Resistance is refusing to die
some things we could learn from 1924
In January 1924, Labour were elected as a minority Government.
Before then, politics had been a two-horse race between the Conservatives (who wanted to preserve wealth) and the Liberals (who wanted freedom to get rich). This election came just six years after two seismic events: the end of WWI and the Representation of the People Act. Voting reform in 1918 tripled the electorate by extending voting rights to all men over 21 and some women over 30. For the first time, ordinary people had a say in how they were governed. So here was a bereaved and traumatised generation, holding leaders to account just as the aristocratic way of life crumbled for lack of servants and surviving sons. Perhaps if we’d survived the trenches and the flu, having watched friends succumb to both, we’d be keen to defend our interests too.
But 1924 was a turbulent year. Two very different letters were to make big impacts on the public mood. 100 years ago this month, the first ever Labour government was finding the road to socialism to be treacherous and pot-holed. Labour had to rely on Liberal or Tory votes to get anything done in Parliament, which was frustrating. One of Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald’s first acts was to ‘recognise’ the communist Soviet Union, but he was prevented from loaning them money.
Then this open-letter managed to bring the government down altogether:
“let it be known that, neither in the class war nor in a military war, will you turn your guns on your fellow workers, but instead will line up with your fellow workers in an attack upon the exploiters and capitalists, and will use your arms on the side of your own class”
JR Campbell, Workers Weekly, June 1924
When Campbell’s radical letter appeared in print, the threat of armed revolution must have felt quite real, for Campbell was charged under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797. The Labour Attorney General, a dashing celebrity barrister, decided not to prosecute. Debates in the Commons led to the outraged Liberals provoking a vote of no confidence in the government, and in October 1924 the public were hurled into another general election.
In the week before polling day, amid furious campaigning by Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberals, the Daily Mail printed a sensational letter from Grigory Zinoviev (the Moscow head of Communist International) to the Communist Party of Great Britain which encouraged sedition and suggested that a Labour Government would hasten a communist revolution. Ramsay McDonald protested that the letter was fake, but reported feeling “like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea”.
On election day, the impact of the Zinoviev letter was clear - although the Labour vote had held strong, middle-class Liberals had been frightened by the Red Scare into voting Conservative. Stanley Baldwin became Prime Minister in a decisive Tory victory, and the Liberal party never recovered. The government investigated the letter and declared it genuine. MI5 knew at the time it was a forgery, but decided that intelligence would be ‘unhelpful’ to the British state. It’s now widely accepted that the letter was created by an MI5 officer. In 2017, the Government announced the file on the Zinoviev letter had been ‘lost’.
So, there we have an example of the lengths the establishment will go to preserve the current economic system, which only works if ordinary people like you and I are willing and ready to die for it. This makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, I know.
In our current maelstrom of misinformation and disinformation, I was shocked to see class-consciousness cited as a conspiracy belief last summer. The Guardian’s Robert Booth led with “Quarter of UK believe Covid was a hoax, poll on conspiracy theories finds”. Within a report on a poll about covid denial, crisis-actors, and the great replacement theory, Booth reports that “about a third of the population are convinced that the cost of living crisis is a government plot to control the public.” This stopped me in my tracks, because that’s the plot of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, isn’t it?
I know the cost of living crisis is a new euphemism for the grinding poverty that keeps us all turning up for work in the mornings, but otherwise that’s a reasonable description of how the capitalist economy is supposed to work. It’s a concept familiar to both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The government is designed to manage the economy in such a way to ensure a steady supply of labour, which is achieved by making sure we’d starve if we didn’t accept whatever work is available. I didn’t think that was new. But about two thirds of the population haven’t noticed, it seems. And I think I know why.
The media and political class have expertise in ‘preserving the nation’ by delivering the message of the Zinoviev letter, and suppressing the message of the Campbell letter. Booth writes:
“Conspiracy theories often develop out of real-world problems and anxieties. For example, rising interest rates and inflation, which reduce affluence and leave families struggling, can fuel a belief that powerful forces are plotting to deliberately impoverish certain sections of society.”
‘Certain sections of society’ must be impoverished for the capitalist system to function. Booth’s portrayal of inflation and interest rates as though they are weather systems entirely beyond our control, and the passive voice for “reduce affluence” suggest that these struggling families would be ridiculous should they try to hold anyone accountable. The Bank of England uses interest rates to control inflation. Higher interest rates make it more expensive for people to borrow money and makes saving money more attractive. “A little bit of inflation is helpful,” the Bank website cheerfully explains. And if you don’t believe that a single person can impact the economy, I refer you to what Liz Truss achieved in one month.
But the real Zinoviev element of this article is the inclusion that “one in seven people - about 6 million adults - believe violence is a fair response to some alleged conspiracies.” Are you frightened enough to vote for a police state yet?
The poll interviewed only 2,274 UK adults and then weighted responses by age, sex, region and ‘social grade’, so visions of a 6 million strong pitch-fork mob seem a little previous. But it was splashed in all the papers and no-one seemed to question established economic theory being presented as a dangerous fringe belief. Job done.
In contrast, the accepted media and political hymn-sheet for returning to normal ‘after’ covid is remarkably calm and reassuring. Despite global transmission being as high as it’s ever been, and one in ten infections leading to long term ill-health, it seems to have been agreed that daily deaths are accepted as the cost of ‘business as usual’. The way the virus is consistently minimised as a cold or flu, the way people think catching it ‘builds immunity’ (which is absurd), and the widespread mocking of basic measures like masks and distancing all ‘conspire’ to make this world dangerous for workers. To be compelled to show up every morning to a public facing role in an ongoing airborne virus pandemic, ‘certain sections of society’ would have to be impoverished out of options. Or why would we put ourselves through it?
2024 will be an election year in Britain, and we’re being told to expect a change of government. 1924 may seem like a long time ago, but a hundred years of progress doesn’t seem to have brought us far. If there are parallels in our politics then warm your heart with this thought - 1926 brought the General Strike.
Don’t get sad, get organised…