Oliver Cromwell and Aneurin Bevan

[p007] OLIVER CROMWELL AND ANEURIN BEVAN. Times have changed since Oliver Cromwell. The social and political conditions of the class struggle are funda- mentally dissimilar and therefore different methods must be adopted. What, according to Mr. Bevan, are the essential differences between the two epochs which will permit the British workers to win supreme power in a different manner than the British capitalists of three centuries before ? They are based precisely on the political conquests made by that earlier revolution and extended by the mass struggles of the three centuries since. In Cromwell’s time England had no real democracy. It was governed by an extremely restricted Parliament and a thoroughly reactionary auto- cratic regime. Now Great Britain enjoys complete political democracy and has deep-rooted traditions of effecting social changes through parliamentary channels. What need, then, can there be for any decisive class action outside of Parliament and apart from it? The tasks of reconstructing capitalist society can be taken care of through legislative measures enacted by a dynamic Parliament and enforced and administered by an audacious Socialist govern- ment. This is the axis of the arguments in Mr. Bevan’s book and the mainspring of his political programme and outlook. Mr. Bevan says he is not opposed to revolutionary means of action at all times and under all conditions. _ This separates him from the right-wing leaders and Fabian 5

[p008] theorists of gradualism who deny the right or the necessity of revolution in principle. But Mr. Bevan holds that other peoples and other countries, such as colonial peoples not now in the British Empire, who do not enjoy the blessings of democracy or the traditions of British Parliamentarism may well be justified in resorting to direct action and armed struggles if no other means of combating tyranny are open to them. Even the British working class in less happy days when democratic institutions were closed to them, found themselves obliged to use forcible means of resistance against oppression, and undertake mass actions outside of Parliament to win rights and reforms. But this belongs to Britain’s past. Here and now our workers would be ill-advised to use such rough and tough tactics because they possess all the instruments of a per- fected democracy to achieve their class aims. Stick to the tried and true parliamentary road, travel it to the end. The House can do the job. That is the best way, the British way, the democratic way. Such is the main message of Mr. Bevan’s book. British workers are accustomed to hear this kind of advice from Tories, Liberals and right-wing Labour Party leaders in their tow. But Mr. Bevan states that his conception of Parliamentarism is the opposite of theirs. They all assign to Parliament a largely negative role, limited to easing and adjusting friction between the classes or repairing this or that malfunction of the constitutional regime and the capitalist economy. Mr. Bevan proposes that Parliament perform the most positive functions. They amount to nothing less than reconstituting the entire governmental system and carrying through the Socialist revolution. For him Parliament can and must become “the decisive instru- ment of social change.” The British Parliament, he writes, “interprets its own authority, and from it there is no appeal. This gives it a revolutionary quality, and enables us to entertain the hope of bringing about social transformation, without the agony and prolonged crises experienced by less fortunate nations.” (p. 100). Thus Mr. Bevan, as a prospective director of the develop- ing socialist struggle in Great Britain, proposes to do what 6

[p009] Oliver Cromwell, with all his power and wisdom, could: not. He aims to effect a thorough-going reconstruction of British society from its economic foundations to its political heights exclusively through Parliament and its. associated institutions, without relying upon other forms of working class action.