The Passing Show (1948)

From the November 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

The attempts of our rulers and spiritual advisers to formulate the mode of procedure best fitted to keep the workers quiet are becoming so fantastic as to cause even their docile dupes to wonder if there is not some leg-pulling going on somewhere; the hope of heaven on earth promised at the last election has gone with the wind. The way of the transgressing wage-slave is indeed hard; he suffers for the sins committed in Capitalism’s interest and bears all the burdens of his exploiters during the process; he is becoming weary and inclined to flag, but this cannot be allowed. “What we want is more production.”

It will be noticed that during those periods when the worker, driven beyond endurance, ventures to quit, he is always out of order (practically all strikes are unofficial). The Labour Leader of the Union and the Labour politician unite in condemning his rebellious conduct; and the capitalist press wholeheartedly support them. Denounced by the leader of his union, attacked in Parliament by his own Labour member, shown the error of his ways by the Church and universally vilified by the capitalist press, he may be excused if he doubts the evidence of his senses, but in spite of all these handicaps, he still keeps up the fight; he feels he must; his instincts bred of the class struggle he feels to be correct; he is becoming conscious of himself ; he is beginning to realise what history has called upon him to do. Upon the worker’s action rests the fate of humanity and every socialist on the planet is sustained during these perilous times by the firm conviction that he will not fail.

It is interesting to consider the views of the pioneers of scientific Socialism on the functions of the trade unions. Lucien Laurat, on pages 74 and 75 of his book. “Marxism and Democracy,” states that Marx made a number of important statements to Hamann, the treasurer of the Metal Worker’s Union. The discussion took place in Hanover in 1869. Among other things, Marx is reported as saying the following:—

“The trade unions must never be associated with or dependent upon a political group. Otherwise they would never be able to fulfil their task, and they would receive a mortal blow. The trade unions are the schools of Socialism. In the trade unions the workers become socialists because they see every day before their own eyes the struggle against capital. Political parties, whatever they may be, can arouse the enthusiasm of the working masses only temporarily for a time only, whilst the unions hold their loyalty much more securely, and it is only these unions which can be a real working class party and erect a bulwark against the power of Capital.”

This is what Marx is alleged to have said about 80 years ago. It is questionable if he would repeat the statement were he alive to-day.

Long before this, Engels, in his “Condition of the Working Class in England,” stressed the importance of the economic movement, and Marx, in his “Poverty of Philosophy,” fiercely attacked Proudhon for his hostility to trade unions and to strikes.

Wherever the unions are mentioned in Marx’s writings we find he defends them. In another quotation in the book above referred to he stated: “The struggle of class against class is a political struggle.” 

When the Chartist movement was analysed by the old timers the fact that the trade unions did not as a whole support the Chartists was referred to with regret. 

In “Value, Price and Profit,” the part played by the unions was dealt with, their limitations clearly shown, together with their utility, but it is pointed out they could be more successful if they used their power more intelligently: they should have as their watchword not a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, but the revolutionary “abolition of the wages system.”

Since the founders of the movement passed away the workers have acquired considerable knowledge as a result of their experience..

The wage-slave sells his labour-power to the capitalist, and competing with him is his fellow slave. The identity of interests of the workers on the economic field is obscured.

When labour-power is in demand the sellers of that commodity, by means of their organizations, try and raise the price, but when the demand falls off, and the unemployed become numerous their organizations weaken and the price falls. There is nothing in trade union action that can take labour-power out of the category of commodities. Trade unions are often the means of enabling the workers to obtain a rise in wages before they otherwise would do and also in preventing a rapid fall when circumstances are in favour of the exploiter. They are, in addition, a vehicle for obtaining better conditions which through custom sometimes become more or less permanent, Their value to the worker cannot be questioned, but they cannot emancipate the toiler from wage slavery.

It is not the function of a political party to interfere with the operations of the unions.

The movement in Britain has not been helped by the political levy and the fusion of some unions with the Labour Party: the unions have not benefited: the trade union leader is now often in opposition to the aspirations of the rank and file, and is backed, on almost every occasion, by the Labour politician in resisting efforts to use the organisations for the purpose for which they were originally formed.

It is inspiring nevertheless to see the gradual spread of class consciousness : it is slow, but sure in its coming. Capitalism is up against problems it cannot solve. There is no power that can prevent the advance of the workers permanently, but it can be helped along by socialist knowledge.

The socialist aims at the removal of Capitalism : the trade unionist who is not a socialist thinks he can get something worth while out of the present mode of production. Sooner or later it will dawn upon the working class that trade union action can’t beat the capitalist system.

In 1850, at the time of the split in the Communist League, Marx judged it necessary to tell the workers “You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, perhaps fifty years of civil and international wars, not merely to change conditions, but to change yourselves, and make yourselves fit to take over political power.” He was optimistic; the workers are still in the wilderness, but his vision was clear. A long preparation was necessary before they could be equipped with knowledge sufficient to enable them to take possession of the promised land.

We have now undoubtedly arrived at a point from which the wage-slaves can see where to head for.

Charles Lestor

Blogger's Note:

Lucien Laurat's Marxism and Democracy was reviewed in the February 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letter: Seeing red (1999)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Seeing red

Dear Editors,

Ivan’s article, “Keeping Their Hair On”, in the July Socialist Standard made some interesting points about party colours and the image of politicians. But why are certain organisations or institutions associated with particular colours?

For example, royalty has traditionally been represented by the colour blue and yet there is no certainty as to how or why this originated. I am not even sure if there is a reason for the left being traditionally represented by the colour red.

Whatever the reason for the association of the left with red, why does the Socialist Party still use this colour too—at least for its publicity and stationery? The Socialist Party is not left-wing (or any “wing”, for that matter) as it is advocating an entirely different system. Red, in the context of socialism smacks of Commies, Reds, Lefties, Militant, “Keep the Red Flag Flying” and all that other nonsense we are trying to distance ourselves from. Think of the old Soviet Union or China and what comes to mind? Red flags!

If we are to change people’s stereotypical perception of socialism and socialists—which is difficult enough as it is—then we need to change how people view us rather than reinforcing what they already believe. It is a question of image.

Sadly, capitalism has made image a more important quality than substance but as long as we have to operate within capitalism we will be judged on petty points such as our Party colour, just as much as we can be judged on our ethos. Perhaps we should use the colour blue (or a strain of it) ourselves; that would really give people something to think about!

Simon Montfalcon, 

Romsey, Hampshire

Reply:

The red flag was first used as a revolutionary emblem in the French Revolution, in 1792 when the monarchy was overthrown. Apparently, up till then it had signified that martial law was in force and of course is still a danger signal (for the ruling class?). In the following century it became the flag of those in France who wanted a social as well as a political revolution.

Thus, in one of his articles on the revolutionary events in France in 1848 (Class Struggles in France 1848-1850) Marx referred to the red flag as being the flag of “the most extreme subversive party”. So too, the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto appeared in an extreme Chartist paper, the Red Republican. The Paris Commune of 1871 adopted the red flag as its official flag, so again Marx wrote about “the Red Flag, symbol of the Republic of Labour, flying over the Hotel de Ville” (Civil War in France).

The words of the song The Red Flag (which used to be sung at pre-WWI Socialist Party meetings such as those to commemorate the Paris Commune, before the song got hijacked by the Labour Party) were written by James Connell in 1889. One line reads “we must not change its colour now”– Editors

New Reprint of Art, Labour and Socialism by William Morris (1962)

Party News from the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

This 1962 pamphlet was a reprint of the SPGB's 1907 pamphlet with an added modern assessment. Reprinted below is the foreword from the 1962 Executive Committee, plus the modern assessment.

