The difference between socialism and liberalism

[msmith537]

@Civilrighte

IMO, many of the policies that Americans call “liberal” are usually associated with socialism. Things like Alcohol regulations are socialist, but alcohol/drug legalization are liberal.

No. Socialism is a broad umbrella to define economic and social systems characterized by public ownership and democratic control of the means of production.

Liberalism is largely defined as a broad umbrella of progressive social policies.

[BrainGlutton]

@Civilrighte

IMO, many of the policies that Americans call “liberal” are usually associated with socialism. Things like Alcohol regulations are socialist, but alcohol/drug legalization are liberal.

Positive discrimination or Affirmative Action are socialist policies, not liberal ones.

You misunderstand the words. For one thing, social democracy != socialism. Social democracy means a vigorous welfare state and heavy regulation of the private sector, as is commonplace in other industrialized countries, and is compatible with a mostly private capitalist economy. Socialism, even democratic socialism (a thing never yet tried, though Venezuela might be heading that way), requires at least some form of nationalization or socialization of most of the means of economic production. (Most; a nationalized oil industry, as is commonplace in OPEC member states, is not by itself enough to make a given country socialist.)

“Liberalism” is a word with a more complex history; its original sense, and the sense in which it is still used in Europe, is rather closer (though not quite identical with, or rather less extreme than) what we call “libertarianism” in the U.S.

Here’s a good guide – the TVTropes Useful Notes page on Political Ideologies. Fascinating reading, too.

[Lemur866]

Right. If you can decide that a particular policy is “socialist”, it’s bad. You don’t have to figure out whether it would have positive or negative effects, all you need to know is that it’s socialist. And if the policy is “liberal”, then you know it’s good. No need to debate the issues, all you need to do is define the issues and that’s all you need to know.

Feel free to replace the above with whatever feel-good/feel-bad buzzwords you want, and you’ll be able to engage in political action without needing to think about anything ever again. So if you’re a movement conservative, you just need to know if something is conservative or not. If it’s conservative, you’re for it. If it’s not conservative, you’re against it. And feel free to let Rush Limbaugh decide what’s conservative or not. And the beauty of it is, a position can be conservative one day and not conservative another day, and all you need to know is that you’re for it if it’s conservative.

[Trinopus]

Look at all those conservative socialists, promoting a socialist military, and socialist health-care for veterans. Pure socialism. Did I say “socialism” loudly enough?

Also the interstate highway system. Socialist!

[BrainGlutton]

@pkbites

socialist fascism

@Smapti

I’m not sure you know what either of those words mean.

@Czarcasm

What would you like them to mean?

I think George Orwell nailed it back in 1941:

Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment.

However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class system. Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.

But what then is Fascism?

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and–this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism–generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere EFFICIENCY of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.

But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human INEQUALITY, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognise any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have “proved” over and over again that only Nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea that non Nordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery.

However horrible this system may seem to us, IT WORKS. It works because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

You misunderstand the words. For one thing, social democracy != socialism. Social democracy means a vigorous welfare state and heavy regulation of the private sector, as is commonplace in other industrialized countries, and is compatible with a mostly private capitalist economy. Socialism, even democratic socialism (a thing never yet tried, though Venezuela might be heading that way), requires at least some form of nationalization or socialization of most of the means of economic production. (Most; a nationalized oil industry, as is commonplace in OPEC member states, is not by itself enough to make a given country socialist.)

“Liberalism” is a word with a more complex history; its original sense, and the sense in which it is still used in Europe, is rather closer (though not quite identical with, or rather less extreme than) what we call “libertarianism” in the U.S.

Here’s a good guide – the TVTropes Useful Notes page on Political Ideologies. Fascinating reading, too.

Especially this bit, which highlights the source of confusion over what “liberal” means:

John Stuart Mill was also a major influence on what is now called social liberalism, despite not being generally considered as a social liberal himself. This brings us to the other great split in liberalism: the one between classical liberalism and social liberalism. This split is mainly due to differences in opinion on what “liberty” means: classical liberals believe that being free means not being stopped from doing something as long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of other people. Social liberals believe that being free means having the power to perform a certain something. Isaiah Berlin referred to the former as “negative liberty” and the latter as “positive liberty.”

