The Reward of Invention. (1933)

From the February 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the advantages claimed for capitalism is that it acts as an incentive to inventors. This claim disregards the fact that generally inventors are too poor to patent their inventions, or to purchase the plant and machinery necessary for their manufacture. An example of the inventor’s reward is the case of Jean Leroy, who is credited with having invented the film projector which made possible the motion picture industry. Failure to patent his invention 38 years ago lost him untold wealth, and during his latter years he made his living out of a small camera repair shop within a stone’s throw of Broadway’s immense picture palaces, where millions have been made from his invention. He has now died in poor circumstances at the age of 78. Leroy said, “I did not patent my invention because I did not realise what I had, and was ignorant of the patent laws. Like the average inventor, I centred my interest on the solution of the problem I had in mind.” (News-Chronicle, 11/8/32.) Leroy’s reply provides a complete answer to those who think that inventors are spurred on by hope of material gain.

Marx and the Labour Party (1933)

From the February 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Arthur. Woodburn, writing in Forward (September 3rd), tries to meet Socialist criticism of the Labour Party’s programme with the retort that Marx, too, was a reformist. This he does by reproducing the list of measures drafted by Marx and Engels in 1847, and incorporated in the Communist Manifesto. (See Section II.)

Mr. Woodburn leaves out the essential explanation without which his statement is grossly misleading. Marx and Engels were socialists, that is to say, they aimed at dispossessing the capitalist class as a necessary preliminary to establishing a system of society based on common ownership of the means of production and distribution. The first step was that the working class must obtain political supremacy. They must then use this political supremacy to dispossess the capitalists. Marx and Engels put forward, in the light of their reading of existing conditions, certain measures as a beginning of the process of dispossession.

     Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois, production; by means therefore which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in the most advanced countries the following will be pretty generally applicable.

Now the important thing to notice is that these measures were proposed as the way in which the working class, after conquering political power, would begin the task of dispossessing the capitalists and instituting common ownership. This is something poles apart from the Labour Party’s aim and programme. The Labour programme is something so acceptable to large sections of the capitalists that you can have a Labour Government’s public utility schemes modelled on Conservative schemes, and carried on without material modification by subsequent Conservative Governments. The Labour Party, in fact, does not aim now or ever at dispossessing the capitalists. Mr. Snowden, when Chancellor of the Exchequer in the two Labour Governments, repeatedly insisted that the Labour Party does not believe in making despotic inroads on the rights of property, and the Labour Party still holds that view and confirmed it at the Leicester Conference.

To illustrate this we need only point to two of the measures suggested by Marx and Engels, viz., “abolition of property in land ” and “abolition of all right of inheritance.” Mr. Woodburn knows quite well that the Labour Party has never committed itself to those two proposals. It dare not do so, and thus it has no intention of beginning an attack on private ownership.

In passing, it is worth while recalling what Engels, looking back in 1888, had to say of the 1847 proposals: —

  The practical application of the principles will depend, as the manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded to-day.” (See Preface written in 1888.)

P. S.

Marxism and Russia (1933)

From the February 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mrs. Barbara Wootton has a reputation as an economist and is accepted by many people as an authority on the theories of Marx. She holds views on the relationship of Marxian theories to the social system in Russia which are fairly common. In the Highway, organ of the Workers' Educational Association (December), she sets out to interpret Russia for the benefit of non-Russians who wish to understand what is going on in that country.

Her explanation is a simple one:

“The Soviet Mind is a single mind. It is this which gives life in present-day Russia its peculiar flavour. ... In other countries no such common collective purpose is known, unless it be the purpose of making war. . . . The Soviet mind not only knows what it is after; it is also after very strange things. . . . These strange things are, of course, nothing less than those embodied in the philosophy called Marxism.”

Mrs. Wootton describes briefly some of the strange things. Among them is concentration on increasing the productivity of industry, what she calls “the glorification of economic output.” This, she says, leads the Russians to esteem sobriety because the sober worker has a bigger output. He must shun “licentious pleasures.” He must get up early and be punctual.

Another of the strange things is that the Russian child is taught to study phases of the class-struggle in other countries, but not in Russia. (According to Mrs. Wootton the children are taught that the class-struggle no longer exists in Russia.)

These and various other examples are given by Mrs. Wootton to “illustrate the extraordinary unity and consistency of Soviet ideas in every field.”

The whole of this is rubbish. There is no “common collective purpose” in Russia. The “strange things” are not strange. They are perfectly familiar to every student of capitalism everywhere, and Marx is not responsible for them.

Let us first take the “single mind” of Russia. Not a week passes without authoritative reports of the shooting or imprisonment of peasants and others who have come into conflict with the Russian Government. Frequent armed punitive expeditions are sent against rebellious groups of private peasants or members of collective farms. Dissident Communists are disgraced, exiled and imprisoned. At the moment a wholesale purge of the Russian Communist Party is taking place. The “single mind” is that of the Communist officials who control the vast repressive forces of the State. The appearance of unity is like its counterpart in every other country: it is imposed by those who have power on those who have not. Mrs. Wootton's analogy of the alleged “common collective purpose” of the nation making war is not a bad illustration of the absurdity of her argument. The war-making governments had to use conscription, supported by intensive lying propaganda and the savageries of military discipline to drive millions of unwilling or indifferent men into the trenches. Mrs. Wootton thinks that this is a common collective purpose. It did not look like that to the conscripts.

Then for the boosting of big output. Here Mrs. Wootton herself has to admit that the Russian “strange thing” bears a resemblance to the propaganda used in the U.S.A. before the present depression. She might also recall the official British “increased production” campaign of 1919-1920, backed by politicians in the three big parties (Labour included) and made the subject of innumerable newspaper articles, coloured posters in the streets, platform speeches and divinely-inspired sermons in the pulpits of churches of every denomination.

Then there is Mrs. Wootton's discovery that in Russia the children are taught to ignore the class-struggle at home and fix their eyes on the shocking state of unrest abroad. This is precisely what happens in every capitalist country. We are allowed to know that there were class struggles in the past and class struggles in benighted foreign countries, but the educational system does not recognise the existence of a class struggle here and now. There is no need to deal with her belief that the class struggle has disappeared from Russia. The rulers of that country officially admit that it is more acute than ever. That is why they have to depend for protection on their huge police and military forces, and that is why, in spite of Mrs. Wootton's nonsense, they do not trust to the “common collective purpose” supposed to have been derived by the Russian population from the theories of Marx.

Anyone acquainted with Marx's writings would know how he denounced the inhumanity of capitalism, sacrificing the comfort and health of the workers in order to build up huge production plants for the profit of the investors. Yet Mrs. Wootton holds Marx responsible for precisely the same process imposed on the Russian workers by the dictatorship. While the majority of Russian workers tighten their belts the home and foreign bondholders get their 10 per cent, or more on their investments out of the proceeds of the workers' labour, and specialists and bureaucrats draw their high salaries.

Mrs. Wootton shows by her article that she knows little of Russia, not very much about capitalism elsewhere, and understands nothing at all of Marx. Her views are not in themselves of special importance, but unfortunately her misrepresentations of Marx are widely held and do great harm to the Socialist movement.

Edgar Hardcastle