A correspondent from U.S,.A. writes: “In discussion, many workers maintain that the condition of the working class is getting worse all the time. They say the ratio which the workers receive in values contrasted with what the capitalists receive in values becomes less and less as capitalism develops, i.e., the workers’ share of new value always grows less. This contention meets with a difficulty. Let us assume that 75 years ago the workers received half of what they produced, and that to-day they receive one-fifth. It is obvious that they are more intensely exploited. On the other hand, it is undeniable that to-day the workers receive more actual goods than they did 75 years ago, i.e., their real wages have gone up. In short, as capitalism develops, the workers are more intensely exploited at the same time that their real wages are increasing. In view of this fact, how can we say that the condition of the working class is getting worse all the time? By saying this, we imply that the workers are getting less and less material benefits, whereas in actuality the reverse is true."
The first point which emerges is that it is not good enough simply to say that the workers are “worse off" or “better off." It depends what you are comparing. As our comrade points out, the workers might be better off in the sense that they have a higher standard of living than formerly, but worse off in the sense that they get a smaller proportion of the wealth produced. We get a smaller fraction of the loaf, but a bigger piece of bread, because the loaf is much bigger.
There is no contradiction in this. The worker must have a rather larger slice of bread if he is to go on producing a much bigger loaf. Intensified exploitation not only takes more energy out of the worker but also requires more skill and knowledge. It is true that mechanisation, rationalisation, and so on, often tend to reduce the skilled craftsman to a machine minder or repetition worker. But machines which abolish skill require skill to produce; rationalisation requires brains to think the schemes out and operate them; large-scale production, keener competition, urbanisation, trustification and trade unionism, government and local government legislation—acting and reacting upon one another—progressively increase the complexity of the whole social organisation of which this large-scale production is the heart. Education Acts, Public Health Acts, Insurance Acts, are required to prevent deterioration and to produce a cleverer and fitter worker to run a mightier and more intricate system.
There is no doubt that at least the lower grades of the workers are fitter than they were 75 years ago. The incidence of the more outrageous diseases of gross malnutrition, such as infantile rickets, has been halved and halved again. Dairy products, fresh fruit and vegetables, the rare week-end “extravagances" of the harassed housewife, become more commonplace on the kitchen table. Maternal mortality has been greatly reduced. The death rate of young children in Great Britain during the summer months is one-eighth of the corresponding rate 40 years ago. The working class are taller, heavier, and live longer. The continued outcry from medical officers of health that much preventive sickness damages industry and robs children of the benefits of the education available, is well justified, but it does not follow that the worker's health is worse or no better. It means, rather, that the authorities' conception of physical well-being improves along with the needs of the capitalists for a fitter worker to do the work required of him. Similarly, the prevailing notion of what constitutes destitution, or the bare level of subsistence, has changed. As an example, comparison may be made between the diet scales in 1826 and to-day for inmates of Chelsea Institution: —
1826.Breakfast: Gruel or broth, 1 pint.Dinner: Meat (three days weekly), 8 ozs.; potatoes, 12 ozs.; bread, 3£ ozs.; beer,1 pint.Supper: Bread, 3½ ozs.; cheese, l½ ozs.; beer, 1 pint.1937.Breakfast: Tea, coffee or cocoa, 1 pint; Bread, 7 ozs., or porridge, ½ pint; jam or marmalade or syrup, 1½ ozs., or corned beef or sausage or brawn, 2 ozs.Dinner: Bread, 2 ozs.; meat (various), 4 ozs., of fish, 8 ozs.; potatoes, 6 ozs.; other vegetables (including pickles), 3 ozs.; pudding (various), 8 ozs., or raw fruit; tea, ½ pint.Tea: Tea, 1 pint; bread, 7 ozs.; margarine, ½ oz.; jam or cheese or cake.Supper: Tea, coffee or cocoa, ½ pint; bread and margarine, 2 ozs.; cheese or buns or biscuits.
The destitute to-day “enjoy” a standard of dining higher than that of a considerable section of regularly employed workers 75 years ago. And the workers are better off, not only in regard to basic food, clothing and shelter, but also in respect of sanitation, recreation, social amenities, “humanisation" of State relief, public manners and private decency.
There is equally no doubt that the worker is better educated. Public education, popular Press, cinema and radio, though inevitably propagandist, at least provide the bricks and mortar of critical thinking. Churches get emptier. News theatres flash world news across the screen. Even the electoral appeals of our capitalist masters have now become more refined, more factual and more sophisticated. The cynic, the soppy, the shyster, the high-waisted “tough-guy,” are insignificant elements in a working class who are mentally equal to the task of operating efficiently a social system far more complex than Socialism need be.
This rise in the standard of living, physical and mental, is necessitated by the technical requirements of capitalism itself, and in turn it helps those mental changes which will make Socialists of the workers. Capitalism gives the workers a higher standard of living—and a higher standard of indignation. They get a sniff of the good things that might be, in the same breath that the gulf between riches and poverty gets wider, industrial depressions more long-drawn out, war more fantastically ferocious, speeding up more hysterical, insecurity more widespread. The very violence of these contrasts brings them to the attention of the workers: they begin to recognise them as problems. And the same ingenuity which the capitalist requires to solve his problems of profit-making can solve the worker's own problem in the midst of plenty, and economic insecurity in the face of colossal power over nature. Whether the workers are better or worse off is a matter of definition: it is a source of inspiration for the Socialist movement that the workers are better equipped to grasp the Socialist solution to their poverty—common ownership of the means of life.
Frank Evans
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