The Rent Strike Stunt. (1932)

Editorial from the February 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Independent Labour Party, like all reform parties, is constantly faced with the need to discover a new programme to hide the failure of all the old ones. Family Allowances and the Living Wage Scheme are already fading from the picture and going the way of nationalisation, bulk purchase, housing schemes, rationalisation, trade boards and all the rest of the junk that has served the purpose temporarily of keeping alive the illusion that the I.L.P. is doing something and getting somewhere. At the moment the nationalisation of the banks is sharing the honours with public utility corporations and with the latest stunt, a “rent strike." The I.L.P. are backing the London and Manchester Trades Councils in a demand that, wages having fallen, rents should be reduced. The I.L.P. has, time after time, pointed to Vienna as a city where their ideal of low rents has operated to perfection, and they have talked of the millions of pounds supposed to have been saved to the workers by the Rent Restriction Acts in this and other countries. The whole of it is based on illusion.

Rents were kept low here and in every European country at the instigation of the employers. They knew that high rents would raise the workers’ cost of living and leave the employers to face either lowered efficiency among their wage-slaves or the alternative of paying a larger wage. Rent restriction has lowered the average cost of living, and wages on the whole have fallen proportionately, leaving the workers just where they were before. Even where this policy of plundering landlords to help industrial capitalists has been carried to its furthest point, as in Vienna, the workers were not the gainers, but their employers. In 1925 the International Labour Office published the results of an inquiry into rents, wages, etc., under the title “The Workers’ Standard of Life in Countries with Depreciated Currency.” The Report dealt especially with the effects of rent restriction. Writing of Germany, it says:—

   Since wages no longer had to cover rent, the cost of labour was correspondingly reduced. (P. 37).

In other words, the employers reaped the advantage. In Austria the same thing was found by the investigators:—

  Most of the workers were in the same position as those in Germany; they had practically no liabilities under the heading of rent, but the corresponding amount was not included in their wages. The actual gain was thus nil. (P. 97).

The Report continues:—

  Industry, on the other hand, benefited, as in Germany, by the reduction in the cost of most labour by the full amount which rent represented in wages before the war. (P. 97).

In Great Britain the policy of rent restriction has had the further defect that it has badly hit the section of workers who have had to get into houses whose rents have been “decontrolled.” The average wage has not allowed for the exceptionally high rents in decontrolled houses, and these individuals have been the sufferers.

The only sound policy for the working class under capitalism is to use whatever strength their economic organisation can give them to press for higher pay from the employers, not to lend themselves to stunt campaigns whose only result will be to make reputations for a few Labour leaders, and help the industrial capitalists to secure more profit. The workers should, however, face up to the limits of Trade Union action. Socialism is the only remedy for the workers' poverty problem, and Trade Union action cannot bring about Socialism.

Returning to this latest I.L.P. stunt, we read in Forward (December 26th) an amusing account of what happened some years ago in the last Clydeside rent strike. Mr. David Kirkwood, M.P., made a fighting speech in which he said that there would be no evictions in Clydebank "except over my dead body." In spite of this, as his local critics complain, the evictions took place, but the "dead body" goes about—talking as usual.

"The Hell of Steyr" (1932)

From the February 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

(From an Austrian Correspondent.)
The name of Steyr is unfamiliar in England. Steyr is an Austrian town in which motor-cars are manufactured, Detroit on a smaller scale, and it is significant that the appearance of an article in the Detroit Free Press on the conditions of the workers in the American auto-industry should have almost coincided with the publication in a Vienna paper of a report under the above heading from their correspondent in the Austrian city of motor-cars. The workers of Steyr, like those of Detroit, are a law-abiding, industrious, hard-working lot, but under capitalism these virtues do not guarantee either sustenance or security to the workers. As one of our speakers, now dead, used to put it to his audiences when analysing the effects of the capitalist system: “It comes to this,” he used to say, “the better you are and the harder you work, the worse it is for you in the end.” Steyr as well as Detroit have proved the truth of this assertion. The workers there have attained an extraordinary degree of efficiency in motor-car making with the result that within a relatively short time all the markets were glutted and work had to be suspended. Under capitalism, increased efficiency has the consequence that while the companies have amassed huge fortunes for themselves, the workers’ lot has gone from bad to worse until it has, on the masters’ own showing, become a veritable hell!

