The Monarchy—past, present and future (1965)

From the October 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Old ideas die hard, and every age, including the present, is strewn with the debris of the past.

By far the biggest collection of such debris is the Monarchy. All levels of society, from Parliament down, are thick with relics of this once powerful institution. In theory the Monarchy is the centre, and ultimate seat, of power; in reality it is a mere shadow with nothing left of its old influence. But although a shadow, it has a tremendous hold on unthinking minds.

The Monarchy for many centuries really was the centre of power and authority, and the battle against it was long and bitter, but even now when it is won and over, large numbers of people either fail or refuse to grasp the fact. They still write personal letters to the Queen asking her to exercise one of her prerogatives such as the prerogative of mercy. Such letters are, of course, automatically passed on to the appropriate department. But the royal prerogatives and powers, completely hollow as they are today, were not always so. Each one was a powerful weapon in the hands of the Crown, and it used them constantly in its battle with Parliament.

To quote just a few; the Privy Council was once the King’s Council, the highest body in the land; it supplied the Ministers of the Crown, and through the Court of Star Chamber could overawe any subject. The right to create Peers enabled the Crown to fill the Upper House with its own supporters, while the right to grant and withdraw charters to towns was used to pack the Lower House. The right to dissolve Parliament (still in theory a Royal Prerogative, but in practice decided by the outgoing Prime Minister) was used to get rid of an awkward Commons, in the hope of a more pliable one being elected. Again Wardship, so beloved of Sunday Newspapers in elopement cases, once gave the King control over heiresses. This was both a means of putting political pressure on their parents, and—by the sale of the control of minors—a source of ready cash.

The Monarchy today is popular. After all it is difficult to fall out with something that says nothing, attacks nobody, expresses no controversial opinions, and is all things to all people. The Monarchy is said to be above politics, which means out of politics. It will accept all governments whatever their party or policy, and although the titular head of the Church of England, will greet the Pope or the Salvation Army with the same meaningless affability, Jew or Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, they are all in the fold; in fact it is difficult to keep out of it.

This was not always so. Until well into the 19th century the Monarch was a politician, and as such suffered the ups and downs of popularity common to politics. Queen Anne was a Tory and recognised as one, while Victoria on her ascension openly supported the Whig government of Lord Melbourne. Monarchs shared the unpopularity of the parties they identified themselves with. William IV, at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, was pelted with clods of earth by the London mob, while Victoria was greeted with shouts of “Mrs. Melbourne” by the same well-mannered crew. Victoria spent most of her long reign in various stages of unpopularity. In the early days attempts were made to assassinate her, and bitter personal attacks were made in the Press. The Prince Consort was made the butt of comic songs from the stage of the early Music Halls. It was only during Victoria’s last 20 years, when the power of the Crown was largely at an end, that she began to be built up into a legend.

The usual line, which was heard a lot of at the last Coronation, was that the Georges were unpopular because of their immoral lives and bad behaviour, and that Victoria’s blameless life restored the prestige of the Crown. This theory does not bear examination. George III, who reigned for 60 years—nearly as long as Victoria—lived a life of domestic dullness that not even the most prudish of Victorians could have objected to. This fact, far from endearing him to his subjects, was the cause of ribald songs sung in taverns, treating his “virtue” as a joke. It was the political position of the throne, and not the private life of its occupant, that decided popular sentiments.

By the time of the Restoration an uneasy balance between King and Parliament had been struck, with the King as the Executive—a kind of permanent President—appointing and dismissing Ministers and controlling affairs, and Parliament as the Legislature, with the sole right to levy taxes. This was the idea accepted by most of the participants in the Civil War. Only a minority of people, with ideas ahead of their times, thought of Parliament as the sovereign body. Judicial murder, although becoming rare, was still a hazard during the reigns of Charles II and James II. An unsuccessful politician still stood the chance of having a phoney charge of treason fixed on him, and conviction by a packed court. This largely disappeared after 1688.

The Revolution of 1688 weakened the Crown, William and Mary becoming joint Sovereigns on conditions laid down by Parliament. The Bill of Rights established Parliament’s right to elect the sovereign, change the order of succession, and depose a King. The Act of Settlement of 1701 extended these powers. Kings were forbidden to leave the country without the consent of Parliament, and no judge could be removed except by Parliament. Thus began the slow but steady stripping of power from the Crown, and its transfer to Parliament, that went on through the 18th and early 19th centuries. This process was aided by the fact that from Queen Anne to William IV, or to quote the terms of common abuse from “Brandy Nan” to “Silly Billy,” the throne was occupied by a line of people of the most monumental incompetence. Not that Parliament in the 18th century was even remotely democratic, the vast majority of the people having no vote. Power at National level was largely in the hands of the Aristocracy—the large landowners—and at local level in those of the gentry or lesser landowners. The masses, especially in London, expressed themselves by bouts of rioting and arson.

By the time of Victoria’s ascension the power of the Crown was largely gone, but she could still, in 1839, keep a Whig government in power by refusing to appoint Peel to Prime Minister in spite of the government’s lack of a proper majority. Victorian politics were tough and dirty, and the methods used to force the hand of the Queen were ruthless in the extreme. An interesting point is the part played by those later pillars of respectability, the Times and the Morning Post, who printed stuff that would land a modern editor in gaol.

What the future of the Monarchy will be is anybody’s guess. One thing is certain. If the bulk of the Capitalist class decide to end it, they will do so. After all they got rid of one King in 1936, and would not hesitate to get rid of the whole lot. Something that is equally certain is that if the Monarchy goes, but Capitalism remains, the working class will not notice any difference. Except perhaps for a different head on the postage stamps.

Les Dale

1776: Whose republic? (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Republic of Washington will grow and grow, until it makes the whole world tremble’ – Marquis de Sade.

In American schools children are taught to call it the American Revolution. Was it? In Britain we were brought up to refer to it as the American War of Independence. But whose independence?

The man mostly urging the colonial owning classes to declare independence from the British crown was an Englishman: the political reformer Thomas Paine. Largely alone in his zeal for the independence of the American commercial class, he would be resisted by the much more timid George Washington and the latter’s clique of slave-owning mouthpieces for ‘liberty’, who were reluctant to go so far, until forced to by circumstances and the sheer ferocity of the British army.

The colonial gentry had launched the cry against imperial taxation and oppression in 1775 and Paine, for whom dissent, anywhere, was an irresistible magnet, became its most zealous spokesman. In his pamphlet aptly named Common Sense he showed the absurdity of the American colonies being ruled by a tiny island kingdom a gigantic ocean away. When the people of his own roots, the pacifist Quakers, warned the rebels of inviting carnage, Paine told them to mind their own business and not interfere in a ‘just’ war (where have we heard that before?).

Oppression is oppression, regardless of who the oppressor is, and Paine was soon to learn this, with the ingratitude and disdain of his supposed colonial ‘comrades’ after they had at last yielded to his urgings that they replace the British rag on a pole with a republican one.

American farmers and ordinary people bore the brunt of British ferocity as the Quakers’ warning came true.

British ferocity, directly caused by the Washington revolt, did indeed provoke a hatred that benefited those riding it and carried them to victory and the overthrow of British rule. War continued, however, beyond 1782 (its official end), with the British navy attacking towns and shipping and in turn put to flight by an American known (ironically) as Captain Nelson, called a pirate by the British. As late as 1812 Britain launched an invasion of the new United States of thirteen colonies, and hostilities would carry on until into the American Civil War of the 1860s.

