The changing world of children (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thirteen million of the population of Britain are under 15 years old. When Socialism is established, that quarter of the population will cease to be financial dependants and will be owners of the means of living like everyone else. Questions about education and upbringing in Socialism frequently assume that children are still to be at the disposal of adults and will have arrangements made for them. It may not be like that.

The idea of childhood itself has altered repeatedly in different social phases. “Infancy”, which now refers to very young children, formerly meant the entire pre-adult period of life; the word is still used with this meaning in law. Adolescence was a legal division in ancient Rome, covering the period from puberty (14 for males, 12 for females) to the male majority at 25. Only in the 20th century, however, has it come to mean a physical and psychological development between childhood and adulthood. In the Middle Ages and the early capitalist era such a stage was virtually unrecognized: they were children, then they were adults.

Thus, in Tudor times upper-class boys matriculated and were sent away to universities at thirteen or fourteen. The law permitted the marriage of boys at fourteen and girls at twelve. Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen, and a character says early in the play: “Younger than she are happy mothers made.” Children of what are now called tender years were flogged; the Verney Memoirs has a letter expressing concern for a delicate three-year-old—“Let me beg of you and his mother that nobody whip him but Mr. Parrye”. In the working class, Defoe noted with approval in the early 18th century that children of four and five all over Britain earned their livings.

Childhood is a physiological condition, but its duration and what is expected of it are social decisions. The question “What is man?” needs a rider: “What is child?”

Work and School

The first moves to control child labour in factories, and thereby create a new conception of childhood, were made by “enlightened” members of the capitalist class during the Napoleonic Wars. One of them was Sir Robert Peel, the father of the Tory Prime Minister. G. M. Trevelyan in his English Social History indicates the nature of this enlightenment: “No doubt the good Sir Robert, who himself employed 15,000 hands, was in part anxious to restrain the unfair competition of his more unscrupulous rivals.”

At the same time, economists argued the need to withhold children from work and send them to school. Adam Smith put forward a scheme for parish schools which would provide the basis of economic activity and progress. Ricardo and Malthus both favoured education as a means of inculcating habits which would lead to family limitation, and therefore an increase in economic well-being. An anonymous pamphlet of 1856 called The Education of the Masses, Can it be Accomplished? talked more specifically of making labour-power “a much better and more trustworthy article than has hitherto been furnished”. In introducing the Elementary Education Act of 1870 W. E. Forster said: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our national prosperity.”

Childhood was defined by developed capitalism as from birth to twelve, then fourteen and after; during this time the value of labour-power would be formed and the child purposefully conditioned. Adolescence appeared as the period between that childhood and marriage, which was now delayed several years. Alongside these changes, the spread of scientific ideas and of modern popular culture installed fresh images of childhood. The decline of the social importance of the family in this century has weakened former prejudices and sanctions; in general, children today are better cared for and less restricted than ever before. Yet, as with the majority of society, the result is frustration because means and conditions are absent.

Moulding

The often-quoted claim of a Jesuit that a child raised by him up to seven years old would be his for life has been responsible for a lot of muddled thinking about upbringing and its effects. Much of what small children learn is the acquiring by imitation of social techniques. Getting food, conversation, movement, etc., are absorbed almost unwittingly from the circles in which they live. “They are very often ignorant of the possibilities of any other sort of behaviour; and the process of learning is probably as nearly effortless as any which can be studied.” (C. M. Fleming, The Social Psychology of Education.)

Responses are also learned this way: how to win admiration and to get one’s own way. This leads to the identification of learning in children with “socialization”, or conditioning them to perform as those in charge desire—the modern version of the Jesuit theory. Fortunately, it does not work. To connect the upbringing of children with the class struggle may seem far-fetched, but this is the operative factor. While their “nature” as children is laid down by and to suit the needs of capitalism, it conflicts with the notions of self- and group-interest formed in a working-class environment. The size of the gap is shown by the numerous attempts at supplementary conditioning made through youth organizations—which in turn fail, for the same reason.

Earnest radicals have often tried to oppose the “socialization” of capitalism with alternative theories of upbringing and youth organizations which try to impose a different point of view. In the nineteen- twenties and -thirties a “Left Scout Movement” was attempted called first Kibbo Kift and then the Woodcraft Folk. The founder of the latter organization, Leslie Paul, wrote later: “Despite the socialist dressing we gave to everything, and believed we believed in, every kind of future reform or revolution paled beside our concern for the content of the actual life we were living at that moment.” (Angry Young Man, 1951.) That is precisely it. For children, the proposed indoctrination is a disposable surface item; the activity, learning by doing, is what adds to the development of reasoning powers.

Games people play

Children learn rôles. Childhood itself is a rôle; if it is deemed to continue to, say, fourteen or fifteen a boy or girl will act younger at that age than if he or she is named an adolescent or an adult. The rôles are what society expects and therefore makes known to children, and their carrying-out is part of social technique.

In the last thirty years the male and female rdles practised and accepted throughout capitalism have altered. The long hair inaugurated by pop groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stone., at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties was a sign of rejection of established masculine looks, while girls took to male trousers. Established ideas of distinct characteristic behaviour of the sexes have blurred; women make sexual demands on men, instead of the opposite. When co-education in state schools was spreading in the ’fifties it was often said to have the effect of making boys womanish, but that is no longer heard.

Previously there was no problem. Boys were conditioned from their earliest consciousness to be virile (“Be a big boy, now’’) and girls feminine. The classic toy for girls, held to be a demonstration in itself that the differences in behaviour were inborn, was a doll. However, in the last ten years one of the most popular boys’ toys has been the “action man’’, which is simply a male doll with changeable clothes. Insofar as children learn male and female rôles from what they see round them—mother doing housework and cooking, father going out to his job—the difference remains. But it is also clear that this is not destiny but a social arrangement; and the old version of it cannot be inculcated in the future.

Besides observation and instruction, children learn by play. This fact was taken up by educationalists a generation ago in "the play way”, trying to adapt play to be a means of conditioning. On the other side, before the 1914-18 war an American named Stanley Hall produced the “recapitulation” theory of play; it argued that children re-enacted the stages of man’s development—gathering, hunting, tribal wars, even (in “swapping”) the growth of commerce. Play ranges from simple imitation to the acting of fantasies, and the need for it is not confined to children. Social convention and the work-ethic say that it should be, with the result that adult occupations such as acting and professional sports are commonly regarded as evading work. Living in capitalism, we see man estranged from himself.

Something new

Again in common with adults, children need stability and affection. In memoirs of the Oneida Community (My Father's House, published in 1937) Pierrepont Noyes related how the elders of the community censured the showing of affection on the grounds that it denoted possessiveness; and the stress this put on the persons he knew. Individuals who are handicapped in this way can and do have problems ot relationships with the rest of society, which often emerge as delinquency.

However, underlying individual relationships is the structure of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship expresses material circumstances, laws and social concepts that arise from or are linked with wage-labour and capital. The protectiveness of parents is a mixture of affection with the knowledge that in the capitalist world the pursuit of a natural impulse, or a misjudgement, can be punished in the all-important material sense. This in itself makes the child a subject instead of an individual; the parent says "Do as you’re told, or it will be the worse for you” because that is how a class society operates.

Certainly, in any society children must learn. Rather than ask how it will be arranged in Socialism, it can be pointed out that capitalism prevents them learning now. Children will learn through their own activity, play and curiosity; the “problem” of literacy in capitalist society is for governments to try to instil it while keeping the social factors which obstruct it. The best-known of “progressive” educationists, A. S. Neill, insisted that children learn when and because they want to, but Neill was unable to operate his principles within the general education system of capitalism.

We look forward to the emergence of socialist man, the fulfilment of the capacities which are stifled and distorted in capitalist society. Socialist child should not be overlooked; equally, he and she will be an altogether different creature.

Robert Barltrop

Pathfinders: Basic skills (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent YouTube essay argues that modern literature is poor quality because young writers don’t know how to write. This is because they don’t really know how to read, and this is because the US abandoned the century-old and evidence-backed phonics reading system in favour of something called ‘critical literacy’, which supposedly prioritises personal interpretation over text analysis. Thus, goes the narrative, literary comprehension has cratered, offset by a skyrocketing tendency to react subjectively to texts instead of objectively analysing their meanings. In conclusion, this is what’s behind the modern epidemic of cancel culture, where words mean whatever you want them to mean, and anyone is entitled to be ‘triggered’ by anything.

