The Floodgates of Anarchy by Stuart Christie Albert Meltzer & Stuart Christie & Albert Meltzer

Author:Stuart Christie, Albert Meltzer & Stuart Christie & Albert Meltzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anarchism
Published: 1970-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

7 Party Lines and Politics

Political parties are associations aiming at power. Some times parties represent classes, especially when a ruling class is driven to a last-ditch defence and has to close ranks. But other factors also come into play, such as personal quarrels and ambitions, the drive of a new power elite, historical continuity, ideological differences, or a combination of some or all of these factors.

Materialistic considerations often, though not always, dominate over ideological ones, and tend to fashion the latter. The anti-clerical and free-thinking French bourgeoisie, for instance, found its way back to political Catholicism not by reason of any “light on the way to Damascus” or even by conscious decision, but solely because of general alarm at the way in which the working class had picked up its own iconoclastic beliefs. In the same way the slaves of Haiti had embraced the republican ideas of their French masters, who thereupon reacted much as would the old nobility. There has been quite some alarm here too, of recent years, in the way in which disillusion with government has spread among the younger generation.

Tories and Whigs were originally differentiated by the more progressive views of the latter section of the British aristocracy, who naturally came to expect that popular radicalism would rally behind them, even at the period when Whiggish attachment to liberty had long been consigned to the past (it was they who deported the trade union pioneers to Australia). Whigs and Tories became indistinguishable, and the party broke up. At that juncture it was the particular contribution of Disraeli to politics that he saw it was illogical that in the new, Liberal Party that inherited the Whig mantle, the urban working class should follow, not their old aristocratic “protectors”, but the very Liberal industrialists who were directly exploiting them. According to him, the natural new “protectors” of the exploited industrial workers were the reactionary landowners, who might well oppress the rural workers but had a common enemy with the factory proletariat in the manufacturing class. Given such an alliance, it seemed to him there was no reason why the Tories could not give up, their reactionary views, and become reformers at the expense of the Liberal industrialists. Universal suffrage could then favour the Conservatives-and would “dish the Whigs”. The policy was described by Carlyle as “shooting Niagara” . The sage reacted to it as did Bismarck when Lassalle tried to persuade him of this “natural alliance” too. It is in the nature of conservatism to distrust leaps in the dark, and “a leap in the dark” is exactly how Tories described their leader’s programme. Yet it was a successful leap so far as they were concerned. Disraeli associated it with popular support for imperialism. And quick victories and painless patriotism, allied to a regard for working-class votes, meant that the Conservative Party got, and retains to this day, a degree of that vote. The Liberal Party was totally deprived of the only reason for its existence. For as the capitalist prospered under empire-building, he became an integral part of the ruling class.

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