During the war the British state used the native American Great Lakes tribes against the colonists in the same way that earlier in the century the Jacobites (the political faction supporting the Stuart monarchy of James II) had done in Scotland. Robert Burns did not like the Jacobites, but he admired the tribal Highland people. As his song Ye Jacobites By Name suggests, they stirred up rebellion, seducing the Highlanders to their cause, then, when it failed, scarpered off to France, leaving the Highland people to suffer the vengeance of the British state.

The Jacobites did this twice in the 18th century, and the last time they scarpered, in 1746, it would result in the destruction of the Highlanders who had followed them. The clearances would have been on the cards anyway at some point, because, like the native Americans and other native peoples around the world, the clans were an obstruction to the development of capitalism.

So who benefited? For all the talk of ‘liberty’, certainly not the United States’ four million African-American slaves, no matter how hoarsely and painfully Tom Paine and others implored. The poor farmers’ subsequent revolt, demanding relief from poverty, and stressing their having fought for the Congress, was ferociously crushed. The British during the war had helped secure the later fate of the native people too, using them against the colonists, teaching the natives about scalping, and ensuring the colonists’ eternal hatred for ‘Indians’.

As for Paine, his dedication to George Washington of The Rights of Man did not help him when arrested for ‘moderantism’ by the French Jacobins. Washington ignored his appeals to save him from the guillotine (for that he had to rely on others) while The Age of Reason – a rational dissection of the Bible –finally sealed his fate where the United States of America were concerned.

In short, 1776 marks yet another murderous squabble between capitalist factions. Revolution – the world revolution of those who actually do all the work in society – is yet to come, and when it does it will be truly democratic and thus will not require violence.

A.W.

American independence and its mythology (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 is upon us, it seems like a good time for socialists to assess this momentous event. Marx, in contrast to his writing on the American Civil War, has little to say about the conflict other than that he saw it as progressive but unresolved until the North’s victory over the South in 1865.

Although we have little interest in the international and internecine struggles between members of the bourgeoisie, what of the claim that these events on the east coast of North America constituted a revolution? If so what kind of revolution and was Marx correct as seeing the transition of 13 colonies into a nation-state as a progressive event in respect of the long-term aim of socialism? A cynic might suggest it was the capitalists of both states and their hatred of paying tax that generated the conflict between them. That the early USA was almost entirely dependent on slave labour for its wealth does make the shouts for liberty and justice rather hollow and hypocritical but then the international bourgeoisie have always been masters of myth creation and, as ever, it falls to Marxist socialists to try and separate myth from reality by stripping away the ideological overgrowth.

By 1763 the British had succeeded in expelling their French colonial rivals from North America but in doing so they had all but bankrupted their treasury. To maintain a series of forts to protect the victory was expensive and Parliament resolved to raise the revenue to pay for this by a series of taxes that regulated overseas trade on the 13 colonies. The colonists, on the other hand, thought that they had done their fair share of fighting to help the British defeat the French and saw no reason to pay for the honour. The climax to this came with the implementation of the hated ‘stamp act’ which was the first direct tax imposed by the British.

In 1763 the British had also forbidden any further expansion west because, for one thing, they feared the cost of going to war with the native Americans. However, the colonists saw the west as ripe for land speculation and they proceeded to create a ‘general assembly’ in the same year to oppose these British measures under the slogan: ‘No taxation without representation’. In response London passed a series of ‘quartering acts’ that imposed British troop garrisons in many of the leading towns with the added insult that the locals should provide them with food and shelter. Boston erupted and British ships were confiscated, whilst embargoes were placed on imports and exports to the ‘old country’. This was an act of rebellion against the crown which resulted in an invasion of Boston in 1768. Boston became a hotbed of rebellion with constant tension and violent skirmishes which in 1770 climaxed with the infamous ‘Boston Massacre’ in which many colonists were killed. Riots followed including the famous ‘Boston Tea Party’ where British ships were looted and their cargoes destroyed. By now the Americans had begun to create armouries for what they regarded as an inevitable war. On discovering the location of one of these a British army marched on Concord to seize the armaments but were confronted along the way at Lexington by a colonial militia and the first battle of the war took place.

The war was to last until 1781 when the British surrendered at Yorktown to the Americans and their French and Spanish allies. The colonists had won their independence but what kind of state would they create and was it in any way ‘revolutionary’? The propaganda against Britain had portrayed it as a feudal autocracy when, in fact, the King and his aristocrats (both old and newly created) had been capitalists for a good 100 years before the rise of merchant capitalism in the new world, and parliament was the final arbiter of policy.

The American economy was mainly based on the labour of chattel slavery and people like George Washington lived like ancient Roman patricians on massive slave estates. So in its formative years the republic saw very little change from the perspective of the black slaves and the poor white farmers. Britain was well into its ‘industrial revolution’ and was a much more progressive state than its new competitor. Most of the signatories of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ were slave owners who, apparently, saw no hypocrisy between the claims of liberty and justice for the white elite and the reality of life within for hundreds of thousands of enslaved inhabitants.

Thomas Jefferson began his political career opposing slavery but ended it as a racist bigot of the worst kind. In North America the conjunction of slavery and skin colour became enshrined in the American psyche and even after the ‘emancipation’ at the conclusion of the civil war many of the formerly enslaved became ‘share-croppers’ – in effect, little better than medieval serfs. America had progressed from chattel slavery to feudal serfdom. This kind of racism was to fuel the genocide of the Native Americans and so preserve the racial and political violence embedded deep within the culture which survives to this day. Of course, socialists are not surprised at the depths of bourgeois hypocrisy but the American oligarchs seem to have taken it to another level claiming that they have no empire and that their state violence was always in ‘defence of democracy’. Perhaps the origin of their state is one of the reasons for the US’s continual political backwardness? If 1781 was revolutionary it was an extremely reactionary revolution more akin to the Third Reich and its genocidal and slave-economy policies than to the English and French revolutions.

Many historians regard the relationship between the founders’ support of slavery and their call for liberty and justice as some kind of paradox; they shy away from the truth of the origin of their country being founded on a lie. It can be said that the absence of any mitigating counterforce to the free market capitalism embraced by the oligarchs made it possible for the northern states to invest millions of dollars into industrial technology and so become one of the most powerful economic powerhouses by the end of the nineteenth century – in that Marx was correct; but what he didn’t foresee was that this extremely technologically advanced country would not also enjoy a commensurable rise in working-class political consciousness. Consumerism, religion and nationalism would prevent any important political evolution and has led to the kind of authoritarian ‘king’ figure that America now endures. The world longs for the end of the murderous American imperialism which seems, at last, to be within sight. Its birth in violence, racism and genocide and the malign shadow that has forever haunted America as a result might finally destroy it. No doubt it will be replaced, in the absence of socialist consciousness, by an equally rapacious capitalist global empire of some kind. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ will have to wait until people realise just how to make what was and is now just a platitude into something meaningful and real.

Wez.

Exhibition Review: Manchester and the world (2026)

Exhibition Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The John Rylands Library in Manchester was founded on the basis of profits made from the cotton industry. It is currently staging an exhibition, ‘Cottonopolis: the Origins of Global Manchester’, on until May. A number of books, letters and samples of cloth are displayed (one of the books being Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England).

The population of Manchester grew massively in the 19th century, to over ninety thousand, this increase being mainly in workers in the cotton industry. There were massive increases in production of calico and fustian, especially in the twenty years from 1790, and cotton cloth became Britain’s most valuable export. Inventions by Arkwright, Compton and others increased productivity enormously, and there was sizeable growth in companies that made machines, as well as in companies that output the cotton cloth. Steam power resulted in mechanical mills, and new ways of printing cloth were also developed. Mass production meant that the British weaving industry was able to out-compete manufacturers in India.