25 percent of US adults have only a kindergarten reading age, the video says, and 60 percent have that of a 10 year old. This is broadly verifiable. The essayist believes that abandoning phonics was a deliberate strategy to dumb people down and thereby make them more compliant. But this overlooks a contradiction. While politicians might love dumb voters, and advertisers love dumb consumers, any industry report will show that capitalist employers want the opposite, smart and productive workers with industry-relevant skills, because their labour is what produces profits. And taxes on those profits finance governments. Worker, voter, consumer, same person.

Conspiracy explanations are lazy. Better to apply the principle of Hanlon’s Razor: ‘Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.’ Capitalism is chaotic, contradictory and incompetent all the way down, including its education systems. Unlike the US, the UK never abandoned phonics. In fact it’s a statutory requirement. Even so, ‘the average reading age of adults in the United Kingdom is typical of a child in UK education at 9 years old’ while ‘some have a much lower reading level’.

Social media means many young people don’t read books. Reading test scores have been declining across OECD countries since 2012. Worse, AI provides a ‘frictionless’ user experience which is proving addictive, and some evidence suggests that AI-reliant students are losing the ability to learn or retain information.

Sourcing a quote provides an example of this frictionless user experience in action. Back in the 18th and 19th century, some intellectuals did indeed view the education of workers with abject horror. One remarked that teaching workers to read was ‘to tie firebrands to foxes and set them loose amid the standing corn’. Who was it? Google’s AI Overview answered at once: ‘The quote is by the Russian anarchist Emma Goldman. She wrote, “To teach the masses in a compulsory fashion is to tie firebrands to foxes and set them loose amid the standing corn,” in her 1911 essay “The Americanization of the American Girl“‘.

Er, no. The idea of Emma Goldman deprecating widespread worker education is preposterous. The essay title also looked dubious, and hyperlinked to this: ‘The phrase “The Americanization of the American Girl” is likely a misremembering of the title “The Americanization of Emily,” a 1964 British-American romantic comedy film starring James Garner and Julie Andrews.’

Well, the film is real, but otherwise, nul points so far for Google Overview. Why not ask the AI to check its own answer? ‘Did Emma Goldman write an essay called The Americanization of the American Girl“? It flashed back: ‘No, there is no evidence that Emma Goldman wrote an essay with that exact title […] “The Americanization of the American Girl” does not appear in her known works or bibliographies.’

You don’t get internal consistency because current generative AI doesn’t remember what it last told you. Next we got: ‘The quote is from the conservative politician Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said teaching workers to read was “to tie firebrands to foxes [etc]” to express her view that it would lead to “radical, anti-American, anti-God, and anti-police sentiment”.

A gargling MAGA nutjob could hardly have authored an 18th century quotation. Time for some ‘prompt engineering’, ie, rephrase question, get different answer: ‘Who opposed general education on the grounds that teaching workers to read was ‘to tie firebrands to foxes and set them loose amid the standing corn”?

This time Google Oversight gave a more plausible response: ‘The phrase was not used to oppose general education, but was a popular quote attributed to the English politician and magistrate Sir Thomas Bernard, who opposed the teaching of reading to the poor in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He feared that educating the working class would lead to unrest and was quoted as saying, “to tie firebrands to foxes… [etc].’ The AI further assured us that Sir TB, ‘a prominent 18th-century English politician and magistrate, was a vocal opponent of educating the poor’ who highlighted ‘the dangers of educating the poor, suggesting it would lead to social chaos and unrest’.

It seemed prudent to ask ‘Who was Sir Thomas Bernard?’ In a flash, the multi-hundred billion dollar oracle responded:

‘Sir Thomas Bernard (1750–1818) was an English lawyer, philanthropist, and social reformer, best known for … founding the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor… he […] dedicated much of his life to improving the lives of the poor and working children.’

Could this philanthropist have worked to improve the lot of the poor while emphatically against educating them? Not unless he was very confused. A clarification then: ‘Did Sir Thomas Bernard oppose educating the poor while campaigning to improve their conditions?’

‘No, Sir Thomas Bernard did not oppose educating the poor; in fact, he was a strong advocate for their education and included it as a key part of his efforts to improve their conditions.’ 

Acres more text in the same vein.

So, bright, shiny, and useless. ‘Frictionless’ learning is a delusion. The mind needs friction like the body needs fibre. Reading, writing and critical thinking are vital for workers. They’re the basic skills of revolution.

Many expect the AI bubble to burst, as the rampant spending shows derisory returns. The result could be a cold shower all round.

Paddy Shannon

Who needs schools? (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is September. The prison gates must be unlocked and the young people who must be taught a lesson or two are being returned to their place, to be instructed, shouted at, forced to memorise the often irrelevant — to have games played with their minds. When it is enacted by the master class that all children between the ages of five and sixteen shall be subjected to schooling they are doing our class no favours: they are endeavouring to catch early the impressionable minds of the young.

How valid is the analogy between school and prison? The more detached from the prison walls of the school one becomes the stranger it might seem, but to the children being schooled (not educated the two are different) the relationship between school and denial of freedom is all too clear. Schools are places where children, coming in with the innocent belief that they are at liberty in the world, are taught the firm conviction that to behave freely is a crime. They must learn to know their place.

Capitalism sends those who do not know their place to prison. It is done "for their own good". Children are told that schooling will be for their own good. In prison you obey orders or you are punished. And in school. Do not question orders. Do not question the right of the person giving orders to give them. They are dictators appointed by the state; the tax paying capitalist has invested good money so that the orders will be carried out

The prisoner is stripped of individuality and made to wear a uniform. So are school kids. In both cases, uniforms make identification and discipline easier. In prison you become a slave to routine. When a bell rings you eat, you exercise, you work, you slop out. In school, children learn to jump to the dictatorship of the bell: "Why are you outside after the bell has gone? It went five minutes ago. When the bell rings you must be in your proper place". Chimpanzees can be taught such bell-obedience: in a human being it is a descent, not progress.

In prison it is assumed that the prisoner can never be equal to those with authority over him. In schools, however clever the pupil becomes, the teacher will always be superior and one will teach while the other learns and never shall the roles be reversed. You are sent to prison for breaking socially-made rules called laws. Often this means you have stolen food because you are broke, an act which would not be criminal in a world without property. You are sent to school to learn how to accept the wisdom of insane socially-made rules. The "rehabilitated” prisoner, like the properly “educated" school student. is released in the hope that they will be a decently exploitable wage slave.

The function of schooling is to create little human commodities: neatly-packed, subservient embodiments of labour power, there to be exploited as wealth-producing wage slaves. A well-schooled young worker will be fit to go out into the market and sell themselves. The skill of the teacher is not to bring out from a child what it could be. but what the capitalist social system requires it to be. Eighty years ago the Report of the Consultative Committee to the Head of Education on Higher Elementary Schools was candid in explaining the declared needs of employers for which schools should cater:

. . boys and girls in their service should possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self- help, and pride in good work for its own sake whatever it might be. (1906 Report)

The Report complained that

Employers are said to be dissatisfied with much of the elementary education given, because the instruction, in so far as it is carried beyond the simplest elements, tends, if anything. to make a boy a little above his job.

The present recession has provided educational authorities with the ideal opportunity to make schooling more than ever a job-based process. It is all very well teaching children to express themselves freely through dance, say the traditionalists, but what good will that do them as training for a life behind the check-out counter in Tesco? The investors in Tesco need wage slaves who can add up (we can’t have Lady Porter short-changed. can we?) and not poets, dancers or inventors. So at school the child is taught to regard big ambitions as dreams for the back of the mind: the real objective must be to become a purchasable labour-power commodity.

Capitalism cannot cope with childhood. It needs children, because they represent the reproduction of labour power — new profit-makers for the future. But children must be censured for being childish. The great, civilised struggle for maturity must be entered as soon as possible. To be mature means to be as stupid as the others who have been conned by the system. A child is a dangerous being: not yet conditioned, not yet afraid to see the world as something to be shared. So schools keep children out of society's way. just as prisons keep others away until they are prepared to conform.