The Vienna newspaper, “Sonn-und Montagszeitung, ” in its issue for January 4th has a long report from its representative who made a special visit to Steyr. The newspaper writes:—

  “One has been quite accustomed to the daily desperate calls for help coming now from this, now from the other working class quarter, but the signal of alarm, 'A City Dying of Starvation,’ makes one look up. It comes from the second largest city of Upper Austria. The Mayor of Steyr at the last meeting informed the city council that of the 22,000 inhabitants about 11,000 are without any income whatever, that 90 per cent. of all the children are underfed and that a large proportion of the population are simply compelled to go begging. The correspondent says that one must have been in Steyr to realise what is concealed behind these figures. 11,000 tragedies in one small city which has become a city of beggars. You are accosted at every street corner by swarms of children—tiny, pale creatures in thin rags and torn shoes who surround the passing stranger with outstretched hands, wailing and imploring. They enter the shops begging for money or something to eat. And there are also young people and old women. In the Municipal poor house there are 328 aged people who now have to go out into the streets too, once a week, to supplement their scant rations by begging. And so do the inmates of other municipal institutions. Friday is the principal day set down for general begging and thousands of people go begging on that day in Steyr. 

Beds Without Bedding.    

“The greater part of the unemployed, and those who are no longer in receipt of the dole, do not live in houses, but in wooden barracks. The conditions there are described as simply appalling. Twelve persons were found to live in one room with three beds without bedding, which had all been sold long ago. All sleep on straw, the wife and the husband and 10 children. They eke out their existence between the four wet walls, the inevitable clothes line drawn across the room with wet clothing. The big boys and girls sleep side by side and next to the parents, with two little children in one bed, without bedding. They sleep as long as possible in order to suppress the pangs of hunger, many also have no shoes. On New Year’s night a woman was confined in a room of the barracks in the presence of her four other children. In another barracks a woman with two children tried to take her 'life'; she had been dismissed from the works two days previously and was not entitled to the dole, so she took prussic acid. Other families live in what were formerly stables. A canal with stagnant water runs outside and the barracks are infested with rats and mice. 

Dogs For Dinner.    

"Here and there in the barracks the correspondent saw remnants of what used to be toys, but the children, he says, do not play. They are hungry and cold. Also they have lost their favourite playmates—the dogs. Formerly there were hundreds, but they have nearly all disappeared within a year, in Steyr. Nobody will openly say what has become of them, but everybody knows that in this city of starvation the dogs have been killed and eaten. 

Children Condemned To Death.    

"The Municipality, a bankrupt municipality, has the care of 1,100 children who have lost their father or whose parents are divorced. ‘The state of health of the population is simply alarming,' said Dr. Pitniskern. 'In a year I have treated 5,000 patients free of charge. Consumption plays havoc in the town. The children are nearly all ill; at least 90 per cent. are underfed; at school examinations I find only skeletons. No flesh, no blood, only skin and bones, and when asked, it is invariably the same answer: nothing to eat. I treat many children who have not seen any meat for months. A boy in the first class did not know what meat looks like, he had never eaten any.’ 

“It goes without saying that under such conditions a normal school service has become impossible. The dilapidated school rooms serve as mere places in which to keep warm. Half of the children cannot attend for lack of shoes, others have only torn ones and insufficient clothes. 

“The Works now employ only 1,700 people, whereas more than 15,000 are dependent on work there. Another 300 were about to be dismissed. ‘With the dole,’ the correspondent says, they will be ‘alright' for a time. They are envied by those who are no longer in receipt of any benefit and only get 42 groschen (4½d.) per day poor relief—42 groschen!

   "366 persons are daily given a meal in the canteen of the Steyr Works. A thousand present themselves every day, but there are only 366 soups, the daily portion, consisting of cabbage and a piece of bread; sometimes they get a piece of meat. The correspondent describes how he watched an old worker eating but half of the contents of his basin, food that would barely have sufficed a child. When asked, he replied that the other half was to be taken home. ‘How many are there at home?' asked the correspondent. ‘Wife and three children,’ was the answer, and he pressed the basin closer to himself and sought to get away; others barred him the way, begging of him, begging of the beggar! 

“This is what the tourist guide book says about the picturesquely situated city of Steyr: 'A lovely place on the meeting place of the River Steyr with the River Enns, with 22,000 inhabitants, tall chimneys and a Gothic church,  to which the correspondent added: 'with 11,000 beggars, with 15,000 starving, with 18,000 persons destitute, tall chimneys that have not smoked for years, chimneys of idle factories. The industrial city of Steyr has become the hell of Steyr, an Austrian 'devil’s island ’ of decent, honest men, ready and willing to work.”

The paper added, of course, the usual appeal to its readers for help, though it confessed at the same time that charity is no solution. The editor did not give a remedy, but there are, of course, numerous political parties and crowds of professional politicians, chiefly coming from the so-called "intellectuals,” always ready with "remedies ” and “ reforms,” with "demands” and programmes supposed to cope with economic ills, and generally pretending to represent the interests of the workers. Every one of these remedies has been found to be a fraud, a farce and a delusion, while some of them have turned out to be worse than the disease.

