I was so caught up in other stuff on the blog that I didn't realise that I reached 21,000 posts on the blog on Thursday. Step up Frank Dawe, it was your article, mate.
Saturday, December 6, 2025
The Bread that Perishes and Those who Make it. (1908)
Like Pouring Water in a Sieve.
Far back in the last century the Baker’s Union was formed, and although it has never enjoyed the confidence of a majority of the men engaged in bread-making, or, with the single exception of the ’89 agitation, has it contained more than a remnant within its ranks, yet probably 95 per cent. of the London bakers have been members at one time or another. They have entered its ranks, paid one or two quarters’ subscription, then, generally through disgust with the internal management, have gone to swell the lapsed, and been lost. The remnant who remain in the union recognise it for what it really is—a provident society—though they do not all understand that, in the final analysis, it operates in the interests of the master class.
The capitalist, in permitting trades unions to have a legal status, demands that they shall serve him further than the mere friendly society. This is done by all trade unions guaranteeing that their members shall not strike spontaneously, thus giving the capitalist time to prepare himself for any eventuality. The bakers do even better. In every district they have a house of call, where the unemployed foregather and await the masters’ convenience. As journeymen bakers invariably go in to work on Sunday evenings with curses on their lips, and as that is the time usually chosen to give the rack another twist, it sometimes happens that a spontaneous strike takes place. When this occurs the master rushes off to the nearest club house, where he can obtain all the men he wants. Thus trade unionists are always available to break the strike of non-union or union men. The most stoney-eyed can see how useful this is to the masters.
Putting Their Faith in the Enemy.
It is necessary for the officials of trade unions, in order to maintain their positions, to advertise themselves, and to prevent the dry rot of apathy among their followers putting a period to their existence as leaders, to invent at intervals a new slogan, such as the “All Grades Movement,” “Abolition of Night Work,” etc. The latter has been the rallying cry of the Bakers for several years past, and the pence diverted from the semi-starved wives and children of the operatives, have been spent in organising public meetings to force the bill for the abolition of night work and the limitation of the hours of labour through the Imperial Parliament, and also to pay the expenses of delegates to the House of Commons. These genuflected before Liberal, Lib-Lab and Lab-Lib M.P.s, humbly beseeching their help in pushing the “Charter of Emancipation” through. At the public meetings the men were assured by hired speakers that no compromise would be considered. The damnable system of night work was to cease. The abominable slavery of 80 to 100 hours a week was to be kicked into the limbo of the past. Many arguments were advanced to show the sweet reasonableness of their “demands,” the most nauseating being the cant of the “Christian Socialists.” Everything was working up for the final onslaught, when, as invariably happens in trade union agitations, as the hour of deliverance was about to strike, there came the anti-climax.
Dilly, Dilly Come and be Killed.
A cold douche quenched any hopes that might be still, flicking in the breasts of the oft-deluded operatives in the form of a circular letter to the branches of the union. This letter ran as follows :
“I am directed by my Committee to ask your members to approve of the proposed alteration in the Eight Hours Bill.We consider that the Bill stands an infinitely better chance of passing with the clause deleted and personally I believe that even if the Bill in its present form was to pass its second reading that particular clause would come out in committee. By deleting it we at once disarm three-fourths of the opposition to the measure which has hitherto been based largely upon the alleged impossibility (if the Bill were passed) of supplying the early morning roll and restaurant trade.Factory bakery proprietors say, not without reason, that it would handicap them in competing with the small shops, and some of the larger shops object on the score of the very large amount of capital they would have to spend in building additional bake houses.Some of the Liberal M.P.s whom we recently interviewed expressed the opinion that as a matter of policy there is no doubt that it would be far and away the best to make the issue a clear and straight one of Long Hours v. Short Hours, and not to give the employers the opportunity of going off on a side issue.Of course, the districts which have day work would still be able to retain it by trade union action, and others might regain it by the same method.Yours very truly,Louis A. Hill,29 May, 1908.”
Absurdity can go No Further.