But, of course, weaving was only part of the story, as the raw cotton came from plantations worked on by slave labour, in the Caribbean and the American South. Some of the cloths manufactured were poor quality ‘Africa goods’, produced for sale to slave traders to clothe the slaves. One suggestion made in the displays is that the creation of a captive workforce in the colonies changed ideas about how workers in Britain could be exploited under the same industrial machine.

Nor was it just Manchester that profited from the enormous expansion of the cotton trade. Liverpool became an important port for imports and exports, and new canals were built, partly to transport food, coal and so on to the growing industrial hub in the city and its surroundings.

Not a large exhibition, but an informative and interesting set of displays.

Paul Bennett

William Godwin, Shelley and Communism (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just over a hundred and fifty years ago died William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, one of the seminal works in Britain of radical criticism of existing class society. Godwin had been born in 1756, the son of a nonconformist preacher, as he himself had been for a few years before coming to see through religion as untrue. The first edition of his Political Justice appeared in 1793, his contribution to the ferment of social and political ideas sparked off by the French Revolution, then still in progress. In 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneer feminist work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Godwin was also the author of a number of novels expressing his views, one of which—Caleb Williams—has been a television serial. In addition his Of Population, written in 1820, was the classic contemporary refutation of the nonsense peddled by Malthus.

Godwin has been described as a “utilitarian anarchist”. This is not an unfair description since he was very much in the Age of Reason philosophical tradition which saw humans as isolated individuals pursuing happiness as a measurable quantity and he could be described as an anarchist insofar as he looked forward to the “euthanasia of government”.

In Political Justice Godwin set out to examine what form of society would have to be established to conform to the principles of justice as laid down by Reason. Defining government as “regulated force”, he came to the conclusion that this would have to be “a simple form of society without government”. What he envisaged was the division of a country like Britain into self-administrating districts which would run their own affairs without the need for laws, or prisons, or “regulated force” in any form and which would send delegates to a central confederal assembly in the rare event of any situation requiring co-ordinated action on a national scale. It is this proposal for a “society without government” that has led to anarchists regarding him as one of their forebears.

But Godwin was not simply an advocate of a society without government. He was also an advocate of “equality of conditions”, “a state of equal society” as he called it. “Equality of conditions”, he wrote, “or, in other words, an equal admission to the means of improvement and pleasure, is a law rigorously enjoined upon mankind by the voice of justice” (All quotes are from 1976 Pelican Classic edition). His argument went as follows:

Human beings are partakers of a common nature; what conduces to the benefit or pleasure of one man will conduce to the benefit or pleasure of another. Hence it follows, upon the principles of equal and impartial justice, that the good things of the world are a common stock, upon which one man has as valid a title as another to draw for what he wants.

In every society, the produce, the means of contributing to the necessities and conveniences of its members, is of a certain amount. In every society, the bulk at least of its members contribute by their personal exertions to the creation of this produce. What can be more desirable and just than that the produce itself should, with some degree of equality, be shared among them?

This was a familiar argument with advocates of an equal society in place of existing unequal class society. It led some of them to advocate “a community of goods to be maintained by the vigilance of the state” as Godwin described one such proposal current in his day. Naturally, as an advocate of a society without government, he strongly rejected this speaking of “how pernicious the consequences would be if government were to take the whole permanently into their hands, and dispense to every man his daily bread”.

What, then, did he propose? How did he envisage goods being distributed in his “free and equal state of society”? Here a misunderstanding has sometimes arisen due to the fact that, in Book VIII (“Of Property”), Godwin defends a right to property. He distinguishes three “degrees” of property. The first is property in the goods an individual uses personally. The second is property in the product of an individual’s own labour. The third is property which entitles the beneficiary to appropriate the labour of others.

For Godwin, this third type of property was unjust as it involves exploitation:

All wealth, in a state of civilised society, is the produce of human industry. To be rich is merely to possess a patent entitling one man to dispose of the produce of another man’s industry.

Privilege entitles a favoured few to engross to themselves gratifications which the system of the universe left at large to all her sons.

This “monopoly of property”, exercised by both landlords and capitalists (Godwin actually uses the term), should simply be abolished by the state ceasing to uphold it. The other two types of property should remain inviolate. Nobody, neither another person nor the community, had a right to deprive a person of their personal effects nor the produce of their own labour. This is where the misunderstanding has arisen, with some misinterpreting this defence of a right to property as meaning that Godwin was not a “communist” but merely a “leveller”, somebody who did not want to abolish property but merely to equalise property holdings within the framework of a commodity society.

But this was not at all what Godwin meant. For although he argued that no-one, not even the community as a whole, had the right forcibly to deprive someone of the product of their own labour, he argued equally forcefully that it was the duty of everyone to make available to other people the products of their labour over and above their own needs. In other words, instead of selling their surplus produce for money and accumulating wealth from the proceeds, they ought to make it available free for other people to satisfy their needs. Godwin did not go into the practical details of how this would work but he was quite clear that buying and selling would not enter into it. Discussing the division of labour, he wrote:

Shall each man manufacture his tools, furniture and accommodations? This would perhaps be a tedious operation. Every man performs the task to which he is accustomed, more skilfully, and in a shorter time than another. It is reasonable that you should make for me that which perhaps I should be three or four times as long in making, and should make imperfectly at last. Shall we then introduce barter and exchange? By no means. The moment I require any further reason for supplying you than the cogency of your claim, the moment, in addition to the dictates of benevolence, I demand a prospect of reciprocal advantage to myself, there is an end to that political justice and pure society of which we treat.

And in The Enquirer, a collection of essays he published in 1797, he was even more explicit:

Were the members of any community sufficiently upright and disinterested, I might supply my neighbour with the corn he wanted, and he supply me with the cloth of which I was in need, without having recourse to the grovelling and ungenerous methods of barter and sale. We might supply each other for this reason only, because one party had a superfluity and the other a want, without in the smallest degree adverting to a reciprocal bounty to be by this method engendered; and we might depend upon the corresponding upright and disinterested affections of the other members of the community, for the being in like manner supplied with the commodities of which we were in want.

So Godwin resolved the problem of who, in his “free and equal state of society”, was to distribute goods according to people’s needs by saying that it would be the producers of particular goods of their own free will. His equal society was to be a “spontaneous equality of conditions” not an enforced one. Although he did not use the term “communism” (which was not then in use) or even that of” community of goods”—in fact, to tell the truth, he was too much in the individualist tradition to have used such terminology—his system was equivalent to what might be called a “voluntary” communism (as opposed to one “maintained by the vigilance of the state”). For, if we assume that the producers deposit the surplus over their needs of their particular product in some general storehouse from which they can take the products of other producers that they need, then we have the classic distribution system proposed by previous pre-industrial communists such as Thomas More and Gerrard Winstanley.

Although the social change Godwin advocated—the euthanasia of government and the abolition of “the monopoly of property”—was a radical one, the method by which he saw this coming about—the slow and gradual “progress of the human mind”—was in stark contrast and led him to oppose any kind of organised political action to further the cause of an equal society. In fact the only kind of organised activity he would accept were philosophical debating societies. In this sense, Godwin was a classical armchair philosopher. However, as often happens in such cases, his radical social criticism was taken up by others who did not share his qualms about political action.

One of those to be influenced by Godwin’s ideas was the poet Shelley, who the previous year had been expelled from Oxford University for producing an atheist pamphlet. Shelley came across Godwin’s works at the age of 18 and was very impressed. He was eventually to marry Godwin’s daughter who, among things, wrote the original Frankenstein story.

