The most subtle, perhaps, is the denial of adequate educational facilities; for what, in fact, that does is to prevent me from knowing how to formulate my claim effectively, and unattention is the price I have to pay for my ineffectiveness.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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The whole machinery of news-making is directed to the confirmation of that impression; and the chance that the miners’ claim will be considered equally is destroyed by the weight which unequal economic power attaches to the case against…
The opinion represented by the miners is not objectively valued.
It is the victim of a process of valuation the purpose of which is to prevent, so far as possible, an alteration of the status quo; and, mutatis mutandis, this is true of all claims which seek alteration in a significant degree.
Now it is, I think, unquestionable that in an unequal society, the effort of ordinary men to attain the condition we call happiness is hampered at every turn.
The power of numbers is sacrificed to the interest of a few.
The truth of the facts which might make a just solution is distorted for a similar end.
Freedom, therefore, in an unequal society has no easy task as it seeks realization.
For its search is not to realize itself for its own sake, but for what, as it is realized, it is able to bring.
We seek religious freedom for the truth our religion embodies.
We seek political freedom for the ends that, in the political world, we deem good.
We seek economic freedom for the satisfaction brought by making an end of the frustration to our personality an irrational subordination implies.
Men do not, I believe, resent an environment when they feel that they share adequately in its making and in the end for which it is made.
But they are bound to be at least apathetic, and possibly hostile, when the sense is wide and deep that they are no more than its instruments.
That is the secret of the profound allegiance trade unionism is able to create.
Its members see in its activities the expression of the power for which they are individually searching.
Few states--it is surely a significant thing--have ever won from their subjects a loyalty so profound as the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, or the trade unions in the cotton trades.
Even the blunders of their leaders meet with a pardon far more generous than would be extended to the political heads of the state.
The reason lies in the degree to which the trade union expresses the intimate experience of its members.
And until the policy of the state meets that experience with similar profundity conflict between the government and the trade union will rarely involve the desertion by the members of the association they have themselves made.
What the government will represent as disloyalty to the state will seem to trade unionists a service which is freedom.
The point I am seeking to make was summarized with the insight of genius by Disraeli when he spoke of the rich and poor as in fact two nations.
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