Workers need education but not schooling. Education means learning to know what is happening and why. In social terms, there can be no doubt that the working class needs to learn what is happening in the world and why. In this way we shall see the capitalist system as the cause of our problems and then the solution will be not far off. But working class self-education is very different from what passes as education in the capitalist school. From the earliest days socialists have rejected that schooling designed, not to expose social reality but to indoctrinate working class kids to “ honour the Queen, obey your superiors, and run away from every policeman" (Justice, 30 June 1894). It was not education for life, but propaganda for submission.

Many reformers of capitalism have engaged in several campaigns to humanise the education system: to make it useful, or at least better, for the working class. At the beginning of this century the Social Democratic Federation campaigned for free school dinners. It was in opposition to this piddling reformism that revolutionaries left the SDF. refusing to plead for bit-by-bit changes to the exploitation system. As with many reform campaigns, this one was never successful but parliament did grant free school milk which was subsequently withdrawn.

Immense reformist effort went into abolishing the old grammar school system. This fight was nominally won but comprehensive indoctrination has hardly changed the essential nature of the oppressive schooling process. Parent governors have been introduced even student governors — but they would be the first to concede (and often complain bitterly) that their views count for little in relation to the state s dictatorial control of schools. Another campaign has been to abolish public schools for the children of the privileged. Eight Labour governments have made noises about them, but not one has made a single move to abolish them.

When Neil Kinnock was shadow Education Minister he became a darling of the Labour Left by promising to put an end to privileged schooling. It will be worth watching his efforts in this direction if he becomes Prime Minister. The fact is that reformists have played around with the form of schooling. but none has proposed to revolutionise the function of education. This cannot be done in isolation from a socialist transformation of society, for it is only when commodity society has been transcended that commodity-based schooling can be removed. There have been a few inspired and brave efforts at establishing non-conventional schools ("free schools") within capitalism but they have had an uphill struggle within a social environment which cannot cope with freedom.

A socialist society will not need to mould children into servants of an omnipotent production process. In a world where the producer’s quality of life and the quality of the product will be equally valued there will be no requirement of a person but that they learn to live well, for part of living well is to live creatively and to give as well as to take. In a society of production for use the experience of education will cease to be a process which takes place in an institution under compulsion.

Whether the word "school" will survive or not we cannot forecast but that any socialist school would be unrecognisable in comparison with those of today is a matter of certainty. There will be no teachers who are not learners also; there will be no end to education but the satisfaction of human needs — a process which will not stop at eighteen or eighty. In chapter five of William Morris's News From Nowhere there is one great vision of what education might be like in a socialist society. It will be for the workers (and that includes children) who establish socialism to decide how to educate themselves and it will be for each generation to reexamine methods of learning and to assess their worth in the light of what it has produced in their elders.

The ultimate condemnation of capitalist "education" is that it has played a key role in producing capitalist-minded people. A society of people who love nations which they do not own. hate foreigners, are willing to kill in wars, offer themselves as victims to the profit system and obey those who abuse them, is a society of badly educated inhabitants. In a book called The School That I'd Like, compiled as a result of essays on the title submitted by school kids for a competition run by the Observer in December 1967. one girl of fifteen wrote that

I am tired of hearing that the hope of my country lies in my generation. If you give me the same indoctrination . . . how can you expect me to be any different from you?

Steve Coleman

The Plot to Educate. Why the Capitalist wants Brains. (1916)

From the September 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

The clerk and the school-teacher boast that they live by their brains. The mechanic smiles in derision and claims that the real thing worth knowing is, how to do something useful. The capitalist and the slacker regard all kinds of education as worthless that do not help them to dodge work. These are personal view-points and much twaddle has been spoken and written on each, which is responsible for much of the confusion that exists on the subject of education.

The capitalist himself does not want to be troubled with education, as he understands it ; he pays someone else to acquire and use it in his interest. He does not object to some pains to obtain a smattering of general knowledge and that neurotic polish known and worshipped as culture. Some capitalists even pose as business men and indulge in vague generalities about “technical knowledge” and “the qualities that make for success.” These are the merchant princes and the qualities they laud were precisely the ones that made them such. The capitalist who soils his hands, or worries his brains over technicalities, it is almost needless to add, is the man who cannot afford to buy brains and must, perforce, use his own.

Science has become an adjunct of industry. Educated brains are as necessary to the capitalist as skilled hands and muscular are. Industry (read capitalists) needs both. Muscular energy and mechanical skill multiplies itself without much watering and manuring from the owners of capital. But the science of the business laboratory, and the knowledge necessary to organization on a large scale can only be acquired under special circumstances not attainable by the average worker.

There is no question of intelligence involved. The lad of average intellect given the opportunity to qualify could fill any post in the field of industry. There is no genius in evidence, nor is it required. High salaries are paid to the chemist and the organiser because their skill or ability is the product of many workers concentrated in one person. The opportunities to acquire this concentrated knowledge are rare, consequently those who possess it are scarce, their price on the labour market is high and their heads are swollen, not with the exercise of their brains, but with the idea that they are worth more than the mechanic or laboiner—to the capitalist.

And the latter, well, he wants more. Not like the worker who “wants more work in order to get less of it.” The capitalist wants more brain workers to get more—for less money. Hence the agitation in the Press. One writer says: “Germany did not sweep to such triumphs in the chemical world simply on the brains of one or two super-skilled men. She had armies of such men.” The capitalist wants to be quit of the Ramseys, Wallaces and Lodges who flirt with spooks and try to analyse ether. When they condescend to notice him from the heights of the Milky Way, the astral world, or a Park Lane drawing-room, their information was, to say the least, costly.

What the capitalist wants is to instal the brain-worker under his factory roof, with the rest of his workers, where he can see that his brain works—by the results. The first step to this end is to train the men. Supply of brain-workers must overtake demand. As was the case with school-teachers and clerks, competition will assert itself and the capitalist will get what he wants—cheap scientists and brain-workers.

The first move is a move in Parliament—the executive of the capitalists. Two committees are appointed, one for science, the other for languages. The terms of reference and constitution of the first are :

“To enquire into the position occupied by natural science in the educational system of Great Britain, especially in secondary schools and universities ; and to advise what measures are needed to promote its study, regard being had to the requirements of a liberal education, to the advancement of pure science, and to the interests of the trades, industries and professions which particularly depend upon applied science.”

The terms of the second are :

“To enquire into the position occupied by the study of modern languages in the educational system of Great Britain, especially in secondary schools and universities, and to advise what measures are required to promote their study, regard being had to the requirements of a liberal education, including an appreciation of the history, literature and civilisation of other countries and to the interests of commerce and public service”.

The unthinking one who reads the above will see nothing in it but the intention of Parliament to give facilities to the children of the poor to qualify for better jobs ; it entirely escapes his notice that the wholesale manufacture of applicants quickly robs the better job of its advantages. Capitalism by these very methods tends to reduce all workers to one dead level. Mechanical inventions eliminate skilled workers; ; lightning calculators scrap the clerk, and the man of muscle is superseded by magnetic cranes, etc.

Division of labour reduces the knowledge and skill required by each person to a minimum. Every man and woman specialises in one direction only ; and in that direction, because of the competition, must devote all his or her energies. To what end ? “The interests of trade, industry, and commerce.” All the educational roads lead to the same goal—the commercial interests of the capitalist class. If the worker wants to live he must get into one of the ruts provided, where his senses will be sharpened and his very thoughts moulded and curbed in the interest of commerce. Whether he works with his brain or his hands, or with, a combination of both—as, indeed, all forms of labour really are—he is subservient to commerce. Production and distribution, instead of being the means to satisfy his wants, enslaves him, plants him in a niche and keeps him busy with the routine of a department or the feeding of a machine.

Life for the average worker has no meaning outside the interests of commerce. The wonders of the universe, the beauties of nature, real knowledge and culture, are outside his ken : he is a mere cog in the machinery of wealth production—and remains poor. The accumulated knowledge of society built up by successive generations of workers has made possible a full and glorious life for all. Yet the life that comes to each of us but once is forced into a rut of toil that an idle class may flourish and revel in excessive luxury.

We Socialists are often accused of using strong language, but it is difficult to frame language that will convey an adequate idea of the hideous poverty of the great mass of the workers, according even to capitalist evidence. The cupidity and greed of the capitalist and the ignominy of the wage-slave have become ingrained in their respective natures. We Socialists, while not relinquishing the task of presenting to the workers a true perspective of their position, gladly welcome any capitalist writer of ability who contributes anything that will support our position, or help remove seme of the confusion prevalent on the subject of education.