Art, Labour & Socialism by William Morris

With a Modern Assessment

Foreword

An address that William Morris delivered at University College, Oxford, was reprinted by him in the magazine Today, in February 1884, under the title “Art Under Plutocracy”.

In 1907 the larger part of it was published by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in pamphlet form as Art, Labour and Socialism.

It has long been out of print and we are issuing it again because, in the words of our Foreword to our original edition:

“It is not often that an accepted master in the arts can express himself with lucid brevity in the language of the common people; and even less frequently is that master able to scientifically diagnose the conditions of his own craft”.

“It is therefore the more refreshing to discover a work by an admittedly great figure in the artistic world which gets down surely to rock bottom facts, and in a style of quite charming simplicity establishes the connection of art and labour, and the conditions of labour which, after all—and however distasteful the information may be to the school of the ‘Intellectuals’—art is, in the final analysis, no more than a reflection”.

“We do not claim for Morris that he was always a convincing and consistent instructor in economics. Indeed, his work in this direction, regarded as a whole, entitles him to no more than a place in the category of the Utopians . . . But this does not blind us to the fact that Morris occasionally struck shrewdly at the pretensions of a vainglorious and shoddy intellectuality, placed art in its proper perspective, and did effective service by his unequivocal insistence upon the necessity, not only of passive working class discontent with, but active working class revolt against, the system of society that enslaves them, robs them of the results of their labours, and incidentally deprives them of that joy in the work of their hands which stands for him at the very foundation of art”.

Executive Committee

Socialist Party of Great Britain

February 1962

 

A Modern Assessment

I. Morris and His Work

Most of the writings about Morris concentrate upon his work as a poet, interior decorator, printer and designer of coloured glass windows, but neglect the other side of his activities: speaker, teacher, and writer about Socialism.

He was already an international figure in the art world when the poverty, squalor and ugliness that constantly confronted him led him to probe into the problem, and he began to take an interest in Socialism, and finally came to study Marx’s Capital.

He joined the Social Democratic Federation, which claimed adherence to Marxism, in 1881. However, he soon became dissatisfied with its reformist policies and its electioneering tactics. He left the organisation along with Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax, Frederick Lessner (and old associate of Marx in the production of the Communist Manifesto) and Marx’s son-in-law Edward Aveling. They then formed the ‘Socialist League’ in 1884. Along with Bax he edited the ‘League’s’ Journal The Commonweal. In the first number of this journal, on the front page, there appeared an ‘Introductory’ by Morris and the ‘Manifesto’ of the League. The beginning of the ‘Introductory’ was as follows: – “We beg our readers’ leave for a few words in which to introduce them to this socialist journal, The Commonweal. In the first place we ask them to understand that the Editor and Sub-Editor of The Commonweal are acting as delegates of the Socialist League, under its direct control; any slip in principles, therefore, any misstatement of the aims and tactics of the League, are liable to correction from the representatives of that body. As to the conduct of The Commonweal, it must be remembered that it has one aim—the propagation of Socialism”.

This was certainly an innovation and a very promising start. A few paragraphs from the League’s ‘Manifesto’ will further indicate how far Morris and his associates had progressed in understanding:

“Fellow Citizens,

We come before you as a body advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is, we seek a change in the basis of Society—a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities.

As the civilised world is at present constituted, there are two classes of Society—the one possessing wealth and the instruments of its production, the other producing wealth by means of those instruments but only by the leave and for the use of the possessing classes.

These two classes are necessarily in antagonism to one another. The possessing class, or non-producers, can only live as a class on the unpaid labour of the producers—the more unpaid labour they can wring out of them, the richer they will be; therefore the producing class—the worker—are driven to strive to better themselves at the expense of the possessing class, and the conflict between the two is ceaseless. Sometimes it takes the form of open rebellion, sometimes of strikes, sometimes of mere widespread mendicancy and crime; but it is always going on in one form or other, though it may not always be obvious to the thoughtless looker-on.

We have spoken of unpaid labour: it is necessary to explain what that means. The sole possession of the producing class is the power of labour inherent in their bodies; but since, as we have already said, the richer classes possess all the instruments of labour, that is, the land, capital, and machinery, the producers or workers are forced to sell their sole possession, the power of labour, on such terms as the possessing class will grant them.

These terms are, that after they have produced enough to keep them in working order, and enable them to beget children to take their places when they are worn out, the surplus of their products shall belong to the possessors of property, which bargain is based on the fact that every man working in a civilised community can produce more than he needs for his own sustenance.

This relation of the possessing class to the working class is the essential basis of the system of producing for a profit, on which our modern Society is founded.”

Although this was written so long ago, how well it fits conditions today, despite the claims that capitalism has changed and society has progressed. There is a further quotation from the ‘Manifesto’ which makes the comparison even more apt:

“Nationalisation of the land alone, which many earnest and sincere persons are now preaching, would be useless so long as labour was subject to the fleecing of surplus value inevitable under the Capitalist system.

No better solution would be that of State Socialism, by whatever name it may be called, whose aim it would be to make concessions to the working class while leaving the present system of capital and wages still in operation: no number of merely administrative changes, until the workers are in possession of all political power, would make any real approach to Socialism.

The Socialist League therefore aims at the realisation of complete Revolutionary Socialism, and well knows that this can never happen in any one country without the help of the workers of all civilisation.”

The last three paragraphs show how far in advance Morris was in relation to the Socialism in one country Communists, the Labour Party, and the multitude of reformers who misuse the word Socialism.

As this pamphlet shows, what was of abiding interest to Morris was to build up a Socialist system, devoid of wage-slavery and degrading toil, in which conditions would enable the producer to find joy in his labour, and would therefore enable him to make articles that were both useful and beautiful.

In Art, Labour & Socialism Morris had something worthwhile to say to his generation; we must consider now whether it is relevant to the conditions of today—and tomorrow. Some of the problems are examined in the following pages.

II. Has Machinery Lightened Labour?

In Art, Labour & Socialism Morris invited his readers to look at the purpose for which employers had used machinery. Like Marx before him, Morris agreed with John Stuart Mill who had written in his Principles of Political Economy:

“It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”

Mill went on to say:

“They [machines] have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes.”

One evil consequence of the introduction of machinery was that it increased the employment of women and children in the factories. Sir William Ashley in his work, The Economic Organisation of England (Longmans, 1921, page 161), wrote of this development:

“The new machinery rendered the work physically so light that it became possible to employ women and children in large numbers; and the sinking of capital in costly machinery made it seem in the interest of employers to work that machinery as continuously as possible. Neither the employment of children nor excessive hours were absolutely new phenomena. Both had been seen in the domestic workshop. But the employment of children was now systematised and extended on a vast scale; and excessive hours, instead of being an occasional episode, say once a week, became a regular thing, every day in the week.”

In the same year that Mill’s work was published, 1848, Marx and Engels had written in the Communist Manifesto:

“ . . . in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery etc.”