Can anyone conceive of a document drafted with a more tender solicitude for the welfare of the enemy, the capitalist wolves? It abandons the main position under cover of presenting a straight issue. The one clause that did stand a dog’s chance of getting on to the statute book, and being enforced when there, was the night work clause, for the very cogent reason that an overwhelming case could be made out to prove that it is necessary in order to ensure that foodstuffs should be produced under wholesome conditions. Many bakers have collected ample materials to prove that bakeries, not only the catacomb bakeries, but some of the more modern factories, are centres for the propagation and dissemination of loathsome infections and contagious diseases, and that this state of affairs is the lowering of the vitality, and consequent disease among the operatives caused by night work and the long hours which are possible only under that system.
Let Criticism Begin At Home.
That, and the question of wholesome ingredients, must be dealt with from a Socialist workman’s point of view. When I have leisure, and as I am fast approaching the “scrapping age,” it shall be done. Once get the howling pack of Christian profit-hunters, who shriek anathemas at Leopold the Amorous from our garden city suburbs for the atrocities perpetrated in the collection of “red rubber” on the Congo, and who view with callous indifference the cruel slaughter of their compatriots in the production of white bread, to realise that this system re-acts against their material interests, the only chord to which they respond, that these flagrant outrages against the laws of Nature spell for them, too, impaired health, disease, and its consequent loss of treasure, and your precious reform is accomplished, nay, is forced on you, willy-nilly, and you would not be consulted on the matter.*
As regards the straight issue, Long v. Short Hours, the veriest political tyro knows the powerful interests which oppose the principle of limiting men’s labour by legal enactment, knows that the bell-wethers of the miners, those “gaseous vertibrates,” called labour leaders, cannot lead their followers to victory. Miners number many more thousands than bakers do tens, are splendidly organised from a trade union point of view, and have been “demanding” the eight hours’ day for twenty-five years, If the miners are in such a parlous state what chance do the poor bakers stand, except by frightening the capitalist parties through their stomachs ?
Twenty Four Hour Day Not Sufficient.
The peremptory stoppage of night work would automatically curtail the hours of labour, as is well known to the masters’ spokesmen. If a man started work at 6 a.m. and wrought till midnight he would only then have completed an eighteen hours’ day, whereas it is not uncommon for a baker to see the clock round twice at the week-end. Every baker knows that it breaks a master’s heart to see his men go home at ten o’clock in the morning, after having done twelve hours slogging. The day is at its busiest, and under a score of pretexts first one hour then another is added to the night’s work until one night is driven into the next, and the baker is robbed of all that makes life endurable. He comes out late in the day completely exhausted, his eyes are dazzled by the daylight; and if he takes one “half ale” he is fuddled, two and he is “blindo.” The nasty, drunken beast !
The last sentence in Mr. Hill’s letter is comic in view of the position of the cotton operatives, the awful plight of the railway men, and the utter rout of “the most powerful and the most perfect type of trade union in the world,” the engineers. The fact is the bakers can obtain nothing by trade union organisation, nor could they if 95 per cent. were organised. Their position has gradually become worse, their skill is fast becoming needless, they are being reduced to the status of the unskilled labourers, who can, and are, taking their places as machine tenders. They are a diminishing number, owing to the introduction of machinery doubling and redoubling the output per man in what is a limited trade, and while their nominal wages have risen slightly, their real wages have gone down considerably, for they have lost their allowance of bread and flour, sack money (which at one time amounted to several shillings weekly), yeast money, millers’ Xmas boxes, and other extras, and by mid-week many of them are “broke to the world,” as they phrase it—yet they never spend any money. Their jobs are more precarious, and they are “scrapped” at an earlier age as regular hands and become jobbers—especially now they are so inconsiderate as to lie down and die in the bake-house, or drop down in the street as they wend homeward.
