Revolution by Consent

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?--Harold J. Laskl--Viking ($1.75).

ALL OUT! HOW DEMOCRACY WILL DEFEND AMERICA--Samuel Grafton--Simon & Schuster ($1).

British Laborite Harold J. Laski is a sometime professor of economics at London's School of Economics, sometime lecturer at Harvard, sometime White House guest of Franklin D. Roosevelt, great & good friend of many a New Deal bigwig, including Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Samuel Grafton writes I'd Rather Be Right, a New Dealing column in the New York Post. Both their books are important because they talk out loud in public about hopes that most New Dealers prefer to talk about only among New Dealers. Both are, whether the authors know it or not, handbooks of revolution. Both propose to have their radical changes take place within the democratic system. Both forget that, once begun, social revolutions have no brakes but total exhaustion or weakness from loss of too much blood.

To the minds of Authors Grafton and Laski, World War II is 1) a symptom that capitalist democracy can no longer solve its own economic and social problems; 2) a heaven-sent chance to ram through, under the guise of wartime necessity, radical social changes that citizens would never stand for in peacetime. Laski calls his program "revolution by consent." He proposes that the owners of property consent to what they cannot prevent.

Capital, he argues, must have the masses to fight the fascists. Hence labor has capital by the throat, and the sporting thing for capital to do is to lie down, twitch feebly and die.

Patiently, Laski explains why. Capitalist democracy is "at best a fragile thing," a delicate compromise between privilege and the masses. But "a democracy that is to wage totalitarian war must end economic and social privilege as the price of victory." With a serene twinkle Professor Laski views the dilemma of the middle classes. On one hand, the fascists threaten them; on the other, so do the masses. Says he:

"I am arguing here that the repulse of the first threat means finding terms of peace with the second." And terms of peace mean "to cooperate with the masses in beginning now the revolution that has become necessary." True, this new policy of appeasement "exacts from the privileged more than they would wish to give."

More dangerous still, "it yields to the workers far less than they wish to take." But "the simple answer is that, like all processes of consent, it is a compromise." In Britain itself, war has already forced much of the revolution Laski diagrams.

The Churchill-Bevan compromise is being tested in a furnace. When the test is over, privilege may wish to know at what point the masses will consent to call the revolution off. That point Laski does not indicate. He is only sure that if the consenting parties are not nice to each other, the fascists will get them both.

Columnist Grafton does not use the word revolution. His formula for "how democracy will defend America": "set [the people] loose and learn from them.

. . ." "It is not necessary to be shatteringly clever," he says, "to resist Herr Hitler successfully; it is only necessary to be shatteringly democratic." One of the first things he would shatter democratically is the average taxpayer's aversion to unlimited government spending.

His plan: Jobs to be provided by government for everybody who has not got one--to be paid for by everybody who has. "The money cost, it can be admitted with a certain smugness, will be quite staggering . . . ten billions the year to care for approximately eight millions of unemployed." Grafton proposes a three-year plan of this kind, "embracing everything from the construction of bomb-proofs in the East Coast cities to a military CCC to turn the tinkering genius of young America loose on tank and plane repair and maintenance." The Nazis did it, he says, why can't we? Let no one worry if this looks as much like the end of democracy as the beginning. Says Democrat Grafton: "Secret contempt for the democratic process is revealed when use is made of the expression that we must be careful not to lose our democratic rights while fighting to protect them." His tough, all-out club-waving version of democracy would make even some New Dealers cringe. Others will recall that Huey Long in one of his prescient moments said: "When Fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-Fascism."

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