British Labor and the War (Volume 639); Reconstructors for a New World (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IX Allied Labor's War Aims A Point has been reached where we can turn from the steps taken in engineering the program upon which British labor had united as never before the whole working class movement among the Allies, and resolve it into its elements. As Vandervelde said, the Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference [London, February 20-24, 1918] was charged with working out a platform and a procedure. The basis of that platform was the war aims memorandum 1 adopted in December by the British labor movement, but the Inter-Allied document2 transcended all earlier outgivings in its approach to the problems of international relations, in the sequence with which it marshaled the principles of the workers' statecraft and in their application in turn, to the war, to the political ordering of the world, to territorial questions, to economic relations and to the problems of peace, of restoration and reparation. "A device of the capitalist interests," read the Inter-Allied labor memorandum, would be "to pretend that the treaty of peace need concern itself only with the cessation of the struggle of the armed forces and with any necessary territorial adjustments." It reiterated that "a victory for German imperialism would be the defeat and destruction of democracy and liberty in Europe," but it envisaged only less as a defeat any return to the status quo ante in terms of a return to competing imperialisms,?to a crushing load of competitive armaments on the backs of the workers,?to a world order of subject races and subjugated masses,?to the "war system" as the world knew it prior to 1914, with its "old yearnings after domination" which "corrupted the aspirations of nationalities and drought Europe to a condition of anarchy and disorder, which have led men to-day to...