No reform or series of reforms can touch that position. No trade union can act even as a brake to steady the downward rush. As the years roll by capital gets more aggressive, more relentless and its engines of death act with more deadly precision. The trade union is a spent force: capital can no longer be fought with the velvet glove. The only effective means is an economic revolution. The issue has too long been obscured by the thousands of tricky liars who prostitute their talents for grub. None have done it so effectively, or so cheaply to the capitalist, as those who have posed as labour leaders and dissipated the energies of the working class by focussing their attention on this or that trumpery reform that does not matter, while pumping an income from the stomachs of the starving women and children of the proletariat. Signs are manifold that their baneful influence is at last waning. We are now face to face with the fact that the class ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth, in the final analysis, spells, not “race suicide,” but race murder. There is no other name for it. There is no social problem to the Socialist. He has the key to the situation. He alone recognises with joy that society is in the melting-pot of the Social Revolution, and that the issue will be—must be—Socialism or annihilation.
J. Smith.
* Since this was written Mr. Haldane has said (Ladybank, Sept 26) that the Government “had to deal with the prevention of diseases among the poor, in the interest not merely of the individual, but of the State.”
Why the Unemployed are Necessary under Capitalism. (1908)
Beyond doubt the problem of unemployment is beginning to assume a new aspect. Hitherto a regrettable, but quite incidental, visitation of Providence, a working-class concern (as bad trade has been to do with the muster class), a temporary inconvenience, our rulers have said, not entirely beyond the ameliorative touch of Private Charity, the problem is now developing a new visage.
The Incubus of the Out-o’-Work.
There is an ugly gleam in its eye, an all-devouring menace in its bestial mouth. No longer can the capitalists pretend that Private Charity is able to deal with the situation—it has been like a bee lending its honey sac to the support of a hungry elephant. It is so short a while since the dread shape was rampant over the land, and now it rises again, with added stature, with renewed rage and redoubled vigour. But the disquieting thing is that during the interim the shape has never for a moment been banished. Our lords and gentlemen and honorable boards, our masters and pastors and those set in authority over us, our organisers of production and captains of industry, all took it for a ghost, and tried to “lay” the ghost each in his own way. And alike for those who took it to the Lord in prayer, and those who passed measures in the legislature, and those who offered propitiation out of the lean purse of Private Charity, and those who accepted the Miltonian dictum that “they also serve who only stand and wait,” the shape unobligingly refused to be “laid.” The thing has not righted itself, even temporarily.
A strengthening suspicion is spreading over the minds of the master class that when the thing does right itself, it will do so in a way distinctly unpleasant to them. It dawns upon them that this thing which, they with complaisance regarded as a cross the workers had to bear, threatens more and worse against the rulers than the ruled. The idea takes shape that this nightmare is the product of their own operations, the inevitable and ominous companion of capitalist production, and they go in mortal fear that, sooner or later, it must overwhelm them.
The Policy of Sop Throwing.
Hence there are signs that every cheap expedient is to be used in the endeavour to stave off the flood of destruction which threatens to burst from this heaped up and increasing mass of humanity so completely cut off from the means of life. And are these efforts to succeed ? Let us enquire into the nature of the problem.
It is not the mere fact that so many men are idle that constitutes the serious feature of the problem. It may be no unmixed blessing to have this army of workless workers kicking their heels together, especially when the devil begins to apply his solution by finding work for their idle hands to do, but it is nowhere suggested that any other consideration can compare with the fact that the unemployed lack the necessaries of life—they starve in their great numbers, and those greater numbers dependent upon them starve in company. The real problem is, therefore, not to provide work for the unemployed, but to furnish them with the means of subsistence. It is a misnomer to call it an unemployed problem it is a starvation problem.
The solution of the starvation problem has been left to Private Charity: she has failed. They say the goddess has a slender purse, and we know that is true. Let us then suppose Private Charity’s purse as broad and deep and illimitable as her heart is said to be, that out of her bottomless resources and melting pity she could and did give to repletion to all directly or indirectly suffering from the effects of unemployment, what then would happen ?
The Awful Indolence of Man.
Alas for her peace of mind, our masters never tire of telling us what would happen. “Human nature,” they say, “would assert itself. It is not human nature to engage in uncongenial toil save under pressure. Remove the pressure of want from the unemployed and at once you have an army of ‘won’t works.'” Private Charity consents to the judgment, as must you and I.