So impressed was Shelley by Godwin’s proposals for a new society in which people would be motivated by “disinterestedness” rather than selfishness that he set out to express them in verse, in a long poem called Queen Mab which he published privately in 1813. This is a vision of the past, present and future of mankind. In it Shelley attacks kings, war, commerce and, in particular, priests and religion. In fact the criticism of christianity, in the poem as well as in prose notes attached to it was so hard-hitting that when it was republished in the 1820s the publisher was sent to prison for blasphemy. Queen Mab became the work that publishers used in defiance of the restrictive press laws of the time. Each time they were convicted of blasphemy. But as a result Queen Mab, and thus Godwin’s social ideas, came to be widely read in Chartist and radical circles.

In part V of Queen Mab Shelley attacks commerce which he sees as a product of selfishness in the sense of people wanting to sell their surplus for money rather than give it to others to satisfy their needs:

Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange

Of all that human art or nature yield;

Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,

And natural kindness hasten to supply

From the full fountain of its boundless love,

For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now.

Commerce! Beneath whose poison-breathing shade

No solitary virtue dares to spring,

But Poverty and Wealth with equal hand

Scatter their withering curses, and unfold

The doors of premature and violent death,

To pining famine and full-fed disease,

To all that shares the lot of human life,

Which poisoned, body and soul, scarce drags the chain,

That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind,

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,

The signet of its all-enslaving power

Upon a shining ore, and called it gold:

Before whose image bow the vulgar great,

The vainly rich, the miserable proud,

The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,

And with blind feelings reverence the power

That grinds them to the dust of misery.

But in the temple of their hireling hearts

Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn

All earthly things but virtue.

Later Shelley continues his criticism:

All things are sold: the very light of Heaven

Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love,

The smallest and most despicable of things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep,

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the laws allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man,

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively,

Are bought and sold as in a public mart

Of undisguising selfishness, that sets

On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign,

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe

Is turned to deadliest agony, old age

Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,

And youth’s corrupted impulses prepare

A life of horror from the blighting bane

Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs

From unenjoying sensualism, has filled

All human life with hydra-headed woes.

It is quite clear that Shelley was expressing Godwin’s idea that, in a just society, producers would give away their surplus produce free rather than sell it for money, Hence his opening description of commerce as “the venal interchange of all that human art or nature yield; which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, and natural kindness hasten to supply”. When he later describes what will happen when people are motivated by the “consciousness of good” he naturally states that they will have no need of “mediative signs of selfishness”—of money—and that “every transfer of the earth’s natural gifts shall be a commerce of good words and works”.

This commerce of sincerest virtue needs

No mediative signs of selfishness,

No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,

No balancings of prudence, cold and long;

In just and equal measure all is weighed,

One scale contains the sum of human weal,

And one, the good man’s heart.

Part V of Queen Mab ends as follows:

But hoary-headed Selfishness has felt

Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave:

A brighter morn awaits the human day,

When every transfer of earth’s natural gifts

Shall be a commerce of good words and works;

When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,

The fear of infamy, disease and woe,

War with its million horrors, and fierce hell

Shall live but in the memory of Time,

Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,

Look back, and shudder at his younger years.

It is only by completely ignoring these passages that Paul Foot is able to claim in Red Shelley (1980) that “Shelley was not a socialist. Shelley was a leveller”. Shelley, at least at this time, was just as much an advocate of a “spontaneous equality of conditions” that amounted to a voluntary moneyless communism as was Godwin.

In one sense this argument as to whether or not Godwin and Shelley were socialists is anachronistic since the modern idea of socialism, as the solution to the problems of a majority wage-working class within a capitalist industrial society, had not yet come into being. This is partly why in this article we have used the word “communist” rather than “socialist” to describe the moneyless equal society advocated by critics of the essentially agrarian class society that existed before industrial capitalism developed. It was of course the low level of development of the means of production that accounts for the frugal, even Spartan, character which the pre-industrial communists were obliged to give to the egalitarian society they advocated, but it still remains true that people like (in England) More, Winstanley and Godwin and Shelley and (in France) Morelly, Babeuf and Buonarotti were forerunners of the socialist industrial society of abundance that we modern socialists now advocate.

Adam Buick

Early days of globalisation (2006)

Book Review from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational by Nick Robins (Pluto Press)

I often gauge how much I have enjoyed a book by the amount of highlighting and marginal notes I make in pencil. This book, like many on my shelves, will horrify those who prize pristine, unmarked first editions.

On 31 December 1600 a precursor of the modern transnational corporation came into existence. Its pioneering techniques in the field of trade and commerce, and downright murder and corruption, preceded by centuries the noxious business practices that we associate with today’s all-powerful corporations, many of whom have a higher turn over than small countries.

This book presents as a meticulous account of perhaps the most powerful corporation that ever lived, tracing how it came into existence, how it operated, its inner structure, the role of its own armies in its rise to supremacy, its part in the Bengal Famine when 10 million died as a result of the Company’s market manipulation, its militaristic role in the Opium Wars, its part in the Indian Mutiny and the Boston Tea Party and how, for the last twenty years of its existence, it ruled India as an agent of the British Empire. When it comes to downright exploitation, corruption, slaughter and sheer negligence and indifference to the suffering of others, perhaps no company that ever existed comes near the East India Company in its ruthless pursuit of profit, whilst refashioning the world commercial order in the interests of privilege and power for hundreds of years to come.

In its time the company had many critics, most notably Edmund Burke, “the real champion of India’s identity”, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Burke fought long and hard to impeach the Company’s Governor General Warren Hastings for the devastation wrought on India in its endless search for profit.

Commencing his opening speech at Westminster Hall in February 1788, Burke said:

“I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights and liberties, he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate . . . I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in very age, rank, situation and conditions of life.”

Despite Burke’s opening four day tirade against Hastings – one of the longest opening speeches in history – during which women were carried out fainting, at which the Speaker was “rendered speechless” and at which spectators were willing to pay ú50 for a seat, despite an ensuing trial that lasted from February 1787 to April 1795, Hastings was acquitted.

Considering the Company’s operations for the New York Daily Tribune in the summer of 1853, Marx noted five characteristics: 

“ . . . a permanent financial deficit, a regular over-supply of wars, and no supply at all of public works, an abominable system of taxation, and a no less abominable system, of justice and law..”

Satirising the Company’s administrative system, he commented how there existed “no government by which so much is written and so little done.” Marx furthermore viewed the company as a tool of British capitalism plc in India, observing how “the aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy wanted to plunder it and the millocracy to undersell it”.

The Second Opium War was, in Marx’s view, attributable to the Company’s operations in the East and its insistence that it had the right to swamp China with drugs in the name of profit, regardless of the addiction-induced misery its trade created or how the Chinese authorities felt. He wrote:

“While openly preaching free trade in poison, it secretly defends the monopoly of its manufacture. Whenever we look closely into the nature of British free trade, monopoly is pretty generally found to, lie at the bottom of its ’freedom’”.

In eight carefully researched chapters, Robins traces the Company’s operations from its inception as a trader in spices to its role in running the Indian sub-continent on behalf of the British crown, withholding, one imagines, very little regardless how gruesome, and there indeed are some stomach-churning passages.

In the final chapter, his analysis masterly done, Robins, contemplating the state of corporate play today, reflects how the Company’s legacy reveals the importance of taking on the mega-corporations who presently rampage across the planet unhindered, and this, for socialists, is the book’s one failing.

Robins’ remedy for curbing corporate power is simple:

“First of all, its market power and political influence must be limited . . Next, stringent rules are needed to ensure that management and investors do not use the corporation as a tool for their short-term interests . . And, finally, clear and forcible systems of justice have to be in place to hold the corporation to account for damage to society and the environment.”