Marx, Mill and Ashley were writing of a period when machinery was taking away the livelihood of craftsmen and forcing them to work in factories under harsh conditions and for long hours. Since then, as the working hours of most workers have been much reduced and child labour in factories has been made illegal, we may ask to what extent the statements made by Marx and Mill in 1848 would be true today. We can accept that there are fewer workers doing jobs which involve heavy lifting, hauling, hammering, excavating and other hard physical effort, but along with a fairly general shortening of the working day and working week labour has been intensified, the speed of machines has increased (and with it the number of accidents) and more workers are compelled to perform monotonous repetition work which can be as tiring as heavy physical labour. It is the aim of employers to exact as much effort in the shorter working week as before, a fact making itself felt in the workers’ fatigue at the end of the day and the week.

The claim made in the early days of machine production that machinery lightens the labour and increases the comfort of the worker is being made now for automation; but again the high capital cost is leading to a worsening of conditions—this time in the increase of shift working. Mr P. G. Hunt of the Labour Relations Staff of the Ford Motor Company wrote about this in 1958. After claiming that with automation “almost invariably . . . the physical effort of the operator is vastly reduced or even completely eliminated”, he went on:

“A further factor that emanates from the high initial cost of automated plant is the need to recoup on capital outlay within a reasonable period, which can be achieved only by high utilisation of the equipment concerned. Such a recoupment in turn can be achieved only by longer hours, and longer hours mean shift working. . . . There is no denying the unpopularity of shift work particularly night work—with the majority of those who are called upon to operate it. It seems clear, however, that the trend towards such working must continue and increase, and that automation is at least in part responsible for this” (Financial Times, 1 December 1958).

Even the reduced hours of work are an illusory gain because, with the concentration of manufacture in big industrial areas, workers are compelled to travel longer distances between home and work.

Machinery has clearly failed to give that lightening of toil that it could have given and that economists and employers claimed in the early days that it would. We have an illustration of this in the picture that industrialisation presents to workers in less developed countries. Far from being invited to enjoy the prospect of having machines to lighten toil for them, and raise their standard of living with less effort on their part, they are being told by their leaders to be prepared to work harder: Mr Jomo Kenyatta, leader of Kenya Africans, hit on the appropriate phrase of calling on his followers to be prepared to work as hard as white men! (Daily Express, 6 November 1961).

 III. The Employers’ Attitude to Machinery

We live in a world in which each day brings news of inventions and discoveries in the field of industrial machinery and methods; but not all of them are applied. Some never get beyond the stage of being tested; they are ideas that will not work in a practical way. But some which are proved to be technically sound and practical never come into commercial use. As it is put in a pamphlet on Automation: “Technically about every industrial operation could be made automatic but economically many are impracticable” (What is this Thing called Automation; published by ASSET). It is only the economically practicable ones that are of interest to employers, the ones that will increase their profit.

There could be no clearer illustration of this than the fact that employers, after installing new machinery, will even remove it if it does not pay. Over a century ago a Government Commission of Inquiry into the conditions of hand-loom weavers reported instances in 1834 “where employers gave up machinery and went back to hand labour as it was cheaper” (Industrial and Commercial Revolutions in Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century, Professor L C A Knowles. Second Edition, page 119). That happening in Britain in 1834 has its recent parallel in USA. The pamphlet on Automation referred to above relates how “In Cleveland, Ford management reverted to hand insertion of small liner bearings in the engine-block because automation of this process was uneconomical”.

What most commonly determines whether a new machine will be economic is the level of wages of the workers whom the machine will displace. It follows from this that variations of wage levels can cause machinery to be economic in one place and not in another and at one time and not at another.

Marx wrote about this in the eighteen-sixties:

“Hence the invention nowadays of machines in England that are employed in only North America; just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries machines were invented in Germany to be used only in Holland, and just as many a French invention of the eighteenth century was exploited in England alone” (Capital, Vol. I. Kerr Edition, 1906, page 429).

It is not labour-saving as such that the capitalist seeks, but cost-saving, and if for any reason wages are relatively low the capitalist will be quite content to carry on production by methods which employ large amounts of labour. As Marx put it, “Nowhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human labour-power for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery”.

It is the same in our own times. Machinery is manufactured in one country or locality where wages are low for use elsewhere in relatively high wage areas.

It was the scarcity of workers in rural areas of Britain and America during the two world wars that led to a great increase in the use of machinery that had been long available. Milking machines were being marketed for many years before labour-shortage caused them to be taken up in considerable numbers. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has the following on the use of these machines in USA: “The shortage and the high price of desirable labour for milking cows has extended the use of milking machine” (1950 Edition, Vol. 6, page 983). Even so it was estimated that in 1944, nearly 30 years after such machines were available, only 25 to 30 per cent of American dairy farmers used them.

Sometimes new machines are brought into use not because they directly save labour or cost, but because they give additional precision, which is of course indirectly profitable for the manufacturers selling the products of the machine in competition with other, less efficient products. And sometimes the gain is simply speed of production. It may be good business for a company to use machinery which is quicker, but the products of which are more costly, if by this means the products can be put on the market for quick sale, in advance of the cheaper but more slowly completed products of rival firms.

This is a particular example of a widespread waste that results from capitalist competition. The successful competitor who captures the market is not concerned that his success may mean the bankruptcy of unsuccessful rivals and the consequent breaking up of plant and machinery which could still be useful. When competition is keen it will induce profitable companies to scrap their own plant and machinery while it still has years of useful life before it in order to install costly improved machinery that will enable them to keep ahead in the race for markets.

The picture of capitalism’s use of machinery is hardly complete without reference to the construction of a £30,000 mail bag, power machine shop in Leicester Prison in November 1961, ending the years-long prison labour of hand-stitching. Mechanisation was needed “to meet the mail bag supply demands from the Post Office”.

IV. Socialism and Work

The establishment of socialism will bring far-reaching changes in production and distribution, flowing logically from the ownership of the means of producing wealth being transferred to the whole of society.

The products of labour will no longer be privately owned; incomes from property ownership and from employment will alike disappear, along with buying, selling, and profit-making.

In distribution the principle will be “according to need”, and, of course, without the double standards that now exist throughout the capitalist world, of best quality for the rich, and varying degrees of shoddiness for the poor; which, in turn, presupposes that in production every person will give “according to his or her ability” and will see to it that there are no poor quality goods turned out.

Unfettered access to educational and training facilities will enable all to acquire knowledge and skill and end the existing barriers between unskilled and skilled, manual and mental labour.

Great demands will be made on the productive capacity of society but there will be ample means of satisfying them. With the ending of capitalism enormous additional resources of men and materials will become available through stopping the waste of arms and armaments, and the innumerable activities that are necessary only to capitalism, including the governmental and private bureaucracies, banking and insurance, and the monetary operations that accompany every branch of production and distribution. On a conservative estimate this release of capacity will double the number of men and women available for the work of useful production and distribution. In addition, we may expect a continuing annual increase of productivity resulting from the accumulation of skill and knowledge and of productive equipment.

With these large additional resources at its disposal society will easily be able—if need be with some loss of productivity in particular fields—to end excessive hours of work, harmful speed and intensity, and unnecessary night and shift work, and to use machinery to replace human labour for types of work that cannot be other than unpleasant. This socialist policy will be a reversal of the capitalist policy applied in the nationalised coal industry, the head of which, Lord Robens, can declare that “there are literally thousands of jobs in industry which can give no satisfaction to the workers and never could” and can at the same time be increasing anti-social hours of work by pressing for shift working round the clock in order to avoid “expensive machinery” standing idle for a large part of the 24 hours (Times, 9 October 1961, and Sunday Telegraph, 9 July 1961).

Morris and Marx stated a positive attitude to labour, but before considering what they said it will be useful to examine the criticism that both were viewing the problem in relation to the ruin of craftsmanship by machinery, and that in the present century the problem is a different one and needs a different approach.

Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto to which reference has already been made, wrote about the advent of machinery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century:

“Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarian has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”

One critic of Marx was the late Henri de Man who published a study of machine work in Germany in the early nineteen-twenties, part of which was republished in England under the title Joy in Labour (George Allen & Unwin, 1929).

His criticism was that Marx drew a general conclusion about machine work based largely on the textile industries and that while that conclusion remained unquestionably applicable to “large strata of the working class . . . there are other strata to which the technical developments of the last eighty years have made it completely inapplicable, so that of them the reverse is true” (page 85).

Henri de Man’s two conclusions were that even under capitalism “the existence of detail work is not necessarily a cause of distaste for work” and that it is not impossible for skilled machine work to give the work full satisfaction even though much machine work fails to do so. We can accept both points, but they do not affect the validity of the general principle behind Marx’s words. Marx was not arguing that work with machinery is necessarily an evil. Like Morris, he recognised that it would be a positive gain if much unpleasant and degrading manual work was done by machines: as already mentioned, one of his charges against British capitalists was that they had failed to replace labour of that sort by machinery because it did not pay them to do so.

Following on the same train of thought Marx maintained that Socialism would do what capitalists had failed to do and that “in a communist society (*) there would be a very different scope for the employment of machinery than there can be in a bourgeois society” (Capital Vol I, Chapter XV, Section 2).

In a speech made in 1856 Marx had this to say of the possibilities of machinery: “Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it”.

(*) In the middle of the nineteenth century Marx preferred to use the word communism because of the current misleading ideas associated with the word Socialism. Later on, he used the two words interchangeably to mean what the SPGB means by Socialism: which, of course, has no relationship to the misuse of the terms Socialism and Communism as applied to Russia today.

The central point of Marx’s criticism was that man should not be an appendage of a machine, doing monotonous work robbed of all individual character and charm, any more than he should be doing manual work of a like kind.

There are three principles that can be applied to work and production. The capitalist would like to have a working class which “lives to produce”; working class life being subordinated to the need of producing profit. A second attitude is that of many non-socialist workers and trade unions, that workers should “produce to live”; work being accepted as a necessary evil, to be kept to a minimum, and “life” to be lived in the leisure hours.

Marx and Morris took a third view, that the aim for a society of free men and women should be that work is part of life, no more to be neglected than other intelligently conducted human activities.

Marx, writing in 1875, stated his view with force and passion:

“ . . . when the slavish subordination of the individual to the yoke of the division of labour has disappeared, and when concomitantly the distinction between mental and physical work has ceased to exist; when labour is no longer the means to live, but is in itself the first of vital needs; when the productive forces of society have expanded proportionately with the multiform development of the individuals of whom society is made up—then will the narrow bourgeois outlook be transcended, and then will society inscribe upon its banners ‘from everyone according to his capacities, to everyone according to his needs’” (From Marx’s Criticism of the Gotha Programme, SLP Edition, page 9).

There is a certain irony in the situation that while many workers are content to accept tedious, repetition work as a necessity some employers have themselves discovered that its damaging effect on the workers is such that it does not pay. The Economist (2 December 1961), writes about this discovery:

“In the early years of scientific management it was presumed that the greater the breakdown of jobs into their component parts, the greater the efficiency. The trouble with this, however, was that men came to be treated as mere extensions to their machines. Today, industrial theorists have come to realise that beyond a certain point the simplification of work creates so many problems of boredom and dissatisfaction among workers that diminishing returns may set in. as a result, in many firms the pendulum has begun to swing back a little, and some tasks are being deliberately re-combined to make their execution more complex”.

It will be seen that Marx posed the same issue as did Morris. Is it still a real issue? Some people think that automation will abolish all work problems, and that we shall have workless production:

“Today our life is largely shaped by having to produce goods for our feeding, for our clothing, and so on. Suppose we could just turn on a spigot and have all these basic things just as we now have water?” (Robert Jungk, Guardian, 2 November 1961).

That idea came into the minds of many people (Robert Owen among them) in the early days of machinery; but for the foreseeable future it is a fantasy. Not that it would be technically impossible to build a factory operated by very few workers (this is an early possibility); but that is not production without workers, any more than the automatic telephone system or the driverless train system is production without workers. What has been going on for a century or more is the progressive elimination of workers from some manual operations, with simultaneous increased numbers of machine-making workers in the metal, engineering and electrical industries and of workers in engaged on maintaining the machines. Overall, there is a continuing small net saving of labour, but no dramatic developments that would change the present dependence of production on human labour in some form or other.

What then should be the Socialist attitude to the issues posed by Marx and Morris? There is no doubt what the answer must be. In a free society, depending for its healthy functioning on agreement and voluntary co-operation, in which “the government of persons will have given way to the administration of things”, people will not wish to spend the working part of their lives as human automatons serving machines, any more than as human automatons performing monotonous manual operations. The principle must be that people in a Socialist society shall be able to bring to all the various aspects of life, including work, all qualities of body and mind, skill, knowledge, thought and imagination.

Arts, crafts and machine techniques will all have their place as Marx and Morris would have urged. The difference since their day is that powers and methods of production have become vastly greater and more varied; which means that man’s power to control the conditions of his life is correspondingly greater. He has potentially must greater freedom of choice and it is inconceivable that under Socialism man will decide to enslave himself to productive processes of his own making.

We are confident that the reader will find Morris’s work ideas worth thinking about, including that most important idea of all, that in order to get a better system of society it is necessary to get rid of Capitalism and establish Socialism.

Seventy Years for Socialism (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded in June, 1904. Those who formed it had been members of H. M. Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation, and to understand all that animated them it is necessary to look first at that organization and why it failed.

The SDF was the first party to exist in Britain in the name of Marxian Socialism. That is not to overlook the old International Workingmen's Association in which Marx himself had been a principal; however, it was an association and not a political party as such, its aim to foster and stablilize revolutionary thought. The Federation was alienated from Marx, and in other respects its start in 1881 was unfortunate. Almost inevitably, it drew strong but immensely varied support. The membership contained the conflicting outlooks of freethinkers, single-taxers (Progress and Poverty was published only the year before), militant working-men, well-to-do radicals—and William Morris.

Hyndman's concern with Marxian economics did not extend widely among his supporters. Shaw's biographer, Hesketh Pearson, relates how the young G.B.S. attended the Democratic Federation, was told that without reading Capital he had no right to discuss, went to the British Museum and read it in French, and returned to find that he and Hyndman were the only ones who had done so. But when the Federation joined with the Labour Emancipation League its liberal-radical support dropped away sharply.

The new programme aimed at "The Establishment of a Free Condition of Society, with Equal Social Rights for All, and the Complete Emancipation of Labour", and simultaneously a series of "measures called for to palliate the evils of our existing society . . . for immediate adoption". It was from this point that considerations of expediency were posed, more and more often, against those of Socialism. For the new society automatically became the long-term, deferred, objective and "something for now" the effective one not only in propaganda but in tactics too; the Federation became prepared to ally itself anywhere, anyhow, for its temporary ends.

The hard core of revolutionary socialists remained in the SDF, but by the end of the century a serious division of aims was plain. With the growth of the ILP and the formation in 1900 of the Labour Representation Committee, Hyndman and the other leaders were eager for broadening the Federation's outlook to include all "sympathizers who were against social injustice". The report in the Labour Annual of the 1897 SDF Conference referred to "an informal conference . . . between several members of the SDF and the ILP, and certain recommendations for amalgamation drawn up for submission to the two Executives".

