V. I.

Lenin

The British Liberals have been in power for six and a half
years. The working-class movement in Britain is becoming stronger and
stronger. Strikes are assuming a mass character; moreover, they are ceasing
to be purely economic and are developing into political strikes.

Robert Smillie, the leader of the Scottish miners who recently showed
such strength in mass struggle, [1] declares that in their next big fight the miners will
demand the transfer of the collieries to state ownership. And this next big
fight is approaching inexorably, because all the miners of Britain are
perfectly well aware that the notorious Minimum Wage Act cannot bring about
any appreciable improvement in their conditions.

And so the British Liberals, who are losing ground, have invented a new
battle-cry in order once again to induce the mass of the electors to trust
the Liberals for a while. “You can’t sell without cheating” is the
commercial slogan of capitalism. “You can’t get seats in parliament
without cheating” is the slogan of capitalist politics in free countries.

The “fashionable” slogan invented by the Liberals for this purpose is
the demand for “land reform”. It is not clear what the Liberals and their
expert in humbugging the masses, Lloyd George, mean by that. Apparently, it
is a question of increasing the land tax, and no more. But the idea that
actually lies behind the resounding talk about “restoring the land to the
people”, etc., is to collect further millions for military adventures, for
the Navy.

In Britain, agriculture is conducted wholly on capitalist lines. The
capitalist farmers rent medium-sized plots of land from the landlords and cultivate them with the aid of wage-workers.

Under these circumstances, no “land reform” can in any way change the
conditions of the agricultural workers. In Britain the buying-out of landed
estates might even become a new method of fleecing the proletariat, since
the landlords and the capitalists, who would retain state power, would sell
their land at exorbitant prices. And the price would have to be paid by the
taxpayers, i.e., the workers again.

The fuss made by the Liberals about the land question has done good in
one respect: it has roused interest in organising the agricultural workers.

When Britain’s agricultural workers wake up and join together in
unions, the Liberals will no longer be able to get away with charlatan
“promises of reform” or of allotments for farm-hands and day-labourers.

Recently a reporter of a British labour newspaper visited Joseph Arch,
the veteran agricultural workers’ leader who has done much to rouse the
labourers to a class-conscious life. This could not be done at one stroke,
and Arch’s slogan—“three acres and a cow” for every agricultural
worker—was a very naive one. The union he founded fell to pieces, but the
cause he fought for is not dead and the organisation of the agricultural
workers in Britain is once again becoming an immediate issue.

Arch is now 83 years old. He lives in the same village and in the same
house in which he was born. He told his inter viewer that the agricultural
workers’ union had managed to raise wages to 15, 16 and 17 shillings a
week. And now the wages of agricultural workers in Britain have again
dropped—in Norfolk, where Arch lives—to 12 or 13 shillings a week.