Thus, a brilliant attack on unchecked power in the pursuit of profit is marred by the simple request that the capitalist class behaves and shows a little more respect when carrying out its obscene business, and that the executive arm of capitalism – government – hurries to the rescue of society and the natural environment. Smiley-faced capitalism is, for Robins, the only remedy. Warren Hastings laughs in his grave.

All said, if you’re into the study of corporate power gone mad, read this.

John Bissett

Extreme reaction (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wednesday, 14 August found me on a day’s family excursion to Brighton, particularly to visit the exaggerated opulence of the Royal Pavilion. An edifice, if ever there was one, symbolising the class division of society.

This Regency Pavilion was built in the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time of dramatic economic change in Britain. This early period of the industrial revolution would witness the emergence of the Luddites and a perception by the British state of a danger of insurrection. Machine breaking and mill burning caused the authorities to respond with force and punitive punishments, up to and including capital sentencing. There was much talk of shadowy influences, such as ‘General Ludd’, orchestrating these outrages.

Riots were a feature of affairs in the eighteenth century. Between 1756 and 1757, stores and shipments of food were looted. Again in 1766, poor harvests and the consequent rising price of wheat and corn resulted in riots across England; 131 recorded between September and the following August. The government reacted, in those pre-police force days, by deploying military units. Large numbers of people were arrested and eight shot dead. Special commissions of assizes were set up that imposed sentences including hanging, transportation or imprisonment.

If these sentences were intended to deter future outbreaks they failed. There were further such riots between 1770 and 1774. This was the period just before the building of the Royal Pavilion.

Ready-made headlines

Walking from the railway station I had a brief conversation with a couple who had come into Brighton to visit a particular shop. Originally their intention had been to arrive later in the day, but the shop was planning to close at 3 that afternoon. The rioters, it seemed, were on their way. Not eighteenth century rioters looking for cheaper bread, but twenty-first century malcontents demanding that immigrants and immigration be dealt with. The tragic murder of three young girls in Southport had been hijacked, largely via social media, by malicious individuals and groups.

Immigrants, especially those who had arrived uninvited on England’s shores in inflatable small boats, were extrajudicially condemned by minority opinion of guilt by association with that dreadful murder. That the one arrested was not an immigrant proved immaterial. For nights running, firstly in Southport, then across England more widely, a number of immigrant accommodations were besieged, as also, as in Southport, were mosques; Muslim equals immigrant seems to have been the ‘logic’.

The disturbances gave the media ready-made headlines and stories for the August period traditionally referred to as the silly season by the media. Parliament is not sitting, so while there is terrible news from abroad, domestic issues are in short supply. A few riots provide dramatic footage for the TV news channels, and are a gift for journalists to report and opine about. Watching footage of howling mobs confronting lines of police generates feelings of insecurity and reinforces the notion that society faces perpetual threats.

Far right and far left

Following the recent elections in France in the first round of which populist nationalism triumphed, only to be thwarted in the second by an alliance of convenience of liberals, social democrats and what’s termed the far left, it was inevitable that participants in the riots would be labelled extreme right.

Left and right are exceedingly broad political categories, designations that emerged in the national assembly of eighteenth century revolutionary France. So broad that extreme right easily covers neo-nazis/fascists, demagogic nationalists, racists and such like. Far left encompasses those who adhere to some degree or other of Leninist organisation of which there are many and various. Most claim to be socialist, though not advocates of a post-capitalist worldwide moneyless commonwealth based on the principle of meeting everyone’s needs.

The problem with the left and right designations is that there is no actual intention of ridding society of capitalism, as they are descriptive of relative political positions within capitalism. Left socialist? Right fascist? What about national socialists? Right-wing socialists? Left-wing Nazis?

What comes through is the confusion of ideas, a confusion helping to maintain capitalism by keeping people divided. It has the effect of focusing most political vision myopically on that other political category, the centre, as the alternative. Offering the alternative to capitalism that socialism is demands going beyond these political categories and an engagement by the vast majority of people to consciously challenge and then transcend capitalism, overthrowing by democratic means the apparent necessity of the status quo.

Underlying insecurity

Undoubtedly, those who took an active part in the various disturbances were motivated by a variety of reasons. However, like those in the eighteenth century food riots, the basic cause is economic. In present-day society only a privileged few prosper, most experience financial insecurity and some suffer downright poverty. Those with very little are fearful of losing the little they do have.

Dr Abdul Hamid, chairman of the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque in Liverpool, confronted by demonstrators, recognised underlying insecurity as the basic problem. Then ‘the other’ is perceived as a threat, those who are seen to be outside limited perspectives. Dr Hamid said there is a ‘fear of the unknown’ and ‘if they don’t get answers, they will try to find any excuse to label you’. Adam Kelwick, a mosque volunteer, went on to say of the demonstrators, ‘I don’t think they knew what they were protesting about – I think they’re just angry, fed up.’

Mosque members made a point of meeting rather than confronting those outside. Conversations took place and food rather than half bricks were exchanged. Then, Kelwick went on to point out, ‘Some of the most vocal protesters, after everyone else had gone, came inside the mosque for a little tour’.

Extreme rightists? Or those with ill-defined grievances who got caught up in something that, for a while, got out of control. As Kelwick observed, ‘None of the people I spoke to mentioned Southport’.

The good news

In a Brighton pub for lunch I overheard the manager on the phone confirming they were definitely closing at 6 that evening. Later that afternoon, walking back to the railway station I saw a number of shops being boarded up. That evening it seems there was an outbreak of nothing happening: no riots, no confrontations. The news featured the Prime Minister vowing judicial punishment for all participants in disturbances. He may have to reintroduce capital sentences and transportation to be true to his word, as the prisons, it seems, are already near enough full.

The good news is that very quickly there were far more diverse groups of people declaring their common humanity with migrants, than the very much smaller numbers of antagonists. Although reported, this was nowhere near as big a story. Bad news is more dramatic it seems.

For the immigrants who were targeted it was a highly distressing few days. Those involved in the riots should ask themselves why people put themselves through all the hardships of migration. They might realise that they have more in common economically with migrants than what seems to divide them. Certainly, one overwhelming common interest that all but the privileged few has, migrant, demonstrator and those watching on TV, is in removing capitalism, the insecure society that of itself breeds riot and social disturbance.

Dave Alton

Might is Right (2007)

From the January 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everybody is talking about “human rights” these days but what are they and will they always need protecting?

Socialists have a problem with “human rights”. Not of course that we don’t think individuals shouldn’t have free speech or shouldn’t be free from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. It is the concept of “rights” in general that is the problem.

We are materialists and so don’t like to deal in vague abstract ideas such as Justice, Freedom – or Rights. For us, these are reflections of material circumstances. We take the view that “might is right”, not in the sense that this is how things should be but in the sense of how things are. Without the power to enforce it (“might”) a “right” is just an ineffective, abstract concept.

Take the “right to strike”, for instance. What this means is that it is not illegal to go on strike. But the state only made strikes legal after the workers had demonstrated that the law wasn’t going to stop them striking. In other words, the state’s recognition of the “right” to strike was the state accepting that the workers had already acquired the “might” to strike.

This is not the case with individual “human rights” in countries which don’t recognise them. When Amnesty criticises the lack of human rights in China or Burma or Iran or wherever, they are merely appealing to an abstract idea since there is no might to back them up. No wonder the governments concerned don’t take much notice of these appeals (unless they want to make some gesture in order to obtain some diplomatic advantage).

The most that we as materialists can accept regarding the concept of rights is as a description of what is in the legal code of some state, i.e. as a description of what the law actually says rather than as an abstract idea existing independently of the law. So, we can say that the “right to free speech” or “the right to a fair trial”, etc exist in some country when this is provided for in the legislation of that country. On the other hand, if the law or the practise in China or Burma does not allow for free speech then this means that, as a matter of objective fact, no “right” to free speech exists there.