By 1902 a small, determined body of dissidents was pressing for a return to the fundamentals of Socialism, to independent political action based on class-consciousness and the excision of reformism. They were quickly dubbed "Impossibilists", but they put their case strongly in the correspondence columns of Justice. There were two main groups, in London and in Scotland. The Scottish faction, with James Connolly at its head, broke away by itself in 1903 to form the Socialist Labour Party in imitation of the American party of the same name.

Despite being thus let down, the Londoners continued their campaign within the SDF. The controversy was brought to its crisis at the 1904 Conference at Burnley. The Executive sought and obtained summary expulsions and the power to deal with more Impossibilists in this way. Plans to manipulate the Conference leaked out. A post-conference meeting to discuss the expulsions was held at Shoreditch Town Hall, and the critics now formed a Protest Committee and issued a leaflet setting forth fully their disagreements with SDF policy.

The statement was signed by 88 members and ex-members, and demanded a political party pledged to Socialism alone. The class struggle must be the guiding principle, and compromise — either by alliance or by seeking the reform of capitalism — rejected unconditionally. And no less important was the re-framing of the organization itself to keep control out of the hands of elites and cliques and vest it in the entire membership.

Within the SDF the cause was lost, and only more expulsions followed. On 15th May a meeting of the Protest Committee's supporters took place at Battersea, and the decision was made. A new party should be formed, entirely independent, based on clear-cut principles and devoted to the establishment of Socialism. A "Provisional Committee" was charged with making arrangement for its formal inception. On Sunday afternoon, 12th June 1904, the Inaugural Meeting  was held in the Printers' Hall, Bartlett's Passage, off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street.

The Standard and the Platform
A hundred and forty-two people gave in their names at the meeting in 1904. Three names were afterwards found to have been false. The last of the hundred and thirty-nine founders, Tom King, died — still a member — in 1971. Of the others, a few were to become notables in movements to which they now vowed hostility: Hicks a Labour Minister, McEntee a Lord, T. A. Jackson an eminence grise of the Communist Party, Jack Kent the Conservative Mayor of Acton.

The Object and Declaration of Principles drawn up by the Provisional Committee and adopted by the Inaugural Meeting have never been altered. Nor has their status been that of a “historic document” preserved but not pursued; today as in 1904 they are the Party’s directing force. Their intention was to define capitalism and what Socialists must do, for as long as capitalism lasted. It was understood too that propaganda for Socialism must depend first and foremost on the knowledge and exposition of Marxian economics. The working class must be shown the mechanics of exploitation from which the only release was the abolition of capitalism.

The Party had no money and no premises. The Provisional Committee had met in one another’s houses (several times, in a bedroom), and for the first Executive Committee meetings Hans Neumann arranged a room on alternate Saturdays at the old Communist Club in Charlotte Street, off Tottenham Court Road. While a committee went into ways and means for a Party newspaper, a makeshift list of acceptable pamphlets was published — Marx, Engels, Morris, Kautsky, Aveling, one or two others and Liebknecht’s No Compromise !

The Socialist Standard first came out in September, 1904. The printer and the only advertiser (advertisements were afterwards stopped) was A. E. Jacomb. He had a little printing-shop in Stratford under the name “Jacomb Brothers”, and as a member he was determined that no-one but he should print the Socialist Standard. The estimate of £7.10s.6d. for 3,000 copies was made simply by undercutting all the other estimates. Jacomb never sent in his bill, and from time to time the Executive Committee was obliged to set up sub-committees to discover or assess how much was owed to him.

Apart from publications, the backbone of propaganda was outdoor addresses — indeed, except for occasional meetings in hired halls, they were the only means available. In 1904 the sects and parties vied with one another in the streets and parks, and the Socialist Party flung itself enthusiastically into the fray. There were several organizations with such names as the Anti-Socialist Union, the Liberty and Property Defence League, and the Middle Class Defence Organisation, called “the societies whose purpose it is to combat Socialism”. In a short time, with twenty speakers holding forty or fifty meetings a week, the Party’s reputation grew out of proportion to its size. It demanded, and had, to be noticed.

Trade Unions and Religion
One of the major questions for the Party at its foundation was that of the trade unions. The LRC was in existence, to become the Labour Party in 1906. Ideas of syndicalism, embraced by the other Impossibilists who formed the SLP, were in the air. In 1906 a clumsy attempt to reconcile the Party with the SLP led — albeit indirectly — to “the Islington dispute” in which a whole Branch was expelled (one of them was the Party secretary Con Lehane, who later became a leader of Irish nationalism).

After a series of meetings and discussions, the Party’s attitude was formulated by the Easter Conference of 1905. Its decision ran:

 Whereas the Trade Unions, while being essentially economic organizations, are nevertheless taking political action either to safeguard their economic existence or for ether purposes, and
 Whereas any basis of working-class political action other than that laid down in the Declaration of Principles of the Socialist Party of Great Britain must lead the workers into the bog of confusion and disappointment, be it therefore
  Resolved that this Conference of the Socialist Party of Great Britain recommends that all members of the Party be instructed to actively oppose all action of the Unions that is not based on the Principles of this Party.

This attitude was amplified in the Party’s first pamphlet Manifesto, published in June 1905. The economic function of the unions was recognized and “any action on their part upon sound lines should be heartily supported”; their participation in “practical politics” under Labour leaders was “criminal folly”. This has remained the Party’s standpoint, and it has been justified again and again over seventy years.

With great social issues in the air the Party had many public debates with Conservative, Liberal and Labour politicians. It was constantly under pressure to support reform demands for “special cases” — women’s (and men’s) suffrage, education, pensions. In 1910 new ground was broken with the publication of Socialism and Religion. In it, the Party unequivocally declared itself to be against religion and unaccepting of the principle “Religion is a private affair”. Socialism and Religion was a best-seller among political pamphlets for nearly twenty years, while churchmen and capitalist politicians held it up as living proof of the terrors of Socialism.

It was revealed that the Party would accept no-one with a religious belief in its ranks. In fact from the beginning all applicants for membership were questioned, and this has always remained the practice — no casual enrolments for numbers’ sake, but convinced Socialists only. Likewise in election campaigns (the Party first contested municipal elections in 1906) every effort has been made to repel impulsive votes and secure only firmly Socialist ones. It can be added too that from an early stage speakers for the Party have been subject to a rigorous test in economics, history and political theory; it has been reflected in a high reputation for SPGB speakers.

The first headquarters rented for the Party’s exclusive use, after a series of meeting-rooms, were at 10 Sandland Street, Bedford Row, in 1909: two rooms above a corner junk-shop, which were left for a place in Grays Inn Road in 1912. The membership slowly crept up to about 200 by the outbreak of war in 1914. The hammering-out of policies in the first ten years had its price, and the memory of the SDF made for an extra sensitivity: members were often too readily convinced that a decision of which they disapproved was the first step to compromise and confusion. However, in 1914 the Party was tested — and not found wanting.

War and Revolution

On the outbreak of war the Socialist Party published on the front of the Standard its uncompromising statement “declaring that no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood”, and ending:

  Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.

No other organization took such a stand. With a few exceptions, the labour leaders zealously supported the war and gave their services to recruiting — Hyndman and co. included. Individual members of the ILP were pacifists but the party leader, Keir Hardie, declared for “the national interest” and recruitment.

