16.07.1998

The enemy at home

From The Call, paper of the British Socialist Party, July 18 1918

Hard upon the news of the baton offensive of the Glasgow police against the demonstrators demanding the release of John Maclean comes the intimation that the Socialist Labour Press has once more been raided, the printing machinery dismantled and some hundreds of pounds worth of paper confiscated.

The Socialist Labour Party, like the Quakers and the Labour Party, determined to ignore the censorship, but, being a weak organisation, it has been ruthlessly handled for its defiance. The Labour Party is not disturbed in its quiet resolve to take no notice of the Holy Inquisition (new style). The Society of Friends is small and it gets into trouble. The catholic hierarchy in Ireland is powerful and it can oppose conscription with impunity.

We gather that the offence of the SLP has been the publication and wide circulation in cheap pamphlet form of Trotsky’s War or revolution, and its persistent printing of certain young people’s papers, The Revolution and The Young Rebel, which follows Liebknecht’s advice as to the correct course of anti-military propaganda among the youths about to become amenable to the Military Service Acts.

It is but the continuance of the policy of ‘the executive committee of the capitalist class’ in attacking and endeavouring to suppress all efforts at anti-war or revolutionary propaganda. This organ of the propertied interests, this agency of the imperialists, cannot be expected to tolerate those who challenge its decrees and try to wrest the public authority from its hands. The capitalists, organised through the state, recognise the existence of the class struggle and act accordingly.

The SLP is a Marxist body and, though it does not see eye to eye with the BSP on the implications of our common political philosophy, it will agree with us that the state does not exist to express ‘the will of the people’, but to protect and further the interests of property. If free speech, free press and free institutions conflict with the very life interests of the exploiting class, as henceforward they must, we can expect nothing else but the iron heel of suppression.

Marxists have the key to these onslaughts on civil liberty. Theirs is the duty to interpret the signs of the times and to point the moral.