Classical liberalism argues that economic activities should be treated the same way that all other liberties are (or, further, that a meaningful distinction between economic and non-economic liberties cannot be made). Thus, economically speaking, any activity that does not involve force, fraud, or threats thereof (i.e. coercion) is just as much a right as free speech. As such, classical liberals are generally skeptical and/or hostile to government intervention in economic matters. This stance is also known as laissez-faire free-market economics (which some people call “Capitalism,” although that term has other definitions depending on who you ask).

Social liberalism argues that positive liberty is absolutely necessary for universal human freedom, particularly that of the poor. For instance, a family which struggles to earn enough to feed itself will obviously be unable to provide medical care or education for its members without state intervention. As such, the state should intervene in economic affairs on behalf of the least privileged.

Note that both classical and social liberals believe that liberty is extremely important, they just disagree on what liberty entails. A classical liberal would object to the state providing services not because they don’t want the poor to have any liberty, but because they might believe the state to be too inefficient or corrupt for it, that empowering the state would be dangerous for further liberties, that it would be inherently inmoral for the state to sacrifice negative liberty for the sake of positive liberty, etc. According to classical liberals, the government should only police the country and prevent interference from foreign governments.

Between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, around the time of The Great Depression, the boundaries between social liberalism and social democracy (the latter being ideologically a product of socialism (see below), even if it had a centrist political platform) began to get blurry due to the popularity of socialism amongst many of the cultural elites of the time. During these decades, a resurgence of classical liberalism began to form as a backlash. This resurgence is often called “libertarianism” (see also below) and occasionally seen as a separate ideology, but this is partly due to the fact that it originated as a rebuke to the intellectual hegemony of socialist ideas. Fundamentally, it was merely a modern reformulation of the classical liberal case.

<snip>

As for social liberalism, it is arguable that (in recent times) the doctrine has been replaced by or assimilated into various forms of social democracy. Some even argue that social liberalism was always a front for socialistic ideas but this is a highly controversial claim. Since the division between social liberalism and social democracy is primarily one of values rather than political program (and the division between social and classical liberalism being one of political program rather than values), the categories can get muddled. Additionally, political programs contain matters of degree; social liberals can advocate either relatively moderate amounts of government intervention (arguably, some of the more moderate libertarians fit here) or similar levels of government to a social democrat, depending on what the liberal believes is required to enable full human flourishing.

Now, while in everyday politics social liberalism has become assimilated into social democracy and almost undistinguishable from it, in academia social liberalism is still a very definite and popular political position. The work that most firmly established it as such was A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls. In this work, Rawls criticized utilitarian liberals (and all classical liberals, utilitarian or not) believing that, under the principles of justice, people would be entitled to a minimum of living even if it doesn’t result in the most efficient outcome. Rawls came to these principles of justice by a thought experiment he called the veil of ignorance, in which he asks the reader to select the distribution of resources and rights of an ideal society by acting as if they didn’t know their class position, status, abilities, race or any other quality aside from their own rationality.

<snip>

It is also worth pointing out that while classical liberals are often painted as being opposed to all government intervention in the marketplace, this is not strictly true. Adam Smith, for example, actually supported subsidies to the unemployed as well as fledgling businesses (although he was uneasy about the latter due to his fears that businesses would lobby against being removed from the subsidy rolls), as well as progressive taxation, while Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek proposed replacing the existing welfare programs and minimum wage with negative income taxes that would provide living wages to all citizens, not the complete elimination of welfare. Where Friedman and Hayek stopped short of social liberalism was in opposing redistribution of wealth for the sake of bringing living standards closer together, although they have been criticized by others further to the right economically for supporting any redistribution at all.

That last paragraph is why I distinguish “libertarianism” from “classical liberalism,” even though the author considers libertarianism “merely a modern reformulation of the classical liberal case” rather than a separate ideology. No self-ID’d Libertarian I ever met would approve of “negative income taxes” or whatever.

[Mangetout]

@Chronos

Who cares what labels we use? The important question is whether alcohol regulation, or affirmative action, or whatever, are good or bad. And it may well turn out that some good policies are “liberal”, and some good policies are “conservative”, and some are “socialist”, or whatever other label you choose, while other policies bearing those labels might be bad.

I agree. All this partisan bullshit is like some sort of personality cult that distracts people from actually getting anything done or changed.