Plans had to be shelved (it had been intended to have a member employed full-time speaking and organizing); but this was the lesser inconvenience. The major ones were the disruption of meetings and the victimization of members, and the Party decided in January 1915 to close down meetings before there was more serious trouble under the Defence of the Realm regulations. The Socialist Standard continued to come out, but public libraries refused to have it and the War Office forbade its being sent abroad.

The membership was dispersed. Many went to prison as conscientious objectors, others joined the “flying corps” — the brotherhood of men on the run. One or two made for Ireland, and Adolph Kohn and Moses Baritz for America. Kohn lay low, sending occasional articles to the Standard, but Baritz was incapable of self-effacement and was imprisoned as an agitator when America entered the war. The Party administration was carried on largely by women members; but all kept in touch as best they could and there were even surreptitious reunions. When the war ended, much of the building of the ten years after 1904 had been shattered. Money and offices were gone. The Party knew as never before that it stood alone, and as the errant members reassembled there was a sense not of defeat but of fresh vigour and resolve.

The war had contained one other remarkable vindication of the Socialist case. The Russian Revolution took place in 1917. The Party had a slight, sympathetic contact with the Bolsheviks. In March 1915 the Socialist Standard had on its front page a statement headed A Russian Challenge in which the Russian party condemned the war and the “monstrous crime against Socialism” of the labour leaders who had entered war governments. Every left-wing paper refused to publish this declaration before it was received by the SPGB; ironically, the same “left” was soon to adulate the Bolsheviks in power while the Socialist Party made a critical analysis with a different conclusion.

From the outset, the Party maintained that Socialism had not been established in Russia. The formation of the Communist Party in 1920 was only a return to old and futile theories: assorted radicals and the rumps of the BSP (the former SDF) and SLP embracing the armed insurrection and conspiracy prescribed by the Third International. It took forty years for savants to discover that the Bolsheviks had transformed a vast backward country into a highly centralized capitalist state. The Socialist Party said so, against all other voices, from 1917 onward.

Times of Crisis

Having no illusions of over-toppling capitalism by coups or confrontations, the Party was not disillusioned by the failures of Labour governments, the outcome of the General Strike, or the perfidy of Ramsay MacDonald. The hardest blows it had to bear in the nineteen-twenties were the early deaths, within four years of each other, of two men who meant much to it: Alex Anderson and Jack Fitzgerald. Anderson was a magnificent orator, Fitzgerald was outstanding as theorist, debater and writer. Both were working men. In any of capitalism’s big battalions they would have been national celebrities but they gave their lives to Socialism instead. Had they not died prematurely their lives and influence would have continued up to and after the second world war. Yet the loss proved the soundness of the Party’s repudiation of leadership; because it depended on no special person, the work went on unaltered.

The strongest political delusion of the ’twenties and the Depression years was the belief that the capitalist system was about to break down. (It was not new: Hyndman had been a perpetual prophet of collapse.) All the left shared it, urging that a militant push or two would bring the allegedly crumbling structure down in ruins. The Socialist Party analyzed the theory and showed its fallacies in a pamphlet called Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse. Mistaken ideas are usually exciting ones but that does not make them less damaging in the end. We were right; the others were not only wrong but, as so often, disillusioned.

As from 1904, the Party showed a small but steady growth. In the mid-thirties its membership was about 350, with a huge activity for its size. Outdoor meetings were prolific and lectures numerous, and there were frequent public debates with well-known politicians — Harold Macmillan, Michael Stewart, Barbara Wootton and many others. In 1929 the Party moved to headquarters at Great Dover Street, Southwark, where it remained until the building was bombed in 1941. Plans were made for what it had always been sought to do, the putting up of a Socialist parliamentary candidate for the first time.

As well as depression, unemployment and hunger-marches, the nineteen-thirties were the years of the rise of Nazism and the Spanish Civil War. Fresh questions were posed to the Party about whether we should fight “for democracy”, or to demolish a foreign government which was persecuting Jews. On the other hand, the fear of a war with terrifying new weapons — in particular, the use of the aeroplane — was so intense that we were also urged to forgo our independence and join with organizations which hoped to prevent it.

Inevitably there were controversies on these matters in the Party, and a few members were lost; but our independence was not given up for any alliance, or reason found for proposing to support another war of capitalism. The questions which to many people then were over-riding and exceptional have been answered by subsequent history. What is noteworthy in retrospect is that the loudest clamour to “defend democracy” and fight dictatorship came from the Communists — whose own favoured regime in Russia had now become as tyrannical as any in the world.

Another War, and Hard Labour

In the 1939-45 war hysteria was not widespread as in 1914-18; the common working-class feeling was of having been led into it by governments which were cynical or incompetent, or both. Conditions for opponents of the war were less severe, though that is not to say they were comfortable. After some initial difficulties the Party was able to hold regular propaganda meetings indoors and outdoors. The only department which was hamstrung was literature. The Government’s Defence Regulations introduced in May 1940 were directed specifically against printed matter, and the Party decided — wisely, as was shown by what happened to other publications — to with-hold from sale its 1936 pamphlet War and the Working Class and to refrain from anti-war material in the Socialist Standard.

Nevertheless, a policy of vigorous opposition to the war was laid down and pursued. At the same time, the Party made itself more difficult to join: applicants had to have two sponsors and were questioned even more carefully. The reason was that at such a time numbers of people who were not Socialists would have joined the Party for its anti-war policy. The harm in admitting one or two vague well-meaning people might seem small, but enough of them would drown the Socialist object in other intentions. We had to see that it did not happen.

As the war progressed the Party had to deal also with the plans and promises for a brave new capitalist world when it was over: Federal Union, now forgotten, and the Beveridge Plan which outlined welfare legislation — pamphlets were published and meetings and debates held on both. When Russia became Britain’s ally and was depicted for war propaganda purposes as a holy land of freedom, the Socialist attitude to Russia had to be stated fresh. (One result was that in 1943 the Communists’ Daily Worker named the venue of the Party Conference and hinted that loyal Britons could do worse than smash up the proceedings.)

The end of the war in 1945 brought the long- awaited parliamentary candidature, and the result of the General Election was the Labour Party in power with a majority of 180 seats. The Labour promise was of a new order severed from the miseries of the past, made in the name of “socialism”. The Socialist Party knew this to be a muddled misnomer for a mixture of ill-conceived reforms and attempts to apply Keynesian economic theory, but it knew also the immense damage done and about to be done.

Unable to control capitalism, the Labour Party conveyed to millions that Socialism was a mess. While everything the SPGB had said about reform, nationalization and “economic planning” was borne out, disenchantment over them redounded against the Socialist movement.

Nevertheless, activity remained at a high level. In 1948 the Labour Government, abandoning promises of plenty, told the population to tighten its belts with posters crying “We Work or Want”. The Socialist Party matched them with its own posters nationwide stating the facts of capitalism: “We SOMETIMES

Work, We ALWAYS Want”. The membership rose to 1,000 in 1947 and 1,100 in 1948. Another pamphlet in a fresh field, The Racial Problem, was published. The Party’s headquarters at this time were at Rugby Chambers, Holborn, and in 1951 it left there for the present head office at Clapham.

Yet within a short time unforeseen and unprecedented difficulties appeared. As the Party approached its fiftieth year the meetings which throughout that time had been its life-blood vanished almost into thin air, through a conjunction of social circumstances. The swift spread of television, nailing three quarters of the population to their armchairs every night; the regulation of shop hours, clearing busy streets after six o’clock; the growth of traffic, making it impossible to assemble round platforms at road junctions and street corners — these and other factors meant that suddenly audiences were no longer to be had, in or out of doors.