Any other definition of “rights” than what is set out in the law creates all sorts of problems, not least as to what exactly they are. Most people would associate human rights with free speech and freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment but why are they restricted just to things like these? Why, for instance, isn’t it a human right to have enough food or to be housed decently? On what basis, in fact, is something considered to be a human right? In the end, it can only come down to a question of political preference – it’s what the people making the claim consider desirable, not something objective that can be discovered. It’s an expression of what they think is right. Nothing more.

Origins

All the same, “human rights” – or “The Rights of Man” as Tom Paine entitled his famous 1791 polemic in defence of the French Revolution – do have a history. What, then, were human rights originally, when the concept was first introduced?

For this we need to go back to the end of the 18th century when two key documents were adopted within two years of each other: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens by the National Assembly of France in 1789 and the first 10 amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America, known as the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791.

The “rights” in the two documents are basically the same (which was no accident of course since there was a cross-fertilisation of ideas between both sides of the Atlantic): the individual has the right to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom for arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and a fair trial before an impartial jury.

Talk of the government emanating from the “nation” and governing with the consent of the governed might lead to the conclusion that the right to vote, i.e. to say who makes up the government, would also be regarded as a “human right”. But in both documents such a “right” is conspicuous by its absence – and this is very revealing.

What it reveals is that both the American and the French Revolutions were revolutions carried out largely by, but in any event, in the interest of property-owners, large and small, who wanted to remove the obstacles to their accumulating more property. But there were conflicts between the larger and the smaller property-owners, between what in France were called the “bourgeoisie” and the “petty bourgeoisie”. One of the disputes between them was precisely over the right to vote.

The richer property owners were afraid that, as they were not themselves in the majority, the less well-off would vote to take away their property. In both America and France, they got their way and arrangements (restricted franchise and/or indirect election) were made to keep power out of the hands of the majority. Which is one of the reasons why we call these revolutions “bourgeois” revolutions. The “rights of man”, now known as “human rights” were first proclaimed by these bourgeois revolutions.

Economics

Marxists who have analysed these bourgeois revolutions have explained the “rights of man” as an ideology accompanying the development of the market economy which these revolutions both reflected and encouraged (see, for instance, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism by C.B. Macpherson). On the market, especially the ideal free competitive market, all commodity-producers are equal in the sense of the market not according special privileges to any of them (hence the call for the abolition of all titles of nobility); they are also free agents in the sense of making their own decisions independently of each other about what and how much to produce and sell; the market, the outcome of these decisions of the free and equal commodity-producers, operates independently of the government (hence it is the duty of the government to accept that all men are free and equal).

It is not only Marxists who associate “human rights” with the market economy. So do advocates of the so-called “free” market. Here’s what the Cato Institute, a free-market think-tank in America, had to say in a document put out in 1996 (opposing trade sanctions against China for its bad “human rights” record):

Free trade is itself a human right and rests on an individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property – rights the U.S. Founding Fathers regarded as inalienable and self-evident ( . . .). The proper function of government is to cultivate a framework for freedom by protecting liberty and property, including freedom of contract (which includes free international trade) – not to use the power of government to undermine one freedom in an attempt to secure others. The right to trade is an inherent part of our property rights and a civil right that should be protected as a fundamental human right. The supposed dichotomy between the right to trade and human rights is a false one. Market exchange rests on private property, which is a natural right. As moral agents, individuals necessarily claim the right to liberty and property in order to live fully and to pursue their interests in a responsible manner. The freedom to act without interference, provided one respect the equal rights of others, is the core principle of a market economy and the essence of human rights.” (http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj16n1-5.html)

This association of human rights and political democracy generally with the market economy and private property is the official policy of the US government. When it criticises the human rights record of Syria or Iran or North Korea (or, less stridently these days, China), what it is criticising is not so much the imprisonment of dissidents as the fact that these countries have state-run economies which don’t allow US corporations free access to invest and buy and sell.

That the US government uses “human rights” to try to impose its form of capitalism on other countries must be an embarrassment to organisations such as Amnesty who are interested in these rights for their own sake. It allows the governments they criticise to dismiss them as tools of US and Western foreign policy. Which objectively – even if quite unintentionally of course – they are.

Lowered sights

This wouldn’t be the criticism we would make of them. We would criticise them for having set their sights too low. In confining themselves to only taking up individual cases, they are missing the big picture. There’s nothing wrong with writing to prisoners (any prisoners, not just political ones) and taking up their case with the authorities. This will ease a little the lot of the prisoners chosen, but can’t really be called political action.

We would of course like Amnesty and the others involved in this sort of humanitarian work to work for socialism. Or even, to work for the coming of political democracy to those countries without it, as the best political condition under capitalism for the development of the socialist movement. But the various human rights organisations have deliberately chosen not to do this. This is not just because it would close all channels of communication with the political authorities they have to deal with to have any chance of achieving something in the individual cases they take up. It is also because they, either implicitly or explicitly, regard working for something bigger such as political democracy (let alone socialism) as to set too unrealistic a goal in the sense of something not likely to be achieved in the near future.

Human rights organisations are not the only ones to take up this position. In the last thirty or so years it has become the general position of people concerned about some problem or other thrown up by capitalism. In the past such people would have joined the Labour Party or the Communist Party to try to solve the problem by national political action. Now they have given up on this and dispersed into hundreds of single issue organisations (Amnesty, Shelter, Greenpeace, Child Poverty Action, etc, etc.). It is as if they have accepted that capitalism is here to stay and have adopted the tactic of merely trying to make things a little less bad in the field of their particular concern. It’s a reflection of the pessimism that has resulted from the failure of reformism, in which so many people had previously placed such high hopes.

No doubt such people gain some satisfaction when they make progress in a particular individual case, but can they really be satisfied with the prospect of endlessly having to fight such cases again and again? Can they really be happy seeing the future as capitalism continuing for ever with them trying to stop it stamping so hard on people?

Hopefully not. Hopefully they will eventually come round to realising that it makes more sense to work for a world in which there will be no violation of human rights since there will be no governments representing the interest of minority ruling classes with an interest in violating them to protect their privileges and rule. In other words, a classless, stateless world based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life by and in the interest of all the people, in which there would be no market as there’d be production directly for use.

In such a world the whole concept of “human rights” would be part of the in-built democratic nature of a classless society (whether as procedural rules or as spontaneous behaviour patterns). There would be no minority ruling class or armed political centre against which people would need protection – no institutionalised might against which a counter-might would need to be exercised.

Adam Buick

English Nursery Rhyme (2003)

From the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

They hang the man and flog the woman

That steal the goose from off the common,

But let the greater villain loose

That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone

When we take things we do not own,

But leaves the lords and ladies fine

Who take things that are yours and mine.

                                                 – circa 1764

Blogger's Note:

A fuller version of the poem can be viewed here. 

Inadequate scientific perspectives (1998)

Theatre Review from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Experiment with an Air Pump by Shelagh Stephenson. Hampstead Theatre.

Three plays about science in as many months. Is there something in the wind or is this mere serendipity? All three plays have a historical focus: Copenhagen (Socialist Standard, September) is about the making of the first atom bomb; After Darwin (October) looks at the immediate and later consequences of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution; and now in An Experiment with an Air Pump, Shelagh Stephenson offers two stories, inviting us to compare the motivations of scientists at the end of the eighteenth century with those of other scientists 200 years later.