There is no doubt about it, man does not sell his labour-power, and with it necessarily his liberty, for fun. To be unemployed is no terrible hardship in the absence of the poverty which accompanies working-class unemployment. Relieve us of the coercive force of the empty stomach, the shameless importunity of the landlord, and so on, and, frankly, we would not worry about work—our human nature is not so different from that of our betters that we need blush to confess that. And then what would happen ?
What would happen, my friends, in this impossible case, is just this. Those in employment,, finding themselves relieved of the competition of the workless (we will leave out of consideration the fact that their “human nature” would impel them to become workless, too, upon such terms), would begin to cast about them for some means of improving their condition. As it is true, as our masters tell us, that the workers would not sell themselves to toil unless they were forced to, it follows that they would oppose a more effective resistance to the weakened coercion. They would demand a higher price for their labour-power, either through increased wages or a shorter working day, or both.
Nothing Left for the Boss – What O !
We are taking here the extreme case, in which the labour market is entirely and effectually relieved of the pressure of the unemployed—whether by provision of work or of direct sustenance does not matter one iota. Theoretically, the worker, being without a competitor, would have things all his own way. Wages, being a price, must rise by leaps and bounds, as all prices do in the absence of competitors. And as, mind you, wages are that portion of the total value created which is enjoyed by those who create it, it follows that a rise in wages results (other things remaining constant) in a decrease of the portion of value left to those who do not create it.
Now mark the effect. Capitalist demand for labour-power is excited only by the desire for that portion of the value created which remains after that labour-power is paid for, and will therefore be in proportion to the relative amount of that surplus-value. Just as the removal of the unemployed from the labour market has torn from the employing class the power of resisting the demands of the working class, so now the diminished profits react against the worker by lessening the demand for labour-power which the desire for profit alone creates. Those concerns which have been run at the lowest profit, immediately cease to show any at all, and are shut down, and Private Charity has other hordes to comfort at her eleemosynary bosom. Solomon gurgled of “breasts like towers,” but she needs breasts like oceans for the job she has taken on, must wear thin and thinner with the calls upon her system, and after all her sacrifice will prove unavailing, for wages, rising to the point of extinguishing all profit, has extinguished with it the capitalists’ desire to engage their factories
and machinery in the process of wealth production.
No Profit, No Production.
Here is a deadlock. The solution of the unemployed problem by sustaining the workless has resulted in the raising of wages, the absorption of profit, and, as a necessary corollary, the cessation of production. From which it appears that idleness has its dignity, no less than labour, since the unemployed are necessary to capitalist production, and that it is true indeed that “they also serve who only stand and wait.”
But capitalist sophism tells us that other things do not remain constant—which, of course, is true enough. We are told that a rise in wages is followed by a rise in prices, but this is presuming too much upon our ignorance. The workers create all value, whether it take the shape of golden sovereigns, loaves of bread, stained glass angels, or what not. If then the price of loaves went up alone the sovereign would buy fewer than before; but if the price of gold rose proportionately, the relative positions of the two remain the same. Just all prices are to go up, since all commodities are the result of wage labour and all wages are to rise. The result is that none of their relative positions have changed. The sovereign still buys as many loaves before, as many Manifestoes or SOCIALIST STANDARDS. There has then been no rise in prices, though, since our ingenuous masters always except one commodity (labour-power) from the added price-stature, they manage to indicate a fall in wages—which is all they want to do. But, with no unemployed “standing and waiting,” the working class would hold the whip hand. And all this is apart from the fact that prices of commodities do not bear relation to the cost of the labour-power consumed in their production, but to the amount of necessary labour embodied in them.
Machinery creates its own Unemployed.
Again other things do not remain constant. We have been considering an extreme case, where production has ceased because profit has ceased, and all because there were no unemployed to keep down wages. It is clear then, that if production is to continue, is must either do so under conditions in which its operation is not dependent upon profits, or the unemployed must be again brought into being to force down wages and allow profit to reappear.