The instructions given to the committee that is to investigate education reform are sufficient evidence to prove the conspiracy of the capitalist class. They plot to make all workers subservient to the interests of commerce, i.e., their interests, to prune knowledge—our common inheritance—till it, too, only serves their interests. Here, Mr. Donald Ross comes to our aid. He anticipated the Shylock character of education reform and exposed the whole plot.

According to Mr. Ross there are three aspects of education. “First,” he says,

“do we want to give our people greater culture ? Do we want to educate them in those things that make for greater personal charm and greater personal achievement purely in a social sense? I mean without any regard to utility. Naturally, we do. Culture is always worth while.”

Secondly he deals with education as it effects efficiency—the view-point of the capitalist. He says:

“In manufacture to-day the best brains directing the most capable hands will win to distinction. If we can educate all our workers in the technical sciences we shall undoubtedly produce better than our rivals and sweep the commercial field.”

But Mr. Ross does not finish there. He goes on to describe how the workers of Germany linked themselves up in association and enthusiastically set themselves to further the ends of industry by discussion and experiment.

Then he says :

“But you will notice that this did not make any difference to them financially. They improved the the machinery, increased production, took an absorbing interest in their work, and made vast profits for the manufacturer who employed them. That is one flaw in the argument for greater technical efficiency of craftsmen. Under the present system the craftsman turns round and says in effect, why should I spend time and trouble on becoming a more efficient machine to produce greater wealth for another ? That is his problem. Admittedly a worker here and there may “get on” because of his knowledge, but this is simply because the others have not the same knowledge.”

Next, Mr Ross states the problem, in language almost identical to our own :

“We all know that the production of wealth in manufacturing countries is enormous. It could be enormously increased. The trouble is that it is not properly distributed. The men who make it, the men in the factory, the forge and the field, get least of it. Their first problem, then, is not how to make more, but to get more of what they already make.”

Lastly, in bold language Mr. Ross outlines the solution of the problem.

“They need education in economics. They need to learn what are the forces at work in the modern world which help a small number of men to take the largest share of wealth. They require an education that will enable them to unravel the tangled skein of modern economics ; to review industry as a whole ; to find out why there are classes and masses, and then, understanding, to apply their knowledge to the refashioning of society, so that the worker shall get a greater share of the wealth he produces. It is often objected that this would be “class” education. It would ; and it is needed, and organised labour should see that the workers get it. So the three steps in labour education should be : First, class education, which will give labour ultimate control of industry; second, technical education which will allow it to produce more wealth ; third, cultural education which will allow them to enjoy it.”

In places, Mr. Ross lays himself open to misconstruction, but there is little doubt that he points to Socialism as the only remedy. In other places he has been responsible for some confusion, but the above quotations from an article appearing in “Reynolds’s Newspaper,” Aug. 13th, shows that he is capable of independent thought ; and what is more gratifying to the Socialist, when he exercises it honestly, he finds himself admitting and asserting the principles for which we have stood so long.

True he speaks of giving “labour ultimate control of industry,” and the worker getting “a greater share” of the wealth he produces, which is no doubt due to his own limited knowledge of economics, But once a man recognises the need for education of the workers on class lines, he has surmounted the worst obstacle. The rest is easy. For what purpose education unless it is to bind the working class in an organization to take and use the means of wealth production and distribution in their own interests ? The education needed by the working class is Socialist education, that includes economics. An education that explains to them how they are robbed, why they must organise on the basis of their class, capture the political machinery of the capitalist State and establish a system wherein wealth will be produced for use, and not for profit. Then technical education will mean greater production of wealth with less expenditure of labour power, and efficiency will no longer enrich a small class of idlers. Every invention that aids in the production of wealth, instead of being a curse, because it increases unemployment, will be welcomed because it gives more leisure to enjoy the good things of life. The instruments of production, instead of enchaining those who operate them, physically and mentally, will serve them as the means to satisfy their wants.

F. Foan

By the Way. (1916)

The By The Way Column from the August 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

The continued absorption of the men of military age has had the effect of bringing in its train a greater demand for children and women to take the place of those workers who are thus removed from agricultural and industrial pursuits, in order that the latter may be trained in the art of scientific slaughter.

During the past month or so much has been said and written with regard to the employment of children and the question of education. Just recently, in the House of Commons, Mr. Arthur Henderson (Labour [!] M.P.), speaking as President of the Board of Education on the Education Vote, let fall the following remarks :

“The question of child-labour had excited much apprehension. . . . The Board had impressed local authorities to make full inquiries into the cases of children employed in agriculture. The Board would regard it as a very grave misfortune if large numbers of children were employed at an early age.

He expressed his gratitude to the Board of Agriculture for their co-operation with the Board of Education, yet in spite of their efforts the number of children engaged in agriculture had nearly doubled. It showed that by-laws were being relaxed without proper care and enquiry.”—”Daily Chronicle,” July 19, 1916.

If one was able to shut one’s eyes to the fact that the speaker was a Labour Member (and consequently was in the House of Commons supposedly in the interest of the working-class) it would be very easy to view the observations recorded above as an apology by an ordinary capitalist politician for jeopardising the education of this country’s future wage-slaves. But stay a moment ! Is not this hon. gentleman identified with the party who used to advocate “the raising of the age of child labour with a view to its ultimate extinction” ?

Another speaker who joined in the discussion said that he believes the President’s estimate of the number of children of school age employed in agriculture was far below the mark, and further suggested that the grant, or a large part of it, should be withdrawn from local authorities if they yielded to popular clamour and for the benefit of farmers robbed the children of their “birthright.”

* * *

We of the Socialist Party have, in season and out of season, insisted that the question of education is one which primarily concerns our masters. They do not educate the children because they desire them to become more intelligent, but because of the increasing development in the modern means of production and the higher education of the wage-slaves of other lands. This point has been referred to on many occasions by Lord Haldane, and even quite recently he emphasised the need of a far higher system of technical education. Therefore, if our masters desire to retain their supremacy as a commercial nation, they will see to it that the future wage-slaves shall be trained accordingly, and hence the grave concern of a small but intelligent section of the capitalist class at the invasion that is taking place in the ranks of the children of school age. Further confirmation of this is to be found also in Mr. Henderson’s speech, wherein he stated that

“The war has also brought home to us that our national prosperity and security demanded greater concentration of intelligence on problems of industry, commerce and public administration. He was glad to say that the Department had not failed to prepare for a re-conquest of the ground they had lost, but had taken steps to go much further than before after the war was over.”

* * *

Whilst I am on this topic there is one item which, perhaps, would not be amiss. It was recently stated in the Press that there were “cases of children attending school who were too sleepy to be taught owing to working early and late.” This was mentioned at the Frome (Somerset) School Attendance Sub-Committee meeting. The report continues :

“One boy of 11 milked seven cows night and morning and then went to school. He started work at five o’clock and had reached Standard II. The Chairman said he knew of a case where the teachers complained that children engaged on farm work were too tired to do anything when they got to school.”—”Daily News,” June 27, 1916.

One can understand the position of the teacher who has to impart information and instruction to children whose mental and physical energies have been sapped ere they reach the classroom. This evil is, of course, not confined to war time only ; it is an inevitable consequence of capitalist society, but to-day it is more pronounced. Here is a glorious opportunity for the idlers of modern society those who heretofore have never done anything useful in the community to do what they are so fond of prating about, work of “national importance.” Will THEY do it ?

To the teachers, parents, and members of the working class we send out our gospel of salvation. Study the position of your class ; realize that you are many and the drones are few ; help to speed the day when the exploitation of yourselves and your children shall be relegated to the past ; and join with us of the Socialist Party to assist the ushering in of a new society, wherein “poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.”

* * *

For some time past we have heard a lot of talk about what our patriotic bosses are doing for those who hare “done their bit.” We have grown accustomed to hearing that after this war “our heroes” are not to sell matches and bananas for a living, but at long last they are going to receive recognition of tasks achieved and duty done. Without here touching on the subject of pensions (which, is engaging a large amount of attention in the Press), I will pass on to an advertisement which caught my eye in the “Daily Chronicle” of July 21st. Here it is :

Army or Navy men wanted who have done their bitt; bring discharge papers; salary 28s. per week to start with . . .