Like Tom Stoppard in Arcadia, Stephenson keeps both her stories in play throughout the evening. She is good in persuading us that even as late as the end of the 18th century science was still largely a gentleman’s activity, that the primary motives of those involved were still concerned with discovery for its own sake, and that the enterprise was managed in a neutral manner. But she also chillingly points to the dangers of scientific experiments which, whilst neutral in their apparent search for truth, were morally indifferent to the rights of those who became the subjects of experiment. The same attitudes which allowed scientists in Nazi Germany to experiment with victims imprisoned in concentration camps, were clearly evident in Great Britain two hundred years ago.

Unfortunately, however, whilst the 18th century tale is persuasive and revealing—and managed with a sure dramatic touch—its 20th century counterpart is a slight little thing which avoid any substantial discussion of contemporary science. The story, such as it is, concerns the fate of a research scientist. Should she continue to work as a university don or accept funding from a private company? Whilst the earlier tale offers some interesting insights into the relationships between science and society, the later story seems intent on avoiding such issues in favour of what might be called “human interest”. The choice facing the scientist is thus a particular choice. It is not referenced to similar choices which other scientists might face, nor yet is it placed in any meaningful context. Indeed, the very particularity of the scientist’s dilemma means that it cannot stand as a token for wider concerns.

Why, I found myself wondering at the end of the performance, had Shelagh Stephenson offered us such a sad little tale? Why, having established such a broad set of critical perspectives for her first tale, should she choose such an inadequate contemporary counterpoise? And then it occurred to me that it is possible to get some purchase on events in the 18th century, without necessarily having access to those further additional insights which would allow similar, present-day events to be scrutinised. Thus she is sufficiently far from the end of the 18th century to be able to see what was afoot with some clarity. But she is also too close to the present, and seemingly without all the analytical tools necessary to understand what is going on.

I recall being critical of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s After Darwin for much the same reason: a failure to comprehend what is at stake in modern science. As a one-time graduate in chemistry I can confirm that the education (sic) of scientists usually conspicuously avoids any reference to the nature of scientific activity, its history and philosophy. Such knowledge as I have about science and technology (rather than the restricted field of vision that is chemistry), has been gained from the study of sociology, philosophy and history, rather than as part of undergraduate studies in science. Just about the last thing that contemporary society wants is that scientists are able to reflect on the nature and consequences of their activity. If they were able to do this they might become concerned about the consequences of their day-to-day behaviour. But commerce and industry want compliant workers and now knowing, reflective practitioners. And dramatists—certainly dramatists who might want to write about contemporary science—tend to have an arts rather than a science background, and as such are unlikely to be familiar with both science and its sociology.

So we will probably have to wait a very long time before some writer is able to incorporate a critique of contemporary science in a drama about the practice of science. It’s not only audiences who are the victims of over-specialisation and dumbing down. Writers, directors and performers also suffer in the cause of capitalism.

Michael Gill

Scottish Clearances (2022)

Book Review from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sutherland Clearances: The Highland Clearances, Volume Three. By Alwyn Edgar. Ebook: ISBN-13: 9781838275 006.

Before the Rebellion of Prince Charles in 1745, each Highland clan owned its own land. No one else, including the Government in Edinburgh, had the power to deprive them of it. (Travellers saw that in the mountains every crag was a new fortress for men defending their own country.) But the Highland Jacobite rebels having been defeated at Culloden and scattered, and the Lowland Government in Edinburgh now being much stronger since the Union with England in 1707, the British authorities decided to incorporate the Highlands into Great Britain in fact, as well as in theory. The anglophone legal system was successfully imposed, and the clan chiefs were made into landlords, owning all the land which had once belonged to their clans. Scots law now gave each chief-landlord the right (for any reason or no reason) to turn his entire clan out of their homes and farms, and keep the whole clan land as his private back garden, if he wanted. So when the new landlords realised that big grazing farms, for cattle or sheep, would make a lot of money, the clearances started. Well-to-do Highlanders, Lowlanders, even a few Englishmen, rented the clan lands; the chiefs evicted their folk; and the chief/landlord found his income shooting up over the years to five times or fifteen times what it had been (and there was no income tax!). Many of the evicted Highlanders were given an acre or two of worthless, barren land, and told to make it fertile: and when by donkey-work the crofters were able to grow a few potatoes, they had to pay rent for the value they themselves had created. Others – either immediately or after years of rack-rented drudgery on the croft – went to the Lowland factories, or abandoned Scotland entirely for arduous pioneering lives in North America (those who survived the journey).

The Earls of Sutherland were chiefs of the Sutherland clan, Murrays, MacKays, Sutherlands and others. Adam Gordon married a daughter of the Earl of Sutherland about 1500, and managed to cheat the rest of the family out of their land-charters. After that the Earls of Sutherland were Gordons. The 18th earl died in 1766 leaving a year-old daughter, Elizabeth Gordon, to succeed him. She inherited nearly two-thirds of the county of Sutherland, over 1250 square miles, an estate about the size of Gloucestershire. The long wars with France between 1793 and 1815 meant there was a desperate need of soldiers, such as the Sutherland small tenants could provide: but (despite being married to one of the richest men in England, the Marquis of Stafford) she wanted the much higher rents which big sheep farms would supply. (You can never have too much money.) She was indifferent to the fate of the small tenants – ‘good many of them’, would ‘inevitably be tossed out’, she wrote; they would be ‘driven from their present dwellings by the sheep farms’. She cleared her estate between 1807 and 1821, greatly increasing her rents. She and her husband became the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.

The second greatest Sutherland landowner was Lord Reay, the chief of the Reay MacKay clan. Reay cleared his estate even before Elizabeth Gordon, beginning about 1800. (Thirteen smaller landlords owned the rest of the county, and rivalled the countess and Lord Reay with their own clearances.) Reay belonged to a London firm which provided finance to slave-traders, and spent most of his time in gambling dens and brothels. Having wasted vast amounts of money, he sold his estate to the Sutherlands in 1830, and bought a slave plantation in the West Indies. When the slaves were freed in 1833, like the other slave-owners he was compensated. (The slaves weren’t.) – from the blurb.

Interview with the author here: https://youtu.be/CrhSuf9TFl0

Blogger's Note:

Alwyn Edgar gave a talk on his series of books last July via the SPGB discord discussion list.

May Day (1960)

From the May 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The engraving (by William Blake after the painting by Collings) reproduced on the cover graphically represents May Day in 18th Century London. Prominent in the days celebrations were the little chimney sweeps (in the engraving they are shown holding dust pans—the symbol of their trade), who were annually released on May 1st from the bondage and brutality of their dangerous job.

When my mother died I was very young.

And my father sold me while yet my tongue 

Could scarcely cry “ 'weep! ’weep! 'weep' 'weep' "

So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

Blake

May Day and the Heritage of the Past (1953)

From the May 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the early years of this century there was a ferment of co-operative ideas in the International Labour Movement that two world wars since appear to have killed. 

In those years mass meetings attended by thousands of workers were held on the 1st of May. At a conference of the 2nd International in 1889 this day was set aside for international demonstrations in favour of the eight-hour day; subsequently they became demonstrations in favour of working class international solidarity and from numerous platforms, attended by crowds in holiday dress complete with the banners of different groups, a varied assortment of speakers delivered passionate orations condemning the actions against strikes, the subjection of nations and groups, and glorifying the martyrdom of individuals. Speakers representing all sorts of groups took part, including Indians, Chinese, Russians and Negroes.