The system makes beautiful provision for this by the law of the development of machinery. In practically every trade there exists machinery and methods in partial use far in advance of that generally employed—indeed, all through the industrial world there are degrees of perfection or imperfection in the means of production, tailing away into antiquity so distant as can just be run at sufficient profit to save them from extinction. In each degree of development there is a fringe where it is a question if better machinery could not be more profitably adopted. Any raising of wages at once decides the question. At all times machinery is the competitor of labour-power. To increase the price of the latter is merely to hasten its displacement by the former. In the printing world the Linotype composing machine is an accomplished fact. It is not that the machine would have to be invented—it is there, doing the work of several men under the hands of one. The only question is the diameter of the circle of its profitable application, and this, of course, is a matter of competition with the hand compositor.
An Automatic Adjustment (not patented).
If the wages of the latter go up, there is a corresponding advantage on the side of the machine, an enlargement in the circle of its employment, and an addition to the unemployed army to beat down wages again. It may be said that the machine operator’s wages rise also, but that is only one man’s wages against several displaced by the machine. It may also be objected that the cost of the machine is raised since higher wages must be paid for its construction, but that lands us again in the impossible position of witnessing an all-round rise in prices, and runs counter to the economic verity that prices (averaged by rises and falls cancelling one another) express, not the amount of wages consumed in producing the commodities, but the necessary labour embodied in them.
The fact is that every advance in wages reacts upon machinery and methods, pronouncing the doom of those requiring most labour-power to operate them, throwing men out of work, and so creating that army of unemployed which is necessary to the continuance of production so long as production is carried on for profit.
The position may be summed up as follows. As under present conditions all commodities are produced for profit, production must cease with the cessation of profit. As profit and wages between them constitute, and have their only source in, the value created by the worker, profit can only appear while wages are prevented from consuming the whole product of labour. As wages, the price of labour-power, are regulated by the relation of supply and demand, a surplus of labour-power (the unemployed) is necessary to prevent wages swallowing up all profit.
The Logic of the Revolutionary Proposal.
Therefore the unemployed army is a vital necessity to capitalist production, and there can be no solution under capitalism.
As wages are regulated by the relation of supply to demand of that labour-power which it is the price of, any diminution of the surplus (unemployed) labour-power is attended by a rise in wages. As machinery is the competitor of labour-power, any rise in the price of labour-power induces its displacement by machinery, which thus creates in perpetuity the out-of-work army. Therefore there can be no partial solution to the unemployed problem under capitalism.
As profit is the only incentive to capitalist production, and an unemployed army is an inevitable necessity to the production of profit, it is clear that the solution of the unemployed problem must be sought in a new productive objective—production must be independent of profit.
As the consumer demands the production of commodities because they are use-values, and demands them as long as they have use-value, it is clear that utility would be a more constant incentive to produce than profit, since things have always utility while people need them, and it is just when people need them most, because they are starving, but have no money to pay for them because they are unemployed, that there is no profit in their production.
As production for profit implies the power to wrest from the workers part of their product by keeping some of them (the unemployed) from production, it presupposes also private ownership by the few of the machinery of production.
And as production for use means production while any one has need, it implies free access to the means of production—in other words, common ownership of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, by and in the interest of the whole community.
The establishment of this changed property condition is the revolutionary proposition, the object of all Socialists. It is revolutionary because it changes the whole structure of society from top to bottom. In particular it abolishes the unemployed by giving free access to the means of production.
Socialism is the only cure for unemployment, therefore study Socialism.
A. E. Jacomb
Dynamite. (1908)
From the December 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard
WAS GOING TO SMASH SOCIALISM
At a sitting, before Mr. Registrar Brougham, for the public examination of E. W. Mockler, of Hungerford Road, Holloway, works manager, it appeared that he had interested himself in politics, and that about June, 1907, he became treasurer of the Constitutional Speakers’ League, which was to send vans round the country and supply speakers at meetings to be held on the subject of tariff reform. In respect of that league the debtor stated that he had personally incurred sundry liabilities, and he estimated that, including money advanced to the chairman (about £300 now appearing as a bad debt) and other expenses, he had lost about £750 in connection therewith. The horses and vans were eventually seized and sold for the payment of keep and storage. To his losses and liabilities on behalf of the league the debtor attributed his failure,—”Morning Advertiser,” 7.11.08.