In reality, of course, voters have to side with the candidate whose policies most substantially align with their own views, and who they feel can be trusted to try to implement said policies, but the notion that one political party has (or should have) the monopoly on such broad concepts such as ‘freedom’ and ‘social equality’, is poisonous bullshit. So too is the notion that these concepts are mutually exclusive.

[msmith537]

@BrainGlutton

I think George Orwell nailed it back in 1941:

Except that he is wrong about a couple key fundamental things. Socialism does not solve the “problems of consumption and production”. It exacerbates them.

Fascism may have worked in the short term, but it turns out that the rest of the world isn’t “inferior” to Germans, and there are a lot more of them than there are Germans and they don’t want to be slaves. It ultimately didn’t work when they tried to put their theories of racial superiority and world domination into practice.

And Capitalism has produced the most powerful economies the word has ever seen. It is BECAUSE it is a system where “all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State” that makes it so powerful. The market dictates what people want and need far more quickly and accurately than any state run ministry.
It is more accurate to say that the interests of the “State” are more often than not the preservation of the ruling class and their apparatus of control, rather than the interests of the actual people who live in the state.

[jtur88]

Americans who are most Conservative seem to be the ones who most ardently want to “liberalize” Iran. Social Liiberalism doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Socialist economics.

[BrainGlutton]

@msmith537

Except that he is wrong about a couple key fundamental things. Socialism does not solve the “problems of consumption and production”. It exacerbates them.

Well, consider the context. From the same piece:

What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit–DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.

When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle steamer of equal horse-power stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. But it is necessary here to give some kind of definition to those much-abused words, Socialism and Fascism.

<snip>

All through the critical years British capitalism, with its immense industrial plant and its unrivalled supply of skilled labour, was unequal to the strain of preparing for war. To prepare for war on the modern scale you have got to divert the greater part of your national income to armaments, which means cutting down on consumption goods. A bombing plane, for instance, is equivalent in price to fifty small motor cars, or eighty thousand pairs of silk stockings, or a million loaves of bread. Clearly you can’t have MANY bombing planes without lowering the national standard of life. It is guns or butter, as Marshal Goering remarked. But in Chamberlain’s England the transition could not be made. The rich would not face the necessary taxation, and while the rich are still visibly rich it is not possible to tax the poor very heavily either. Moreover, so long as PROFIT was the main object the manufacturer had no incentive to change over from consumption goods to armaments. A businessman’s first duty is to his shareholders. Perhaps England needs tanks, but perhaps it pays better to manufacture motor cars. To prevent war material from reaching the enemy is common sense, but to sell in the highest market is a business duty. Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were tumbling over one another in their eagerness to sell Germany tin, rubber, copper and shellac-and this in the clear, certain knowledge that war was going to break out in a week or two. It was about as sensible as selling somebody a razor to cut your throat with. But it was “good business”.

And now look at the results. After 1934 it was known that Germany was rearming. After 1936 everyone with eyes in his head knew that war was coming. After Munich it was merely a question of how soon the war would begin. In September 1939 war broke out. EIGHT MONTHS LATER it was discovered that, so far as equipment went, the British army was barely beyond the standard of 1918. We saw our soldiers fighting their way desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane against three, with rifles against tanks, with bayonets against tommy-guns. There were not even enough revolvers to supply all the officers. After a year of war the regular army was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There had even, previously, been a shortage of uniforms–this in one of the greatest woollen-goods producing countries in the world!

What had happened was that the whole moneyed class, unwilling to face a change in their way of life, had shut their eyes to the nature of Fascism and modern war. And false optimism was fed to the general public by the gutter press, which lives on its advertisements and is therefore interested in keeping trade conditions normal. Year after year the Beaverbrook press assured us in huge headlines that THERE WILL BE NO WAR, and as late as the beginning of 1939 Lord Rothermere was describing Hitler as “a great gentleman”. And while England in the moment of disaster proved to be short of every war material except ships, it is not recorded that there was any shortage of motor cars, fur coats, gramophones, lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings. And dare anyone pretend that the same tug-of-war between private profit and public necessity is not still continuing? England fights for her life, but business must fight for profits. You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing the two contradictory processes happening side by side. On the very same page you will find the Government urging you to save and the seller of some useless luxury urging you to spend. Lend to Defend, but Guinness is Good for You. Buy a Spitfire, but also buy Haig and Haig, Pond’s Face Cream and Black Magic Chocolates.