Over the years changing national and internal lineups have so altered the aspect of affairs that the passion of May Day and its misguided hopes have departed. All, all are gone. The story of them must come as a tale from a strange world to the young generation of today. Even the passion that inspired the misguided ranter against wrongs has departed with them, converted into the acceptance of privilege. Impassioned radicals became bulwarks of governments based upon privilege; fiery denouncers of imperialist oppression took their places amongst the privilege supporting a new imperialism in the erstwhile subject nations; bitter spokesmen of subject groups came to the top and in their turn exercised as ruthless an oppression as their privileged forebears. Underneath it all, and cutting across all frontiers as of yore, there still remained the fundamental class cleavage between propertied and propertyless, between the relatively small section of the world's population which occupies the seat of privilege, reaping power, leisure and luxury, and the vast mass which remains the pedestal upon which power and privilege rest; labouring that others may enjoy.

The budding international solidarity of the past has been swallowed up by the armed and antagonistic camps of to-day, but our independent May Day message still remains as urgent and as alive as when it was first delivered, the message of Socialism, the only message of hope, of solidarity, of certainty in a world of hatred, strife and uncertainty.

This message has its roots far back in the past. The germs of communistic ideas go back centuries, but the germs of socialistic ideas, as we know them to-day, were synonymous with the growth of capitalism. Their vague beginnings are to be found amongst a group of French writers who were raising a ferment in the 18th century, when Capitalism was rising to its feet. Borrowing from Hobbes, Locke and their contemporaries, these writers put forward ideas some of which fit the present in spite of their somewhat confused context.

The earliest of these French writers appears to have been Jean Meslier, who, in “The Testament of Jean Meslier," at the beginning of the 18th century, used phrases that sound singularly modern. These are some of his ideas: He was opposed to property, believing in the common control of the wealth of society. He argued that among the evils which oppressed mankind and called for reform the worst was private property. Property meant inequality; Inequality led to injustice and oppression. The rich were respected and honoured, while the poor must toil in neglect. Property was a cause of idleness; the idle rich class found its complement in an idle poor class. This latter class was made up of the unemployed, who, because of the existing system, had nothing to do and were hence in poverty. Cupidity and its attendants, ambition and greed, are the evils in a society based upon property. Property does not unite people; but through jealousy tends to break up social harmony, and hence destroys social unity. Fraud, deception, theft and murder find their cause in property. Society might be happy were goods made common and equality secured. The basis of equality is equality of economic condition.

Later on another writer, Morelly, carried some of the ideas further. He had a definite plan for the future in which each would labour according to his ability and share according to need. He argued that it was not labour but the conditions of labour that people objected to. That there would be no exchange as goods would be stored and distributed according to needs. On property he made the following remarks

  “From the sceptre to the shepherd's crook, from the tiara to the meanest monk's frock, if one asks who governs men, the answer is simple; personal interest or the interest of others which vanity makes one adopt and which is always dependent on the first. But where do these monsters get power? From property.” P. 100-101 “Code de la Nature,” 1755.

He denied the existence of innate ideas as also did his contemporary (Helvétius), who said:

  “The ideas supposed to be innate are those that are familiar to and as it were incorporated with us; they are the effect of education, example, and habit.” P.15 “System of Nature.”

Barnave, another of Morelly’s contemporaries, saw a bit farther than the rest. He could see the rise of classes and considered the part which economic changes played in history.

Morelly laid down definite plans for a new social order based on natural rights, the heritage of everyone born into society. There was no room for historical development in the systems of those who thought like him; history and its results had no value. Society did not grow out of the past, the present had to be obliterated root and branch, to make way for the future. This form of thought, together with the revolutionary tradition, dominated radical movements until the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Morelly’s merit was that he looked for the cause of social evils in society as organised in his day; the environmental theory later pressed so vigorously by Robert Owen.

The Babuef “Conspiracy of the Equals" at the end of the French Revolution drew from these early French sources, justifying their rising, like the Trotzkyists, on the ground that the Revolution had got off the track. They advocated the conspiratorial seizure of power.

One of the members of the “Society of Equals" who escaped from France formed the Babouvist movement after the Fall of Napoleon. The object of the movement was to carry on where Babuef had left off. This movement became tied more and more closely to the workers' movement in France, finally becoming a definite working-class party under Blanqui and exercising a considerable influence upon the French risings of February and June, 1848.

In the beginning of the 19th Century the Revolutionary tradition was carried on, associated with the Utopian experiments of Owen, Fourier, Cabet and Weitling, but in a less turbulent fashion than formerly. Weitling studied in Western Germany, where working men’s clubs were being formed for reading and discussion. At these clubs radical literature was available to those who otherwise would not have had the means to obtain it. Weitling had considerable influence on those who founded the “League of the Just”—a secret society with communistic ideas that eventually merged into the Communist League, that published the Communist Manifesto.

In England machine production brought ruin to masses of hand workers and by simplifying productive operations, introduced women and children into factories and mines to work under conditions that were appalling. It was the hand workers who were the prime movers in the revolt against the new world of industry, and who sought a way out of their difficulties; first, by incendiarism and machine breaking, and later by vague visions of some sort of co-operative world based upon small proprietorships.

Some of the earliest reactions to the industrial revolution were political reform associations, the Utopian schemes of Robert Owen, and the land reform ideas of Thomas Spence and William Qgilvie. Owen argued that abundance was the cause of crises and misery. This turned the attention of some writers to an examination of economics. They came to the conclusion that as “labour was the source of all wealth” the labourer was entitled to the fruits of industry. Ricardo's book, “Principles of Political Economy,” published in 1817, established that labour was the source of value and, working on his conclusions, writers like Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray demanded that all products should belong to the labourer.

Under the inspiration of the American War of Independence, a corresponding society was formed in 1780 under the title of “ The Society for Constitutional Information.” Its formation was mainly through the instrumentality of Major Cartwright and Horne Tooke. It had a programme that included the Six Points that later formed the basis of the “People's Charter.” The French Revolution gave a fillip to the movement for reform and corresponding societies sprang up all over the country, engaging in bitter and thinly-veiled attacks on the government. In 1792 the first genuinely working-class movement commenced with the formation of the “London Corresponding Society'' by Thomas Hardy, Robert Boyd and George Walne, holding its first meeting in January of that year. The motto of the Society was “Unite, Persevere and Be Free.” It was formed for the purpose of corresponding with other societies that had the same ends in view. It only lasted a few years and repressive action compelled it to disperse, but agitation continued to simmer, finding expression in various ways, in lectures, Utopian writings, the publication of the “Gorgon,” the first trade union paper, in 1818, and eventually the formation of a new London Corresponding Society, “The London Working Men's Association, in 1836. Members of this Association, such as Lovett, Cleave, Hetherington, Watson, Vincent and Harney, were afterwards active in the Chartist Movement. The Association published an address to Workingmen’s Associations that concluded with the words, “Be assured that the good that is to be must be begun by ourselves.” It also started the practice of sending addresses to working men of different countries, beginning with Belgium in November, 1836. One of its members, Lovett, drafted the “ People’s Charter,” that started the Chartist Movement, and another, Harney, formed the “Fraternal Democrats,” which brought the English movement in contact with the Continental.

In 1848 the genuinely Socialist movement began with the publication of the “Communist Manifesto.” A brief history of the working-class movement from that time onwards will be found in the Introduction to our pamphlet, “The Communist Manifesto and the Last Hundred Years.” An examination of this history will reveal how wayward the movement has been, and how ready to chase after will-o’-the-wisps. But the movement goes on and understanding is growing, although the struggle has been long and die disappointments bitter.

So this May Day we again call attention to the only bright gleam in the heavy clouds that hover over us—our message of hope. The determination to establish a new form of society in which everything that is in and on the earth shall be the common heritage of all mankind; where security, comfort and harmony will be the lot of all. All that is necessary for the establishment of this society is understanding and the will to achieve it.

Gilmac.