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LETTING THE CAT OUT
Sir,—I beg to assure you that there is nothing of revolt against the Government in my letter stating I would not again contest Walworth. I wish to give the Prime Minister, Mr. Burns, and Mr. Haldane every support. What I do revolt against is any pandering to Socialism by less experienced and less wise Ministers, and entirely because their doing so helps reaction and blocks the way of the urgent reforms to which I am pledged. REFORM AND SOCIALISM ARE LIKE WATER AND FIRE—MUTUALLY DESTRUCTIVE.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
House of Commons, Oct. 26.
—” Standard.”
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HOW ABOUT YOUR CHILDREN?
When you go back to the early years of the nineteenth century, and read the accounts of children’s sufferings due to the cruelty of slave-drivers, your hearts are apt to cry out in anguish. Just think of today. Think of today in these great United States, children five and six years old, working from six in the morning until six in the evening, and at the hardest and most trying kind of labour. These children are being ruined by thousands by the manufacturers. It is killing the whole white race of the South.
It may be surprising, but it is the absolute truth, that things just as bad are going on right here in New York City. Child slavery thrives here in greater proportion than in the South.
There are parts of this city where little children are driven to work early in the morning for two hours and then sent to our American schools, and after school are forced into sweatshops, where they are obliged to work from three in the afternoon until eleven o’clock at night.—William H. Maxwell, Superintendent of Schools of New York City.
—”St. Louis Labour,” Oct. 17, 1908.
Who said ” Tariff Reform” ?
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CANDOR
Asked at a mass meeting last January, “What do you advise a conscientious working man to do who is out of a job and whose family is starving because he can’t get work ?” Mr. Taft, who weighs over twenty stone, flung his hands above his head in a gesture of despair as he answered, “God knows, I don’t.”
That pregnant ejaculation has travelled from New York to San Francisco and its echo has been heard from New Orleans to Minnesota. It is characteristic of its author—as honest an American as the United States ever produced.
“Star,” 8.11.08.
For the first time a mountain in travail has brought forth something that may pass for the truth. Taft may know God knows what a starving man should do, but certainly Taft, the capitalist doesn’t.
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WHAT DO THEY KNOW?
Much amusement was caused in the Lobby of the House of Commons last night by the circulation of a portrait in a New York newspaper. The words underneath were “England’s Bulwark Against Socialism—Mr. John Burns,” but the portrait, by some mischance, was that of Mr. Keir Hardie.
—” Daily Mail,” Guy Fawkes Day.
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No one, surely, can be so unkind to John Burns as his friends.
“Mr. Burns has seen one relevant fact of great importance. He has realised that if municipalities distribute their work with more regularity over the year and give out as much of it as possible during the winter months a good deal of unemployment can be prevented, and for some of it a resource will always be available.” “Daily News,” 26.10.08.
How can unemployment be affected by starving men in summer to feed them in winter ?
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We do get the truth, sometimes.
“The pretence that the existing distress is merely a transient phase due to financial disturbance in the United States and so forth is absurd.”—”Standard,” 26.10.08.
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This is interesting.
“One remedy for unemployment would be to double the wages of every working man. If that could be done to-morrow the spending power of the people would be doubled, and work would be provided, for every man and woman in Great Britain in providing for their needs.”-(Keir Hardie at Merthyr, 24,10.08.)
It is as difficult to mitigate unemployment by doubling wages as it would be to remove unemployment by abolishing wages.
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What d’ye say, Henderson ? What’s the good of it if it don’t find work for every child as well ?
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Oh ! these “Socialists.” Here is another specimen. Author, Philip Snowden.
“He wanted to assure all temperance workers of his sympathy and of the sympathy of his colleagues, who were working in other fields of reform—reforms which were no less temperance reforms … As one who deeply appreciates the very great injury and the very great obstacle which the drinking habits of the people present to the progress of every movement of a social reform character, I want to assure you that we are heart and soul with you, and we wish you God-speed. … In connection with the Trade Unions Congress there was always held a temperance fellowship meeting. Mr. Steadman, M.P., the secretary, had told him that he could remember the time when a temperance resolution was struck out of the agenda on the ground that temperance had nothing to do with labour.