Other problems resulted. The sale of the Socialist Standard had always been largely a by-product of meetings. Now, forced into dependence on the printed world, simultaneously the main avenue for distributing it was closed. For several years a few Branches — Ealing, Islington, Hackney, Camberwell — sustained the circulation by door-to-door selling in the London area. The situation also drew attention to the shutting-out of minorities from the mass media: Socialism could not have its voice heard in television, the newspapers, the so-called “means of communication”.

From CND to the Seventies

The political movement which arose while the Party coped with changed circumstances was one claiming to be apolitical, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As before the war, Socialists were urged that the importance of the subject relegated everything else: the survival of mankind was at stake. The reply could only be that the problem was war itself, not its weapons, and in turn the economic system in which the danger of war is always latent. Moreover, it had been possible for seers a generation before (H. G. Wells, for instance) to envisage the world devastated with pre-nuclear weapons. Indeed, CND disintegrated as its supporters realized a single issue could not be isolated from the rest of society’s causes and effects — which was what the Socialist Party said at the beginning.

It was argued, in other fields, that capitalism had changed. The full employment which had lasted since the war, the absence of a major depression, the possession by working people of cars and cocktail cabinets, were seen by many as evidence that the old problems had gone. In a few more years they reasserted themselves, however. The Party has never failed to consider and analyze whatever proposals and theories are advanced, but has never found reason to alter its case that capitalism is incapable of favouring the world’s population and that only Socialism will end the problems.

In fact the scene now resembles the pre-war one. There are unemployment, widespread poverty and industrial discontent, and capitalism — everywhere else besides in Britain — lurching from crisis to crisis beyond control. As an inevitable accompaniment, left-wing groups call for militancy and bring out again the theories with which their predecessors fell down: direct action, infiltration of the Labour Party, the collapse of capitalism.

Seventy years with an object unattained may look like failure. We claim success in many ways. First and foremost, the Socialist Party is alive and well. That surely merits attention. During our lifetime innumerable people and organizations have been going to show us quicker ways to Socialism, or render it unnecessary by reforms. Where are they now ? Extinct, or negligible.

At various times in seventy years the Party could surely have made a splash and gained a bigger membership by becoming Russophile, or whipping-up industrial agitation, or advocating attractive reforms. By not doing these we have irritated many people; but we are still here because we have not been wrong. There is a sad side to that question, too. Most of those who wanted our support for immediate campaigns have said they agreed with us but could not wait for Socialism — yet if they had come in with us instead of wasting efforts elsewhere, we should have had Socialism long ago.

So the work for Socialism goes on. As always, we have our problems. We still need avenues for distribution of the Socialist Standard. For every member we have several sympathizers — if only they would make the effort and join! We always need money. But the enthusiasm and optimism of our several hundred members are as bright and keen as were those of the founders in 1904. We do not think of ourselves as carrying on an old struggle, because it is a new one all the time. If the Socialist Party had not existed for the past seventy years, it would be necessary to start it today.

Robert Barltrop

Marx's partner (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists cannot pay tribute to Marx without at the same time noting the role of his comrade and collaborator, Engels. It was Engels’ financial support which enabled the penurious Marx to carry out his researches into political economy.

But this financial support was not the least of Engels’ contributions. It is reckoned that about 1500 letters passed between Marx and Engels. They thought along the same lines, they spoke the same language, yet their life-experience was different. For Engels, there was the practical world of the Manchester cotton trade, he read widely, keeping himself fully informed of the latest developments in physics, chemistry and other sciences, with a special interest in comparative physiology and the controversies surrounding Darwin’s theory of evolution.

To Engels we owe volumes II and III of Marx's unfinished Capital, which he completed with difficulty from quantities of rough drafts and notes. After Marx’s death. Engels continued to publish translations and new editions of Marx’s works, providing prefaces in many languages. Yet it would be wrong to regard Engels only as Marx's editor, publisher and lifelong friend. His contributions to the socialist movement stand in their own right.

Many of the issues he discussed in his early work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, were taken up again by Marx in volume 1 of Capital. Engels' passionate indictment of slums, and the diseases and deformities of children at sweated labour (as in his analysis of the real cost of lace for fashionable ladies), such themes permeate his book. Yet there is more in it than indignation at the social evils of industrial capitalism.

Engels described how new technology and the division of labour were accompanied by the emergence of a new class, the urban proletariat. He posed the fundamental question: "What is to become of these propertyless millions who own nothing and consume today what they earned yesterday?’’ Industry, he wrote. ". . . regards its workers not as human beings but simply as so much capital for the use of which the industrialist has to pay interest under the name of wages”. Describing how competition affected the level of wages, he also emphasised the "cycles of boom and slump”; the Malthusian "surplus population” was the reserve army of the unemployed, available for industry's booms, and condemned to destitution and the Poor Law workhouses between-times.

Discussing both the value and the limitations of trade unionism (a theme to which he returned in some later writings [1]), and the main working class movements of the time. Engels criticised the English socialists for being metaphysical, lacking awareness of the significance of historical development. It seemed to him that they preached "philanthropy and universal love . . . the improvement of humanity in the abstract". He reiterated this criticism in his preface to the 1892 edition:

And today, the very people who. from the ’impartiality' of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes — these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers — wolves in sheep’s clothing.

This first socialist examination of the effects of industrial capitalism, written from the standpoint of historical materialism, touched on many issues later developed in other works by Marx and Engels. Written in Germany on Engels’ return from two years in Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class has some faults. He was not able to check all of his quotations, and some are inaccurate; later, he acknowledged that his prediction that with the next crisis would come the revolution was “youthful ardour”.

Although the Communist Manifesto was published as their joint work, Engels himself expressly stated:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto — that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the w'hole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggle — this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx. [2]

One persistent criticism of Marx is that human behaviour is said to be influenced exclusively by class interests and material factors and nothing else. This is a gross distortion and Engels explicitly argued against such nonsense:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I has ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic role is the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. [3]

In much of Engels' writing, we find the dialectical method explained. He considered phenomena as evolving through often complex interactions. His conception of history was not a simplistic model of a superstructure of laws, religions, ideologies and dogmas perched on top of a separate economic base, with something like a damp course separating one from another. On the contrary, the various elements of the superstructure "also exercise their influence upon the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form"'. [3]

Criticisms of Marx as an "economic determinist” arise from "the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction. These gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once a historic element has been brought into the world by other, ultimately economic causes it reacts, can react upon its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it" [4]. In Anti-Dühring Engels showed that science had revealed just such a dialectical process in nature. There are no absolute truths, everything is changing: "motion is the mode of existence of matter".

Anti-Dühring supplies a thorough grounding in dialectical materialism, applied not only to science and philosophy (attacking with gusto the nonsense about "eternal truths" propounded by metaphysical thinkers), but also to the development of socialist theory from "Utopian" socialism to "scientific” socialism. Some chapters from Anti-Dühring were soon republished as a pamphlet, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, and the central section of the book ("Political Economy”) serves as a helpful introduction to Marx’s Capital. Both the book and the pamphlet had an immediate and lasting influence in many countries.

In his next book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). based on Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, Engels analysed the way civilised, class-divided society had evolved from barbaric and savage societies, and how property relationships changed family relationships. Engels also showed how the changing division of labour, with the introduction of herding, "forced women into second place": mother-right gave place to father-right. He showed how the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, so that the state "is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class". It follows that the socialist has no choice but to emphasise that every class struggle is a political one.