It was much easier to believe all that, in fact it seemed flatly obvious to any thinking person, in 1941. And remember that Orwell, though mostly remembered now as an anti-Soviet propagandist, remained a self-ID’d socialist until the day he died.

As for the value and workability of socialism as such, I’ll once again trot out this bit from Economics Explained, by Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow:

The reason it [the Soviet system] did last [as long as it did] is that in the beginning the system very much resembled a military operation. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin confronted an almost totally disorganized society, and tried at first to build a “socialism” that was partly capitalist – private farming and private small enterprise – and partly socialist, in the form of state-owned banks and large centers of production. Russia staggered along under this mixed system for a few years, without either great success or great failure, but after Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin took command and rapidly instituted the highly centralized system we have sketched in.

Stalin’s methods were ferocious and bloody, but they were successful in bringing about an immense accumulation of wealth, much as did the ruthless ways of the ancient pharoahs of Egypt and emperors of Rome or China. The difference was that whereas the latter built palaces and cities, Stalin built factories, steel mills, hydroelectric plants, and railway systems – the ingredients of an industrial economy. The fact that Stalin’s Russia was strong enough to resist Hitler’s armies – and efficient enough, after its reconstruction following World War II, to impress the world with its industrial and military capabilities – shows that Soviet central planning was by no means a failure in its initial years. That is why “military socialism” may yet be a model for development efforts in the future. China is today a semi-military socialism which appears to be successfully negotiating the early stages of industrialization, much aided by a carefully supervised free market sector attached to the planned core. Hence the collapse of the Soviet system should not lead us to the snap judgment that centralized socialism is no longer on the agenda of the coming century. That is indeed likely to be the case with the North, but it is not a foregone conclusion in the troubled countries of the South.

THE COLLAPSE

But we are ahead of ourselves. After so successful a beginning, why did Soviet socialism finally break down? The answer is that it is a great deal easier to design and build the skeleton of a mighty economy than to run it. Building a steel plant requires good industrial draftsmanship, but running a steel plant requires good industrial management. Management, in turn, depends on the ability to adapt flows of production to ever-changing conditions – the unforeseen contingencies, mistakes, mismatches, shortages, and overruns that are inescapable in any complex undertaking.

In a market system, these mistakes are repaired and remedied as soon as possible because they cost the factory or store money. Hence suppliers are told to hurry up, or to hold back on shipments, unprofitable items are canceled and profitable ones run overtime, the Yellow Pages are searched for last-minute necessities. None of this can happen in a society planned from top to bottom. When mistakes are made, they bring about a kind of gridlock in the flow of production, so that the pace of Soviet economic production was a never-ending sequence of feast or famine, too much or too little, with no way of remedying the errors other than recasting next year’s plan or seeking the semi-illegal channels of “tolkachi” – fixers.

And, once again: Even the Stalinist model of totalitarian socialism does work – for limited purposes, i.e., heavy capital formation. In 1924 Stalin took control of a backward, agrarian country, marginally industrialized by the onset of WWI and that little industry devastated by that war and the Russian Civil War, and – by methods which were bloody, brutal, repressive, wasteful, but effective – by 1939 had turned it into an industrial power capable of going head-to-head with Hitler’s Germany; and Germany had always been at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. No way could that have happened, if Russia had had a free-market system during that period. In proof of which, look around – post-WWII, how many Third World countries have managed to industrialize that heavily that quickly? None.

OTOH, central economic planning, lacking the constant corrective feedback of competitive market performance, is spectacularly inept at any kind of fine-tuning. Moreover, it does not encourage innovation very well. No state planner would ever have thought of something like the Sony Walkman, or the Pet Rock, or fabric softener. (Whether that is an argument for or against Stalinism is open to debate.)

Look at Korea: We think of the NKs as undernourished, and they are, but before the 1980s they actually ate better than the SKs, or so I have read. But then NK’s economic development hit a wall – it had gone as far as it could go under a Stalinist model – and SK sped past it.

So it’s not a question of socialism or capitalism being “better” – the usefulness of each varies with time and place and circumstances. The one could be better for a country at one period and the other better at a later period. It’s like with protectionism – Whigs and Republicans spent the whole 19th Century making speeches in favor of a high protective tariff. They were not wrong at the time, but now the U.S. is the most fully industrialized country in the world and needs no such thing.