There’s generosity for you ; 28s. a week for those who have “done their bit.” The Lord only knows what the remuneration would be for those outside the condition above stipulated.”

* * *

Our right reverend father in God the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently wrote to the Prime Minister with regard to the plea of the World’s Evangelical Alliance that the second anniversary of the outbreak of war be made a national day of prayer by Order in Council. The reply of Mr. Asquith was a materialistic one, for he and many others, though giving lip-service to orthodox religion, place more reliance in shot and shell than in the efficacy of a day devoted to national prayer. Which reminds one that another gentleman in days gone by was once alleged to have said: “You may pray to God, but keep your powder dry.” However, let me quote :

“I have received your letter. … I am not prepared to recommend that Friday, August 4, be proclaimed a day of national penitence and prayer. I must point out that Monday and Tuesday, August 7 and 8, are declared Bank Holidays.

The suggested Proclamation would enforce a stoppage of work throughout the country on the previous Friday, and would not, I think, conduce to the result which is desired.

I think that the community will readily respond to the proposal that services should be held on that day in churches of all denominations throughout the country, and I believe it to be more in accordance with general thought and feeling that the State should not intervene in the manner suggested.”

—”Daily Chronicle,” July 1, 1916.

* * *

We have from time to time commented upon the £. s. d. point of view of obtaining recruits for the Army. The following is decidedly frank and honest:

“In granting exemption to a farm hand, aged 30, with nine children, the Ramsbury (Wilts.) Tribunal expressed the opinion that it would be cheaper to keep him at home.”—”Daily Mail,” June 34, 1916.

* * *

During the period immediately following the passing of the Compulsory Military Service Bill for single men, there were many outbursts in the House with regard to the methods of roping in potential recruits. Reference was made to the destruction of medical certificates of rejection and those who held them were forced to undergo further examination. Such were the methods used then and ultimately condemned by Mr. Tennant when he could no longer maintain a policy of official ignorance on the matter. Despite all promises of reformation, and the period of time which has since elapsed, we find the following condemnation of the methods adopted by the military authorities :

“Improper treatment of men who have been sent to Warley for medical examination was made the subject of a strong protest to the War Office yesterday by the Ilford Tribunal.

It was stated that the men were asked by the medical authorities to sign a blank card which would be sealed up afterwards and sent to the military authorities. This the men refused to do, and they informed the Tribunal of the fact.

Mr. Middlemas, the military representative, took exception to the treatment of these men and said it was scandalous, and he himself had written a strong letter of protest.”—”Daily Chronicle,” July 21, 1916.

* * *

Much ink and paper has been used to present in lurid terms the “awful frightfulness” of the German. But lo and behold ! in due course come pen pictures of the “frightfulness” of the ruling class of Britain and her Dominions. We have in time of peace heard a great deal about the “master mind” and the “directive ability” of our bosses, and with microscope in hand we have set out to discover these qualities which it is alleged belong to our masters. I have in mind the “gamble” of the Dardanelles and the Meso­potamia campaign particularly at the moment, though numerous other items might be mentioned. That the question is a serious one may be gathered from the fact that the Lords, spiritual and temporal, appear to have been the first to publicly discuss it. Now for the indictment :

“The Duke of Somerset said he had an opportunity that morning of reading three or four very long letters from officers who had been serving in Meso­potamia. He could assure their lordships that the cruelties our men must have suffered through the utter incompetence of the authorities, both in India and at home, were simply disgraceful. They knew what the Belgians suffered and they knew also what our own men suffered when taken prisoners by the Germans at the beginning of the war. But our men were suffering very much worse than they had ever suffered through the brutality of the way in which things had been managed in Mesopotamia. What they had suffered was perfectly indescribable.

He would give one or two instances, in one case a thousand wounded were sent down in a ship with one medical officer and one orderly to look after the whole of them. They were all mixed up together—­officers, British soldiers, and native soldiers. There were men with dysentery and men with shattered limbs all in the same ship, and there was not a bit of morphia or a drop of chloroform. One officer who was sent down wounded never had his wound dressed from the time he was picked up until he got to Bombay.

‘Who is to blame God knows,’ he added. ‘There must be somebody to blame here, and, as for India, I think the officer in command of the troops there must be terribly to blame.'”—”Daily Telegraph,” July 14, 1916.

* * *

“Dardanelles Treaty. Russia promised both sides of the Straits,” are headlines which recently appeared in the “Daily Chronicle” (19.7.10) over a short announcement with regard to the return of the Russian Parliamentary delegates to Russia. The item of news goes on to state that “the most interesting statement was made by Professor Miliukoff, the former Liberal leader, who, according to the Russkoe Slovo, said :

“The most important question in which we were interested was the problem of the Dardanelles. An agreement has been made between Russia and her allies according to which we are promised both sides of the Straits.”

Who said we are fighting on behalf of Belgium ?

The Scout.

Unwillingly to school (1950)

From the August 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Hardman is Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education. On July 1st he opened his heart to a meeting of teachers at Dorchester; the Observer thought it important enough to accord a splash heading “New School Time Table.” Stressing as he did the urgent need for “co” ordination between hand and brain, and the high importance of inducing “delight” in the pupil while acquiring culture in its best sense, the words of the Secretary were a signal advance in the right direction; at least the ghost of Robert Lowe who flung his brutal “Board Schools” and scornful words in the face of the Working Class in 1871 has been well and truly laid; it may be hoped the Dorchester audience of Prime Minister Lord Rosebery’s “captains and guides” grasped the full significance of Hardman’s speech.

But alas! even today the gulf between the aspirations of the advance guard in education and the possibilities of fulfilment yawns discouragingly. That gulf can only be bridged, when a New Society (Socialism) has swept away the inevitable evils that must frustrate educational effort under the Capitalist System, in spite of the good intentions on the part of reformers.

It would be folly to deny that there has been a notable diminution in the lads and lassies who creep unwillingly to school; there has been a welcome and growing comradeship between pupil and scholar; there has been a definite, if slow, distrust of the Examination Myth—Hardman himself gave a sour glance at it.

But after all. Education in the long run is governed by political considerations; it was by no odd freak of history that in ancient Greece the Spartan youth was trained to a super-Fascist "hardness,” while the Athenian youth (of the privileged classes, of course), was trained to enjoy Homer and Aeschylus; tradition counted, it is true, but the outstanding fact was that Sparta had no walls, and no sea barrier.

Fifty years ago, Margaret McMillan, the pioneer of Nursery Schools, wrote an enthusiastic Clarionette: “You teachers do love the Grind.” They did, and unfortunately even on the plane of mere amelioration, a lamentable number still do. In the last War, a London school found itself sharing the dubious hospitality (morning and afternoon shifts) of a Secondary School in a South Coast town. An elderly member of the latter staff proudly expressed his determination (a siren wailing applause) to carry through "his” Final Somethings, come weal, come woe. "I’ll stick to the deck, said he, so they stuck him on deck with glue,” as an irreverent youngster of the London School afterwards remarked to his colleagues.

A pitiful handful of school reformers are gallantly striving to keep alive private schools where the child is the centre of the picture, where Wordsworth’s “blind authority beating with his staff the child that might have led him” no longer applies. Happy kiddies! but, with relatively large staffs, etc. these schools are expensive, and therefore for the children of the well-to-do only; further. Government grants are a far-off contingency when “a daily act of public worship” is laid down as part and parcel of grant-earning. This type of school is different.

There has been a spate of loose talk about "equality of opportunity” since the last Education Act, a new version of the old Napoleonic bilge about marshal’s baton and private’s knapsack. It is pretty apparent that the vast mass of pupils attaining Grammar School status will never attain the prize dangled at the top of the greasy pole; the unwholesome preoccupation of youngsters to reach a prescribed goal, the abiding dread of failure, failure itself, entails sheer tragedy for many a sensitive plant in Shelley’s garden. Face the fact, too, of the working-class parents scraping and sacrificing to come somewhere near the school’s requirements in clothing alone; face the fact of much prized “traditions” which are a veritable hot-bed of snobbery, spite of good intentions; face the fact of a child gradually sensing a growing divergence in speech between himself and relatively uneducated parents. It is easy to brush these things aside, to attribute exaggeration to a sketchy outline of potential child torture.

