attacking War Prime Minister Lloyd George.

Out of Harvard, into Yale. So young Laski went on to Harvard, where he was liked no better. When the brash Briton spoke up for the cops in Boston’s 1920 police strike, the Harvard Lampoon devoted an entire issue to an exposé of “this propagandist in our midst.” The flaming red cover showed Laski as a socialist saint (see cut). A cartoon showed the socialist Day of Judgment with Professor Laski surrounded by human freaks, casting better-dressed citizens (Harvard men, no doubt) into outer darkness.

Later Laski lectured to overflow classes at Yale. He became a full professor of political science at the London School of Economics, where he stayed for 25 years without getting into major trouble (except in 1934, when he lectured in Moscow and pictured a hypothetical British Labor victory, followed by a financial crisis, a Conservative reaction, suspension of the “Constitution,” and chaos culminating in the “hope of revolution”).

As a politico-economist, Laski acquired a brilliant international reputation. He is a great pal of Washington’s more vehement New Dealers.

Revolution by Consent. Unlike most British Laborites, before the war Laski had abandoned all hope for achieving socialism by gradual reforms. (Said one critic: “He never does things by halves, he always does things by doubles.”) His formula: the overthrow of “acquisitive [capitalist] society” through “revolution by consent.”

Laski argues that the West has lost its Christian religion, needs a new faith. The Russian Revolution, he says, is the early Christian Church. Capitalism is paganism, socialism is the new, true faith.

On its altar, he is perfectly willing to sacrifice, if necessary, the Western ideal of freedom. But he spends much time rationalizing the sacrifice. Wrote Laski last year: “If the Communist Party of the Soviet Union left the central principle of its faith to the chance decision of an electorate . . . that would be as remarkable as a willingness on the part of Western democracies to see without repining the access of socialist parties to the state power.”

The Labor victory had made Harold Laski an adviser to the new Government. It remained to be seen whether he was also to be its official philosopher.