[msmith537]

@BrainGlutton

Look at Korea: We think of the NKs as undernourished, and they are, but before the 1980s they actually ate better than the SKs, or so I have read. But then NK’s economic development hit a wall – it had gone as far as it could go under a Stalinist model – and SK sped past it.

But that’s pretty much the point. Planned economies like NK and the USSR can be very good at cherry picking what industries or products they want to excel at or at building monuments to their leaders, but typically at the expense of the rest of the country. Stalin built lavish subways stations and a strong(ish) industrial economy, but most of the country lived like backward agrarian peasants. North and South Korea started in the same place, but now SK is one of the most advanced countries on Earth while NK can barely keep their lights on.

I also question Orwell’s assessment of British capitalism. Their form of capitalism sound a lot closer to the hereditary aristocracy of the previous century than it does to the entrepreneurial free market capitalism as we understand it.

And when was building war machines considered “unprofitable”? We spend billions creating next generation aircraft to fight terrorists riding around the desert in modified Toyotas with machineguns welded to the roof.

[Lemur866]

And also note that Germany’s armaments advantage was to a large extent illusory. It’s one thing for The Leader to declare that so many tanks of such and such a specification should be built, and quite another thing to actually build them. The German army had some good weapons, which are quite well known, but also had many substandard and obsolete weapons, which nobody seems to be able to remember. And so you have horse drawn wagons bringing ammunition to the front for your small number of advanced Tiger tanks, which break down so frequently that most of them are never available to actually fight.

[jtur88]

@BrainGlutton

So it’s not a question of socialism or capitalism being “better” – the usefulness of each varies with time and place and circumstances. .

One of the most salient points I have seen in a long time, and worth isolating and underlining.

[BrainGlutton]

@msmith537

I also question Orwell’s assessment of British capitalism. Their form of capitalism sound a lot closer to the hereditary aristocracy of the previous century than it does to the entrepreneurial free market capitalism as we understand it.

Then maybe it actually was closer to that. Orwell was just describing what he saw all around him – and he was very, very good at that and very, very perceptive and insightful, and if he was ever wrong he was wrong for better reasons than most people are right.

@msmith537

And when was building war machines considered “unprofitable”? We spend billions creating next generation aircraft to fight terrorists riding around the desert in modified Toyotas with machineguns welded to the roof.

The profitability of making war materials depends entirely on the existence of a government willing to buy them and willing to maintain a high enough level of taxes to pay for them. America post-WWII can much better afford that than Britain pre-WWII, when the UK was not the economic powerhouse the U.S. had already become, and when taxes in the UK and throughout the Empire were comparatively low, and where war-taxation was made politically difficult by an anti-military tradition – from the same Orwell piece:

The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement. And with this goes something that is always written off by European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy, the English hatred of war and militarism. It is rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class. Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it. Well within living memory it was common for ‘the redcoats’ to be booed at in the streets and for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse to allow soldiers on the premises. In peace time, even when there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the tiny standing army, which is officered by the country gentry and a specialized stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm labourers and slum proletarians. The mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition, and their attitude towards war is invariably defensive. No politician could rise to power by promising them conquests or military ‘glory’, no Hymn of Hate has ever made any appeal to them. In the last war the songs which the soldiers made up and sang of their own accord were not vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist [Note, below]. The only enemy they ever named was the sergeant-major.

[Note: For example:

'I don’t want to join the bloody Army,
I don’t want to go unto the war;
I want no more to roam,
I’d rather stay at home,
Living on the earnings of a whore.

But it was not in that spirit that they fought. (Author’s footnote.)]

In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory. English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore’s army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. And of the last war, the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.

The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is that it ignores the existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer hypocrisy. After all, the English have absorbed a quarter of the earth and held on to it by means of a huge navy. How dare they then turn round and say that war is wicked?

It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire. In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire exists. But their dislike of standing armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word ‘Prussian’ had much the same significance in England as ‘Nazi’ has today. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of the British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am UGLY, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army. The Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely under German control, and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans. The Vichy government, if it survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground discipline into what is left of the French army. In the British army the drill is rigid and complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but without definite swagger; the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.

But in American culture, pacifism and militarism co-exist and are always struggling for ascendance, and militarism usually wins.