It may well be asked here: what is the remedy, granted the picture is even moderately true? The S.P.G.B. has no hesitation in replying—that only by removing the causes of evil can a final remedy be accomplished. Quinine is a benign alleviator of malaria—elimination of the foul pools with their disease carrying insects is the recognised scientific remedy. The evils inherent in the Capitalist system which, spite of pietistic mouthing, elevates material success to a major virtue, can at its best endeavour but alleviate the worst horrors of infant torture which marked the period of mine and factory hells. And it is worth calling to mind that there were Christian apologists in that period who affected to believe that "wholesome toil ” was a good thing for the pitiful little broken and disfigured scraps of humanity.

The achievement of Socialism will and can be only accomplished by the Working Class; the main appeal of the S.P.G.B. is therefore to that class, but it may not be irrelevant to point out that everything in the educational garden of Eton and Harrow and their kind, as far as pupils are concerned, is not lovely; bullying, even if not of the order of Tom Brown’s schooldays, is not unknown—"worse remains behind.” Socialism would be a happy change for many a sensitive school- tie kiddy.

Hardman means well—as does his chief, ex-schoolmaster Chuter Ede, despite a lapse occasionally into the hectoring Trade Union leader when condescending to speak to his late co-workers. But fine words butter no parsnips, indeed buttery sentimentalism adds to the rough pack of the unthinking worker a new element of dangerous slipperiness; Sir Peter Teazle’s “O damn your sentiments ” seems to meet the situation.

To Working Class fathers, the S.P.G.B. makes this special appeal: even if you fail to realise completely the dire meaning of wage-slavedom for yourself: if you have but imperfectly grasped that Capitalism entails a harassed and inhumanly overworked wife, at least give a thought for your children, your bidden guests. The joy of life, childhood laughing as it goes, faces “ in which sweet records meet, promises as sweet ”—these can be a realised aspiration under SOCIALISM alone.

Augustus Snellgrove

Marx and Morals. (1908)

From the August 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

The author of the “Secret of Herbart” has made a notable advance in the direction of a clearer understanding of the real “problems” underlying “Education” since his last work, “The Secret of Herbart,” was published. In his latest essay, “Education and the Heredity Spectre,” he says:—

“No one claims that improved moral instruction will be a panacea for all ills. The time may come when the minds now devoted to the cause of moral instruction may urge the importance of other factors. Or a happier time may come when all factors will have been so adjusted that advocacy of any one of them would be gratuitous. The immediate need is to lay stress on the importance of moral instruction.”

The advance herein indicated consists in the growing consciousness of the fact that his own particular pet palliative may, in the face of other “factors” making for righteousness, prove to be extremely inadequate, if not wholly ”gratuitous”—a loose agglomeration of learnedly ignorant “ideas” and “ideals” presented as a “system,” but lacking in coherence and in healing virtue because not broad-based on the truths of

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain, searching the dark places of capitalism with the torch lit by Marx, again urges its claim to be the only agency at work in Britain which is consciously and persistently plying its axe at the root of the social evil which underlies all “problems,” whether “educational” or otherwise.

Dr. Hayward himself well says : “Something little short of infanticide prevails at the moment in those homes where the child is the chief bread-winner.” His prescription for this and other glaring evils is, in brief, “a wholesome, rich, and stimulating mass of story and poem and history”—for the unfortunate victims of a system which must

INEVITABLY BREED INFANTICIDE !

The absurdity of the suggested cure is surpassed only by the tragic waste of intellectual energy and misdirection of benevolent aspiration which is implied in the following unintelligible jargon of idealism : “Man, capable of becoming, as you will, a wild animal or personified reason (!), needs an art which shall build him up in order that he may receive the form that is right” (Herbart).

What kind of “form” is “right” for this same “personified reason” ? A race of Calibans, bred among and gazing upon nothing but a hog-breed, would doubtlessly regard its race as the “right” form of humanity. The more than hideous Caliban, fell Capitalism, necessarily hugs its vile offspring, Wage-slavedom, proclaiming it to be the “form that is right.”

And as to the particular kind of story, poem, and history ? Will the State—expression of the power of the master class to oppress and perpetuate a slave class—permit other than such pabulum as will inculcate the “duty” of thanking God for placing the worker in that station in life from which it is becoming increasingly difficult to rise ? We ask a direct question of Dr. Hayward. How would he, in his capacity of “Inspector,” view the teaching of Shelley’s “Men of England,” or of the “Red Flag,” as part of the “English” syllabus ? Will he tell us, in all seriousness, what diminution of prostitution followed the production of the “Bridge of Sighs,” how much less total exploitation of child and woman labour followed as the result of “The Song of the Shirt” and “The Cry of the Children” ? Any amelioration in the lot of any section of the working class has been dictated by

ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS.

Mr. Geo. Cadbury, astute representative of the master class, recognising the increased possibilities of the clean, better-fed, better-clad human machines as a source at once of more cocoa and more profit, only recently said, “Starvation wages pay neither employed nor employer.”

“Moral” instruction by “direct” or “indirect” method ? Yes. By both, especially by the latter ; but inculcated by the hirelings of a master class—wage-slaves themselves, sedulously taught to believe in the sacred “rights” of property—the “morality” filtering down to the “elementary” scholar from Executive Officer to bottom-dog “Assistant” will be

SLAVE MORALITY.

The crowd that will throw up its sweaty nightcaps and cheer itself hoarse to greet a king of knaves on Epsom Downs can hardly be expected to appreciate a “Queen of curds and whey,” be her charms sung ever so sweetly by immortal bard, can it, Doctor? Allopathic doses of the “Recessional” and “Rule Britannia,” or even homoeopathic doses of Seeley’s “Expansion of England ” on Empire Day are of more than doubtful value in curing the evil which the army of social quacks are endeavouring to grapple with.

“WE ARE ALL IS A FOG”

says the worthy Doctor. Too hasty generalisation, based upon an assumption which may be dispelled by a reading of the Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, or, assuming this work to be beneath the notice of a “D. Litt., M.A., B. Sc.,” by a perusal of the works of Marx and Engels, who are allowed even by the master class to have been possessed of some small erudition, and one of whom, in issuing an epoch-making work, the crowning triumph of historical research and of the application of the evolutionary theory to sociology—”Das Capital” —omitted to mention the fact that he possessed the highest academic honours a German university could confer. Historical Materialism, whose main proposition is “that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political, intellectual, and moral history of that epoch,” leaves revolutionary Socialists in no “fog” on matters educational. Capitalist society, nurtured on the life’s blood of the worker, fell Moloch and filthy Satyr, drunk with the blood of children, and leering bestially at the desecration of womanhood, is solely responsible for the infanticide and the prostitute, the crime and the criminal. Real “Moral Instruction” can only consist to-day in stinging the wage-slave into a recognition of his hopeless position while possessed of nothing but his labour-power to sell, and in pointing out the way to that emancipation which must be his work and his alone, by proclaiming the fact that economic freedom involves intellectual and moral advancement.

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been,

Whether he first sees light

Where the river in gleaming rings

Sluggishly winds through the plain,

Whether in sound of the swallowing sea—

As is the world on the banks,

So is the mind of man.

A. Reginald

Blogger's Note:

A. Reginald (Augustus Snellgrove) had previously written about Dr. Hayward in the March 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The Proletariat (The Working Class). By Karl Kautsky (1908)

From the January 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from December issue

Specially translated for The Socialist Party of Great Britain and approved by the Author.

But the supply increases too rapidly for it to be possible to make a great deal out of education even if one sells with it his own personality. It cannot be prevented that masses of the educated are driven into the ranks of the proletariat.

It is as yet uncertain whether this development will lead to the educated joining the fighting proletariat en masse rather than individually, as until now, but one thing is certain—with the proletarianising of the educated the last chance of the proletarian to rise by his own efforts into a higher class has been frustrated.

It is out of question that the wage-worker can become a capitalist, at least in the ordinary course of things.

A prize in a lottery or a wealthy uncle abroad are not taken into account by sensible persons when considering the position of the working class. But under exceptionally favourable circumstances a better-paid worker may here and there succeed in saving—owing to his more abstemious way of living—sufficient to commence a small concern as handicraftsman or to open a shop, or to send his son for a course of study in order to become one of the “better” class. It has always been ridiculous to point to such possibilities for the workers for improving their own position or that of their children. In the ordinary course of things a workman may be glad, if he is at all able to save, to put by so much in good times, as not to be quite destitute when he falls out of employment. But to-day it is more ridiculous than ever to attempt to console the workers with such prospects, for the economic development not only makes it less possible for the worker to save, it also makes it impossible even if he succeeds in earning sufficient to raise himself and his children above the proletarian existence. To commence working on his own account means for him to get from one misfortune into another, and to return as a rule to his previous misery, recognising that petty enterprise cannot be maintained, but only results in the loss of previous savings.