“There was at the present moment another question besides that of temperance touching the hearts of the people—the wide-spread suffering and privation from want of employment.”—(“Manchester Guardian,” 10.10.08.)
The quotations are quite in their proper order. Observe the great question of “temperance reform” comes first, then the secondary matter of “unemployment,” while as for Socialism, that seems to have been “struck out of the agenda on the ground that it has nothing to do with labour.”
What We Are After. (1908)
The Socialist Party of Great Britain has for its OBJECT:
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.
Obviously the present social system is not so based. Its characteristics, class division and antagonism, riches and poverty, overwork and idleness, its law, public institutions and mentality, arise from and have their basis in the ownership and control of these means and instruments by a small part of society—the members of the capitalist class. Our wealthy mentors and their Press and platform hirelings admit as much when they tell us that if we abolish the “sacred rights of property” the whole social fabric will totter to the ground, even though, they conclude with the gratuitous assumption that “anarchy and chaos” will follow.
So that there may be no mistake, let us at once state which are the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution that Socialism demands shall be owned in common and controlled democratically. They are those winch are essential to the community’s well-being—those which it is worth the people’s while to acquire, hold and administer ; which, as private property, enable their owners to get rent, profit or interest—those things, in short, which enable their possessors to exploit the workers. Thus the carpenter’s favourite plane, the wife’s knitting needles and a host of other odds and ends that deluded opponents of Socialism love to quibble over are excluded. The means of production and distribution that count, that are indispensible and worth going after, are, broadly speaking, the land, factories, warehouses, machinery, ships and railways.
Given, then, such a fundamental change in the basis of society as will be the social control of industry, in place of the existing private control, and tremendous changes must inevitably follow in the whole social superstructure. The capitalist-landlord class, deprived of its unearned incomes, will either have to come and do its quota of necessary labour like the rest of us, or accept the alternative it offers us workers—starvation. The census of 1901 shows that there were then 663,656 adult men who did not even profess to have any occupation. These “gentlemen” together with their numerous female dependents, and the myriads of domestic servants who pander to their luxury, constitute a potential supply of labour power which, when applied, will help to vastly increase the supply of goods and services available to the community. The thousands of clerks to-day employed in booking profits will, with the abolition of the profits system, be set free for work of social utility. The same applies to the innumarable agents, commercial travellers, advertisers, printers, redundant shopkeepers and assistants.
There being no longer an enslaved class to keep in subjection and no longer any need to forcibly hold markets or protect capitalist investments abroad, the stupendous amount of energy now wasted in the maintenance of arnies and navies will become available for the satisfaction of society’s needs.
Thus at a stroke tho establishment of the Socialist Republic involves an immense increase in the productive powers of the community, and consequently of the possibilities of enjoyment and of leisure ; and further, the abolition of war and vice-breeding, parasitic idleness. The security of well-rewarded, brief labour would spread over the land a happy and bony people.
The condition that necessarily follows from the attainment of the OBJECT of the S.P.G.B. is then, seen to be infinitely preferable to the conditions at present obtaining, at least from the workers’ standpoint.
The product of industry now divided into a small part wages and a large part profits will then remain entirely with and at the disposal of the industrious. Then invention and more economical methods will not, as now, spell unemployment and misery, but greater comfort and leisure, giving opportunities for such, physical and mental development as but few of the working class even hope for to-day.
Many poor, half-fed workers, carefully gulled by the political and journalistic organs of the beneficiaries of the present system, will bring forward this and that (as they think) awkward question and objection ; but if they will reason out logically the consequences that flow from the S.P.G.B. Object applied to each case they have in mind, and compare the results as they affect themselves and those they love, with the results of the present capitalist system, they will realise, indeed, that the workers have nothing to lose but their chains, and a world to win.
By reasoning out for themselves and finding out the correct answer to the often trilling difficulties and objections brought against Socialism, instead of asking someone to think them out for them, our fellow working men and women will the sooner enjoy the novel satisfaction of being less often tricked and misled. Then, indeed, we shall be making headway toward our goal, realising that in Socialism, understood and fought for by a wide-awake and ever vigilant democracy, lies our only hope.
J. H. Halls
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