The superficial objection to socialism — that it is against "human nature” — is based on ignorance of the fact that civilised society, with its class divisions and state coercive institutions, "has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it (the state), that had no conception of the state and state power". Engels described primitive societies which managed their affairs democratically and without the coercion that is considered right and natural today. Such societies demonstrate that it is not "human nature" which requires humanity to be divided into nation-states and opposing classes, or which would make socialism impossible.

This article has only discussed Engels's main works. There were others which are both readable and helpful. How far was the theory of "Marxism” his work? His own view was emphatic and consistent:

What I contributed — at any rate with the exception of a few special studies — Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved . . . Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name. [5]

Charmian Skelton

References:

1. Cf. The Wages System (Progress Publishers)

2. Preface to the German edition. 1883

3. Letter to Bloch, 1890 (Marx and Engels — basic writings ed. Feuer, Fontana)

4. Letter to Mehring, 1893 (Feuer)

5. Ludwig Feuerbach, 1886 (Chap. IV. footnote)

Engels' review of Capital (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Universal suffrage has added to the already existing parliamentary parties a new one, the Social-Democratic Party. In the last elections to the North-German Reichstag it nominated its own candidates in most large towns, in all factory districts, and six or eight of its deputies were returned. In comparison with the last election but one it has developed considerably greater strength and it can therefore be assumed that, for the present at least it is still growing. It would be folly to wish to continue to pass over in splendid silence the existence, activity and doctrines of such a party in a country in which universal suffrage has laid the final decision in the hands of the most numerous and poorest class.

However divided and unsettled the few Social-Democratic deputies may be among themselves, it can be assumed with assurance that all groups of that party will welcome the present book as their theoretical bible, the arsenal from which they will draw their most substantial arguments. On these grounds alone the book already deserves particular attention. Rut its contents too are such as will arouse interest. Whereas Lassalle's main argumentation — and in political economy Lasalle was but a disciple of Marx — is confined to continual repetition of Ricardo's so-called wages law, we have before us a work which treats the whole relation of capital and labour in its connection with the whole of economic science with indisputably rare erudition and which sets as its ultimate aim "to lay hare the economic law of motion of modern society”, and thereby, after obviously sincere investigations carried out with unmistakable knowledge of the subject, comes to the conclusion that the whole “capitalist mode of production” must be abolished. We should, however, like further to draw attention to the fact that, apart from the conclusions, the author in the course of his work presents quite a number of the major points of economics in a completely new light and in purely scientific questions arrives at results which are greatly at variance with current economics and wInch orthodox economists must seriously criticise and scientifically refute if they do not wish to see the doctrine they have so far professed founder. In the interest of science it is desirable that a polemic should develop very soon in specialised journals precisely on these points.

Marx begins by expounding the relation between commodity and money, the most essential of which was already published some time ago in a special work. Then he goes on to capital and here we have the cardinal point of the whole work. What is capital? Money which is changed into a commodity in order to be changed back from a commodity into more money than the original sum. When I buy cotton for 100 talers and sell it for 110 talers I preserve my 100 talers as capital, value which expands itself. Now the question arises: where do the 10 talers which I gain in this process come from? How does it happen that as a result of two simple exchanges 100 talers becomes 110. For economics presupposes that in all exchanges equal values are exchanged. Marx then considers all possible cases (fluctuation in prices of commodities, etc.) in order to prove that in the conditions assumed by economics the creation of 10 talers surplus-value out of the original 100 talers is impossible. Yet this process takes place daily and the economists have not yet given us an explanation for it. Marx provides the following explanation: the puzzle can be solved only if we find on the market a commodity of a quite peculiar kind, a commodity whose use-value consists in producing exchange-value. This commodity exists — it is labour-power. The capitalist buys labour-power on the market and makes it work for him in order in turn to sell its product. So we must first of all investigate labour-power.

What is the value of labour-power? According to the generally known law, it is the value of the means of subsistence necessary to maintain and procreate the labourer in the way established in a given country and a given historical epoch. We assume that the labourer is paid the entire value of his labour-power. Further we assume that this value is represented by six hours’ work daily, or half a working-day. But the capitalist asserts that he has bought labour-power for a whole working-day and he makes the labourer work twelve hours or more. With a twelve-hour working-day he therefore acquires the product of six hours' work without paying for it. From this Marx concludes: all surplus-value, no matter how it is divided, as profit of the capitalist, ground-rent, taxes, etc. is unpaid labour.

From the manufacturer's interest to extract as much unpaid labour as possible every day and the contrary interest of the labourer arises the struggle over the length of the working-day. In an illustration which is very much worth reading and which takes up about a hundred pages, Marx describes the origin of this struggle in English modern industry which, in spite of the protests of the free-trade manufacturers, ended last spring in not only factory industry but all small establishments and even ail domestic industry being subjected to the restrictions of the Factory Act, according to which the maximum working-day for women and children under eighteen — and thereby indirectly for men too in the most important branches of industry — was fixed at 10½ hours. At the same time he explains why English industry did not suffer, but on the contrary gained thereby, as the work of each individual won more in intensity than it lost in duration.

But there is another way of increasing surplus-value besides lengthening the working-day beyond the time required for the production of the necessary means of subsistence or their value. A given working-day. let us say of twelve hours, includes, according to our previous assumption, six hours of necessary work and six hours used for the production of surplus-value. If a means is found to cut the necessary working-time down to five hours, seven hours remain during which surplus-value will be produced. This can be achieved by a reduction in the working-time required to produce the necessary means of subsistence, in other words by cheapening the means of subsistence, and this in turn only by improving production. On this point Marx again gives a detailed illustration by investigating or describing the three main levers by which these improvements are brought about: 1) co-operation, or multiplication of power, which results from the simultaneous and systematic joint work of a number of workers; 2) division of labour, as it took shape in the period of manufacture proper (i.e. up to about 1770); finally. 3) machinery by the help of which modern industry has since developed. These descriptions are also of great interest and show astonishing knowledge of the subject even down to technological details.

We cannot enter into further details of the investigation on surplus-value and wages: we merely note, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that, as Marx proves by a number of quotations, orthodox economics is not unaware of the fact that wages are less than the whole product of work. It is to be hoped that this book will provide Messrs, the orthodox economists with the opportunity of giving us closer explanations on this really surprising point. It will be appreciated that all the factual proofs that Marx gives are taken from the best sources, mostly official parliamentary reports. We take this opportunity of supporting the suggestion, made indirectly by the author in the Preface, that in Germany too a thorough inquiry into the condition of the workers in the various industries be made by government officials — who, however, must not be prejudiced bureaucrats — and that the reports be submitted to the Reichstag and the public.

The first volume ends with a study of the accumulation of capital. This point has often been written about, although we must admit that here too much of what is given is new and that light is shed on the old from new sides. The most original is the attempted proof that side by side with the concentration and accumulation of capital. and in step with it, the accumulation of a surplus working population is going on, and that both together will in the end make a social upheaval necessary, on the one hand, and possible on the other.

Whatever opinion the reader may have of the author's socialist views, we think that we have shown him that he is here in presence of a work which stands well above the usual Social-Democratic publications. To that we add that with the exception of the strongly dialectical things on the first 40 pages, the book, in spite of all its scientific rigour, is very easy to understand and because of the author's sarcastic manner, which spares no one, is even interestingly written.