More difficult even than commencing an independent petty enterprise, almost hopeless indeed, to-day is the attempt of the proletarian to send his son to college. But supposing such an attempt has been successful, of what use is his education to the son of the proletarian who cannot turn to account his acquirements, who has no protection, especially now when hundreds of lawyers, engineers, chemists, and commercial graduates are walking about in search of employment ?

Wheresoever the proletarian may turn, everywhere he discovers proletarian conditions of life and work. Proletarian conditions are increasingly forced upon Society; the masses of the population in all civilised countries have already sunk to the proletarian position. As far as the individual proletarian is concerned the last prospect has long vanished of rising by his own effort and on his own account out of the morass into which the present system of production has thrown him. He can only raise himself by raising the entire class to which he belongs.

[Conclusion]

Blogger's Note:

It was the German SPGBer, Hans Neumann, who translated Kautsky's writings from the German into English for the Socialist Standard.

Letter: The Socialist Party and Reforms. (1911)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party and Reforms.

[To The Editor.]

Forest Gate, Essex.

Sir,—Recognising your Party’s hostility toward reforms, and being, for the most part, in sympathy with your standpoint in this respect, I still remain without any knowledge as to how such reforms as the following can be considered as being detrimental to working-class interest, and some comment on the matter may, therefore, elucidate your unswerving attitude in regard to any reform whatsoever:

(1) Educational reform (already conceded).

(2) Male suffrage (ditto)

(3) The feeding of school children, from the point of view that it is impossible for children to be effectively educated unless well fed. If they are well fed, therefore, it would follow that as a result of their education they would better understand their position in life than they would if they were ill-fed and mal-educated. Therefore why oppose this reform ?

(4) Secular education— the advantages of which need no comment.—Yours, etc.,

L. A. Bostock

 

Reply:

The S.P.G.B., as distinguished from every other organisation in this country, is the party with Socialism, and nothing but Socialism, as its object. It is, consequently, not to be side-tracked into raising mere hostility to reform or the reverse—into equal importance with its object. Its guiding principle is not hostility to reforms but hostility to capitalism ; and since its aim is Socialism its whole policy in regard to reforms is dictated solely by the exigencies of the class struggle for Socialism, and must continue to he so dictated, whatever changes in the conditions of the fight may intervene.

Wherever needful for its object the Party must, therefore, make use of, ignore, or resist, any reform as determined by the particular circumstances. Consequently it cannot seek support for or advocate any policy of reform or anti-reform, for such must always be sacrificed upon occasion for its object, while such policies might—as seen in other organisations—attract those who do not accept the object of the Party, thus weakening its definite aim. All such matters are considered by it as worthy of attention only in so far as they bear distinctly on the question of working-class emancipation.

This subordination of all means to one end, and of all issues to the supreme one of the conquest of the State for Socialism, is the only logical policy for the Socialist Party. Without it, indeed, the party could not be Socialist.

Mr. Bostock is, therefore, completely in error in assuming that in showing the unsatisfactory nature of reforms in themselves, and their utter futility as solutions of what is called the “Social Problem,” the S.P.G.B. is necessarily hostile toward all reforms, and considers them as being in every case inevitably “detrimental to working-class interest.”

Even were the capitalists omniscient and of one opinion on. every point, it would still remain a fact that they are compelled by economic development to weaken their stronghold. Our enemies are forced, as it were, to dig their own graves, and it is by no means our policy to prevent them doing so. We should, indeed, be traitors to our cause did we not endeavour to make it profit by every mistake and every point of weakness of the enemy. There is danger only in allowing any consideration whatever to influence the policy of the party other than its object and the conditions of the struggle necessary to its attainment. Socialists, in short, must beware of being scared or cajoled either to the right or the left of the scientific way to Socialism.

With regard to the reforms enumerated by our correspondent, our attitude results inevitably from the position outlined above. All of them have been dealt with in these columns. Let us, however, briefly notice them here.

(1) The Education Acts were not motived (despite declarations to the contrary) by any wish on the part of the ruling class as a whole to benefit the workers, but to benefit themselves and to obtain cheap and efficient wage workers. It should be noted that the paltry measures of working-class “education” now in force stop short even of this despicable ideal. Therefore the Socialist has certainly no feeling whatever of gratitude toward his exploiters when he takes the fullest advantage of this reform for the furtherance of the workers’ cause.

(2) Male suffrage does not exist. We take the greatest useful advantage of the present property suffrage, and would not consider Adult Suffrage “detrimental to working-class interest.” Socialism is the interest of the many, not of the few ; its method, therefore, is that of democracy. But since Socialism is greater than all means, we would not bargain with our enemies, or bate one jot or tittle of our object or principles for any extension of the franchise, much less for a more promise. We have, moreover, seen the dismal folly of supporting an individual or a party that is utterly opposed to us on every vital point because of some minor point of utility. The grain of good is overwhelmed by a flood of harm.

(3) We do not oppose, and never have opposed, the feeding of school children. We have adversely criticised certain proposals for State maintenance, which would mean the taking of children from their parents to be reared in barracks by the State, pithed with anti-working-class ideas, and given the mentality of the flunkey. We have further pointed out the economic effects of such a measure on the labour market, where feeding here, is often counterbalanced by more misery there, and where, owing to the worsening trend of economic pressure, every attempt short of Socialism to stem the tide of increasing working-class poverty must fail. And we have pointed the inevitable Socialist moral.

It is, further, a fallacy to assume that the class-consciousness of the worker has any definite relation to the amount of food he gets. The flunkeys are probably the best fed and the least class-conscious. The slum-proletariat is the worst fed, and is hardly more class-conscious than the wage-slaves of flunkeydom. We rely neither on feeding nor on starving, but upon ripening economic conditions, together with sound Socialist propaganda.

(4) As to Secular Education under Capitalism, it may well prove a mare’s nest. Its advantages may possibly be non-existent. Only when religion has lost its efficacy as a working-class drug will it be abandoned by the ruling class in the schools. But what will take its place ? A scientific curriculum ! Or superstition in even worse forms, such as cunningly devised capitalist ethics, or a deadlier patriotism ? Hence the peculiar wisdom of the classic phrase “Wait and see! ”

Reforms usually take away with the left hand what they offer with the right, and the last state of the reformed is often worse than, his first. There is a vast difference between the vague proposal and the final measure. The latter may in its own. cunning clauses more than neutralise the grain of good originally proposed. Let the capitalist class, therefore, take entire responsibility for its handiwork. Our lack of enthusiasm and severely critical attitude toward all reforms of whatever colour is, inconsequence, fully justified. Not only do we regard them as mere minor and relatively insignificant incidents in the class war, but we know them to be, in the main, fraudulent in themselves.

SOCIALISM can no more come by an accumulation of reforms than a new and up-to-date boiler can result from an accumulation of patches on an ancient one. It presupposes the conquest of. political power by the Socialist working class —the SOCIAL REVOLUTION.

A program of reforms is not only superfluous, Its existence proves that the party possessing it has taken reform for its object instead of Socialism. It is, moreover, a fraud upon the toilers, for until they are supreme their party can pass no reforms —these are grants by the capitalist class, to be considered only in so far as they can be made use of for the cause—and when the working class is triumphant reforms will be entirely redundant, for Socialism will be here.

W.

The Proletariat (The Working Class). By Karl Kautsky (1907)

From the December 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from November issue

Specially translated for The Socialist Party of Great Britain and approved by the Author.

6. The Growing Extent of the Working Class. 

The Commercial and the "Educated" Proletariat. 

It is not only by the extension of industry on a large scale that the capitalist mode of production makes the proletarian conditions general. It is also caused by the position of the wage-workers in industries on a large scale becoming the standard for the position of the wage-workers in other spheres of activity. And their conditions of work and life are revolutionised by the large-scale industries.