Socialism the Only Remedy

There is ONE remedy for all the evils of working class existence, and ONE only— it is the solution which the science of Marx and Engels made plain, but which it does not pay the “leaders of labour ” to propagate. For that task the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties in other countries have been established. We insist that these evils are all part and parcel of, and inseparable from, the present social order—capitalism—a system of society in which the means of wealth production are owned and controlled by a small section, on whom the mass of the people are dependent. These evils will persist and glow unless and until the working class, organised in the Socialist Parties, make an end to private ownership, so that no individual will be dependent on another private individual for his material subsistence. Under Socialism, such absurdities as poverty in the midst of plenty, which is the outstanding feature of capitalism, will be unthinkable, because society will produce all human comforts and conveniences for USE only and not for profit. The product of men’s hands will then cease to play tricks with them, and the further improvement of machinery, which spells wreck and ruin to the workers to-day, will then only increase the real well-being of all. We insist that no proposition can be sound and worthy of working-class support that respects the present social order and does not aim at the destruction of a system that deprives millions of people of a chance of earning a living, that humiliates and degrades, and drives thousands to despair and suicide. Any proposition that does not establish equal right for all to the means of life, deserves nothing but the contempt of the workers.

The workers of Steyr and of Vienna have had an object-lesson which should open their eyes. Putting their trust in leaders—who are the curse of working-class organisations —they elected a majority of Social-Democrats to the two city councils, with the result that after 12 years of such administration Steyr is now “a city dying of starvation,” while Vienna—a city of under 2 million inhabitants—has the dreary record figure of over 120,000 unemployed, over 3,000 suicides in the past year, and more beggars than ever before.

Workers of the world! It is high time to bestir yourselves! Rid yourselves of your illusions and of your leaders! Join our ranks and so leave your mark to posterity as men and women of whom they will be able to say that you assisted in the great task of ridding the Earth from the fangs of the monster incubus of capital!

Rudolf Frank

Atheism, Religion and Socialism (1932)

From the February 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

ECONOMICS AND ATHEISM.

Mr. Chapman Cohen, the Editor of the Freethinker, is an "advanced” thinker who described Communism as the religion of Russia. He builds up his argument on the insistence on certain kinds of teaching in Russia, to the exclusion of any other ideas whatever.

Mr. Chapman Cohen, however, has no ground for calling this Communism, and uses this term as loosely as any Christian could do.

The limited point of view of Freethought was indicated by him in the Freethinker (November 1st, 1931).

He says that Conservatism, Liberalism, and Capitalism are equally atheistic with Socialism.

Atheism, or Freethought, then, is limited to. the opposition to religion. Freedom of thought and freedom of expression, however, cover a wider field than a negation of religion. Any Freethinker who applied his free thinking to social life would find that the basis of freedom is economic. Those who control our livelihood are in a position to repress our activities and to compel us either to keep quiet or lose "our” jobs. This brings the Freethinker up against the question of material conditions.

At a lecture at Great Alie Street Forum, London, on December 12th, Mr. Cohen vigorously denied that the workers were struggling to-day for bread and butter. The struggle to-day, he said, was psychological. All the efforts of workers to get better things or to make their livelihood secure were not material, but a product of higher mental states. Reason, not economics, was the guide, according to the Apostle of Atheism.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ATHEISM.

The driving force of history was not material conditions, but mind. Mary Baker Eddy, the Christian Scientist, and Chapman Cohen, the Freethinker, find a common ground in their ideas. In fact, all believers in religion ridicule the materialist conception of history on the same grounds as the "Freethinker"; they all say that the material conditions of wealth production and distribution are not the cause of social change. They argue that changing mental concepts are the fundamental cause of social change. In reply to questions, Mr. Cohen asserted that he was putting forward good Socialist arguments in describing all ideas as social in origin. The cause of mental changes, according to him, was to be found in social, not material, conditions.

He was faced by the argument that if the struggle for better things to-day was psychological, then we could get the things we wanted by leaving it to psychological effort.

Actually, every student of social affairs knows that the changed conditions and social freedom we want depend upon control of material things—wealth, money, food, clothing and shelter—that is, access to the means of living.

WHAT ARE SOCIAL CONDITIONS?

Social conditions are the cause of mental change. True. But what are social conditions? According to the Editor of the Freethinker, they are the ideas, religions, politics, institutions, newspapers, churches, property, in fact everything in society. The dominant force in social conditions among men is mind, he said. Among animals it was food, clothing and shelter. Men are different; they have got beyond the animal stage. Men are idealists; animals are not.

Typical of the superstition of the Freethinker, as such, the lecturer idolised reason, but failed to see that material conditions determine, in the long run, the things we reason about and the success or otherwise of ideals held by men. The reasoners before the French Revolution idolised liberty, freedom of contract, absence of authority, and equality. The conditions of French feudalism repressed capitalism and gave rise to these ideas. The nature of the material conditions made the victory of the Revolution limit the liberty and fraternity to the bourgeois virtues of freedom for the capitalist and repression for the worker.

THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND FREETHOUGHT.

Those who apply their Freethought and evolutionary ideas to social life find that the basis of all social conditions is material. The conditions of wealth production and distribution form the foundation of modern society. From this foundation the class divisions and struggles arise and develop. The class struggle is never mentioned by the Atheist, who is too busy with abstractions and abstract ideas to deal concretely with social life.

The class struggle is a product of the material conditions and becomes the greatest driving force in social evolution. Atheist or theist, rationalist or materialist —it they belong to the working class—are compelled to accept the terms of the owning class in order to live. Their daily life is limited by their economic position as a class without property, compelled to struggle for a bare “living wage.” Their ideals, their hopes and ambitions are denied expression if these conflict with the interests of the property-owning class.

Whether we like it or not, “sordid” materialists or aesthetic idealists though we may be, we are compelled to occupy our lives with the first, the essential thing in life—the securing of the wherewithal to live. That brings us up against the owning class. When we understand the struggle as well as take part in it, our object will be to get control of the material means of production. Only then will freedom of thought become a reality instead of the present sham.

"THE RELIGION OF RUSSIA."

The Rationalist lecturer, Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe (of the Manchester Guardian) has recently returned from Russia and lectured on a recent Sunday at Conway Hall on “The Religion of Communism.” The Monthly Record of the institute gives a summary of his lecture, from which the following is an extract:—

To consider the differences between Communism and Christianity, the Communists believe the universe to be without a God and man to be without a soul; they believe in class-hate, in the class-war, in dictatorship as a means to an end, and in the subjection of the individual. Marxism stands for a negation of the quintessence of the old religions—charity, compassion, forgiveness, the contrite spirit, the elevation of the humble and the meek. It is important to realise the width of the chasm that separates Marxism from the spirit of Buddha or of Christ. One may see this in the manner in which the Russians have set themselves to liquidate prostitution, for their object is not the redemption of the individual but the elimination of a social evil.

Mr. Ratcliffe has for many years been prominent on the lecture platform, especially in his yearly tour of American cities. The quotation given here shows that little knowledge is required to be a lecturer to Liberals and Rationalists.

He takes his Marxism from the present situation in Russia and labels the struggle there, the “Communist Religion.” Charity, forgiveness, etc., are foreign to Marxism, according to this supporter of the Great War.

Marxism is a word used to mean the teachings of Marx. Is there anything in Marx opposed to human kindness and the other elements of developed social life? On the contrary, the essential idea of Marx is to teach the workers to end this class-riven society which makes for cruelty, servility and repression. Marx taught that economic necessity demands a co-operative commonwealth. Then the social feelings would be liberated instead of being crushed in the struggle for existence.

RATIONALIST ILLUSIONS.

Mr. Ratcliffe finds that under the powerful State-controlled machine of Russia the individual is subjected. He does not understand that the economic and mental development of Russia to-day does not allow Socialism to be established, apart altogether from the fact that there can be no such thing as National Socialism. The subjection in Russia under dictatorship can only be judged by an examination of the rise of Bolshevism to power and the conditions which gave it birth. If Mr. Ratcliffe knew anything about Marxism or Socialism, he would not expect Communism to rise “ in a night ” out of the nightmare that was Czarism.

He does not even realise that prostitution is an economic question. He evidently thinks that women sell themselves for money because their hearts are wicked or that they are born in sin. The Russians should “redeem the individual” women by inviting the Salvation Army or the Ethical Society to save their souls. Perhaps Mr. Ratcliife explained to Stalin how prostitution is “liquidated” in democratic Britain and America.

In a later lecture at the Conway Hall on the “Clash of Systems,” Mr. Ratcliffe criticised Russia’s lack of freedom of speech. He claimed it was inherent in Socialism. The fundamental difference between State Capitalism in Russia and Socialism as advocated by Marx is evidently quite unknown to him.

Adolph Kohn

'Jack London and Socialism' (1932)

From the February 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

J. W. Keable (Balham) asks if Jack London was a Socialist. He also asks us to explain a note in a previous issue which stated that his wife, Charmian London, misrepresented Jack London's views.

In reply, we would state that Jack London was for some time a member of the Socialist Labor Party in California, and later joined the Socialist Party of America. His letter of resignation from that reformist party shows his resentment of their opportunism.

We can only judge from Jack London's activities and writings. He advocated Socialism for many years, but was never clear as to the means of realising it. "The Iron Heel" is an instance of this.

His wife pictured him as being disgusted with the working class when he was merely expressing his contempt for the compromising S.P. of America. How little this bourgeois lady understood London's ideas can be seen from her so-called Life of him.

The real meaning of the class struggle was never grasped by Jack London. Hence, his support of the World War.

A. Kohn