The advantages which these workers may perhaps have possessed over those employed in capitalist industries are now, by the influence of the latter, changed into so many disadvantages. Where, for instance, to-day the worker of a handicraft still boards and lodges with his master, the aforesaid change results in this handicraft worker being worse fed and housed than the wage-worker who has a household of his own. The long apprenticeship was, in times gone by, a means for preventing a glut of workers in handicraft; to-day the system of apprenticeship is the most effective means of producing a glut of cheap workers in handicraft and of depriving the adult workers of their livelihood.

Here also, as in other directions, things that under the domination of petty enterprise were reasonable and a boon, have become nonsensical and a hindrance owing to the capitalist mode of production.

The endeavour of guild-masters to revive the old guild system may in the main be ascribed to the desire to create, by the revival of the old forms, new means for the purpose of exploiting their workmen. They seek to save themselves from the bog by throwing down and stepping on proletarian bodies.

And these gentlemen grow indignant when the working class fails to become enthusiastic over this method of delaying somewhat the inevitable extinction of petty enterpise.

Commercial trading undergoes a similar development to handicraft. The large enterprise squeezes out of existence the petty enterprise, even in the sphere of petty trading.

The small commercial undertakings need not, therefore, diminish ia number. Petty trading becomes the last refuge of those who have gone bankrupt among the small producers.

In the German empire there were employed per thousand workers in each particular group :—

ESTABLISHMENTS	INDUSTRIAL		COMMERCIAL. (including Licensed Victuallers.)
	1882	1895	1882	1895
With 1 – 8 employees	551	399	757	697
With 6 – 50 employees	186	238	202	243
Over 50 employees	263	363	41	60

From this table it will be gathered that in commercial and licensed establishments petty enterprise predominates far more than in industry and declines less rapidly—speaking relatively. Speaking absolutely, petty enterprise is on the increase in commerce and the licensed victuallers’ trade. The number of employees in these callings increased from 1,013,981 in 1882 to 1,509,453 in 1895.

To restrict petty trading—for instance by restricting hawking or peddling—would mean nothing else but to sweep those who are getting their livelihood in that way completely off their feet and to force them into the ranks of the loafing class ; that is to say, to compel them to become beggars, vagabonds, or jailbirds—which would indeed be typical social reform.

The influence of the development of industry on a large scale, as far as petty trading is concerned, does not find expression in a decrease in the number of small trading concerns, but in their actual dwindling away. The existence of petty traders on their own account becomes continually more insecure and more like that of proletarians. Besides, there is a steady increase in the number of those employed in large concerns, who become real proletarians, and have no prospect of ever going into business on their own account; child- and woman-labour continues to extend, the latter accompanied by increased prostitution. Overwork, unemployment, and the cutting down of wages also enter this sphere of employment. The position of the commercial employee is approaching that of the industrial proletarian. The former can be distinguished from the latter almost in only one way, namely, by his keeping up the appearance, at a great sacrifice, of a higher social position, while the industrial proletarian knows nothing of practising such deception.

And yet another category of proletarians begins to develop: the educated proletariat. To be educated has, in our present mode of production, become quite a separate business. The scope of knowledge has grown immensely and is widening from day to day. And capitalist society as well as the capitalist state, require more and more men of science and art for the conduct of their affairs, for the subjection of the forces of nature, be it for the purpose of production or destruction, or for the luxurious utilisation of their increasing affluence. But not only the peasant, the handicraftsman or proletarian, but even the merchant, the manufacturer, the banker, the stock-exchange gambler and the large land-owner have no time to devote to art or science. Their time is fully taken up by their business and amusements. In present society it is not, as under former systems of society, the exploiters themselves, or at least a section of them, who foster art and science. They leave that occupation to a separate class, whom they pay for their services. Education becomes a commodity.

But until several decades ago it was still a rare commodity. There were but few schools, and study involved considerable expense. The peasants were mostly not in a position to be able to raise the means for sending their sons to the higher schools. Handicraft and commerce on the other hand were still in a prosperous condition ; hence, whosoever was engaged in these callings remained in them; only the fact of being specially gifted or in exceptional circumstances induced the son of the handicraftsman or merchant to take up the study of art or science. While the demand for officials, technical experts, medical men, teachers, artists, etc., increased, the supply was almost entirely restricted to the progeny from such circles.

The commodity education commanded therefore a high price. Its possession brought at least a comfortable living to those who turned it to practical account, like lawyers, officials, medical men, professors, etc.,—often fame and honour also. The artist, the poet, the philosopher were the companions of kings. The intellectual aristocrat considered himself superior to the aristocrat by birth or money. His only concern was the development of his intellectual gifts. Consequently the educated could be idealists, and often were such. They stood above the other classes and their material aspirations and antagonisms. Education meant power, happiness, and amiableness; therefore the conclusion lay near, that, in order to make all men happy and amiable, to surmount all class antagonism and to abolish poverty and degradation, nothing more was required than the diffusion of education.

Since then the spreading of higher school education—and here it is only a question of higher education—has made gigantic strides. The number of educational establishments has immensely increased. The number of scholars has grown to a still greater extent. Petty enterprise in commerce and industry no longer offers chances of prosperity. The petty bourgeois is unable to save his children from drifting into the ranks of the proletariat unless he can manage to give them a university education, providing, of course, it is possible for him to rake together sufficient means for this end. And he must think of providing not only for his sons but also for his daughters; for the progress in the division of labour gradually transforms, as already mentioned, household work into separate occupations, thus reducing more and more the work in the home, so that a marriage in which the wife is only the housekeeper, and not at least partly bread-winner, becomes increasingly a luxury. At the same time, however, the petty bourgeoisie falls into greater poverty, as we have seen, so that it loses the ability of affording a luxury. The number of celibates increases, as does the number of families in which wife and daughter have to work to augment the income of the family. Thus female labour increases not only in the direction of the petty and large industry, and of petty trading, but also in the sphere of officialdom in Government and private employment, as, for instance, in the post and telegraph offices, railways, banks, art and science. However loud the protest on the grounds of prejudice or personal interest may be, female labour enters increasingly into the various spheres of intellectual activity. It is not conceit, neither insolence nor uppishness, but the compulsion due to economic development, which forces women to seek occupation in that particular sphere as elsewhere. While the men in some intellectual occupations, in which craft organisation still exists, have been successful in keeping out female competition, the women have been able to gain admission to callings unhampered by craft organisation, as, for instance, journalism, painting, and music.

A consequence of this entire development is, that the number of the educated persons has increased tremendously in comparison with the past; but the favourable consequences which the idealists expected to be derived from a greater diffusion of education, have not been realised. So long as education remains a commodity, the diffusion of education means an increased supply of the commodity, hence a lowering of its prices and consequently a worse position for the owner of the commodity The number of the educated has grown to an extent that more than satisfies the requirements of the capitalists and of the capitalist state. The labour market of the educated workers is to-day as overcrowded as that of the manual workers. And also the intellectual workers have already their Reserve Army—unemployment is as much known in their ranks as in those of the industrial workers. Those who wish to obtain an appointment under Government have to wait years, often more than a decade, until they are able to get one of the badly paid minor posts. With the others over-work is followed as much by unemployment and vice-versa as with the hand-workers, and the forcing down of wages is practised upon them as upon the latter.

The class position of the educated workers grows perceptibly worse ; if before one spoke of the aristocracy of intellect, one now speaks of the proletariat of intelligence; and very soon these latter proletarians will distinguish themselves from the other wage-workers by only one thing—their conceit. The majority of them will still think they are something better than the wage-workers ; they still consider themselves to belong to the bourgeoisie, but in a similar way as servants regard themselves as belonging to the family of their masters. They have ceased to be the intellectual leaders of the bourgeoisie and have become their hired prize fighters. The ambition to succeed develops among them; not the cultivation, but the turning to account, of their intellectual gifts now becomes their first consideration, and the prostitution of their being is the principal means of advancement. Like the petty traders, they, too, are deceived by a few big prizes in the lottery of their life; they overlook the numerous blanks which are facing them and bargain away body and soul for the mere prospect of drawing such a big prize. The selling of their own convictions and a marriage for money have become in the estimation of the majority of our “educated,” two self-understood as well as indispensable means for “making a fortune.” And that is what the capitalist production has made of its explorers, thinkers and dreamers.

(To be continued)

Blogger's Note:

It was the German SPGBer, Hans Neumann, who translated Kautsky's writings from the German into English for the Socialist Standard.