Wage-labour v. Capital (1952)

From the April 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was once a story in circulation of Siamese twin brothers who hated one another from birth. Inseparably joined together, their hatred became deeper and more bitter with each inconvenience they caused one another. Either could have willingly killed his brother, but they were joined in such a manner that the death of one would mean the death of both. One could not exist without the other.

Thus it is with wage-labour and capital. Born together, they are inseparable yet they are antagonistic. They are complementary yet they are perpetually in opposition to one another. They strive strenuously against one another but the abolition of one means the end of both. Neither can exist without the other.

Capital is wealth that is invested for the purpose of producing further wealth with a view to profit. The process requires the bringing together of raw material, machinery and human effort. The capitalist owns the raw material and the machinery but the human effort he must obtain from the workers. He needs to obtain and use it in a particular manner—a manner known as wage-labour.

There have been other forms of labour in the past. There was once free labour, then slave labour and serf labour. These different forms served certain conditions but are useless to capital.

In very distant times men lived under social conditions now known as Primitive Communism. Under those conditions they worked with their very primitive tools to produce things in order that the whole community might use them. There was no question of profit, no question of some working to produce for the benefit of an idle section of the community. All who were capable assisted in the tasks of obtaining and preparing the things that were necessary to feed, clothe, house and maintain them all. They thought not of things as “Mine” or “Yours” but as “Ours—the property of us all.” Those conditions of labour were free. They are obviously useless to the capitalist who seeks only profit and relies on others to produce it.

Slave labour followed. This was a system where one section of the community owned, body and soul; lock, stock and barrel, a number of others—owned them and worked them as slaves. They had to feed them, clothe them and shelter them, whether they were working or not. Such conditions required, for the slave owners, that as far as possible there should be regular and constant work to be done so that they did not have to maintain slaves who were idle and temporarily useless to them. Their main problem was whether it was better to get slaves and work them to death and then get others, or whether it was cheaper to treat their slaves with some little consideration so that they had a long working life.

To the capitalist this form of labour is equally useless. He requires to be able to employ his labourers and dismiss them just when he has need. The wealth that his workers produce for him must go to a market and the condition of that market is unpredictable. The capitalist may have orders to fulfil to-day that may be doubled or may cease altogether to-morrow. He needs to get his labourers to suit his orders, some to-day, maybe more to-morrow and perhaps sack the lot the next day. He wants his labour power in the same way that he wants his electricity, switch it on when required and off when not required. He does not want the expense of wasted electricity, neither does he want the expense of maintaining labourers for whom he cannot find work.

The capitalist does not want the initial expense of buying his labourers, as slaves were bought. It would enormously increase his capital outlay, and replacement would be a costly business. This point is adequately illustrated by the story of a man who paid £100 for a negro slave and sent him to work painting a roof. The slave turned to his master and said, “ Massa, if you send me on to that roof and I fall and break my neck you will be £100 out of pocket, but if you go to the city and get some of that white trash for sixpence an hour and he falls and kills himself, all you have to do is go and get another one without losing a penny.”

The capitalist does not want to be bothered with the carcasses of his employees, all he wants is the energy that they contain and he only wants that when there is profit to be made.

Serf labour is of a different order. The serf is not bound to his master but to the soil that his master owns. The serf has his piece of land, no matter how small or poor, and he produces things for use, a little for himself and family, and the rest for his overlord. He may also give his overlord some of his working time to till the lord's crops or to defend his domain. The serf owns some of the tools that are needed to produce his food, clothing and shelter, and he owns a little raw material—the land on which he works. But he is chained to the soil. A change of overlords leaves him on the same ground working on behalf of the new lord. To the overlord the land is useless without the serf and he assumes certain obligations to his serfs, as they assume certain others to him. The lord, of course, gets the fatter living whilst the serf struggles in poverty.

This, likewise, is useless to the capitalist. He does not want his workers chained to any particular place. They must come to the work, he cannot take the work to them. The factory, the mine, the workshop, the garage, the depot, the dock, the warehouse or whatever sort of place the capitalist owns is the spot to which the worker must be free to come.

Neither does the capitalist want his workers to have the slight amount of independence that a piece of land, such as the serf had, would give them. The capitalist cannot afford to have his machinery held up because some of his workers have taken time off to get in their hay or their potato crop or to thatch a roof. The worker must be entirely dependant on the capitalist for his livelihood so that he can be disciplined into punctuality, regular attendance at the place of work when required, and respect for his employer’s wishes. He must be conditioned by the job without outside interference. Absenteeism and insubordination that might flow from a little independence are a curse to the capitalist. So serfdom does not suit capital.

The capitalist needs wage-labour. He wants not the worker’s body but his energy, mental and physical. Mental and physical energies are inseparable. There is no physical work that does not call for thinking and no mental work that does not entail some physical effort even if it is only pushing pen over paper. The capitalist wants this energy on tap and he wants it to be completely at his disposal. Wage-labour offers him all that. The worker seeks employment, he offers for sale his bodily and mental energies for a price. That price is the wage. It may be called a salary, an income, a fee, a stipend or what you will, it is the same thing. The capitalist can employ the wage-labourer or not, employ him today and put him on part time or sack him tomorrow; tell him what time to come to work and what time to go; tell him how the work shall be done and take from him the wealth that he produces.

The capitalist also likes to have a reserve of labour power from which he can draw when his business requires it. If there is no such reserve and he needs extra wage-labourers he must compete with his fellow capitalists for workers by offering higher wages, a process that is distasteful to the capitalist class. Efforts are made to create a larger army of wage workers or build a reserve in some way.

When capitalism first appears in any part of the world wage-labour appears with it. One of the capitalists’ first worries is the creation of a reserve of wage-labour. In most countries this problem was originally solved by taking away from the serf, or the peasant, the land that he owned. This made him propertyless—-a proletarian, and drove him into the ranks of the wage-labourers to seek employment from those who did own property. The hundreds of enclosure acts on the statute book of this country are evidence of the ruthless process of dispossessing the English serfs and peasants. Their land was taken and enclosed by fences to be used largely as sheep grazing land, large hunting parks or for large scale agriculture. The poor landless families wandered to the towns where the factories were, there to operate machines that made woollen goods from the sheep that now wandered over the site of their late homesteads. The reserve army of wage labour, in those days, included small children, the aged and the infirm, as well as women.

The reserve army now-a-days is maintained by drawing more and more women into the wage-labour category. Labour saving machinery is introduced to enable one man to do the work that was previously done by two. The redundant men help to fill the ranks of the reserve of wage-labour, to be drawn on when occasion may demand.

If capitalists have to compete with one another for a limited supply of wage-labour and the price tends to rise, they howl “blue murder.” They will use their political power to freeze wages, bind the worker to his job or direct him to another. They have even conscripted women to the wage-labour ranks. The competition between capitalists for the limited markets wherein to sell the goods that the workers make, results in the accumulation of capital into fewer and fewer hands and the bankruptcy of the weaker capitalists, who then go to join the swelling ranks of the wage-labourers.

If capital needs wage-labour, so does wage-labour need capital. Whilst there are men and women who own nothing but the energy contained in their bodies, they must, in order to live, have access to the tools of production and the raw materials to work on. Whilst these things are in the hands of capitalists the workers must go to them for permission to use them. Unless the capitalist is prepared to invest these things in some profit making enterprise, the workers can starve.

Yet, despite needing one another so desperately, wage-labour and capital fight tooth and nail. The capitalist seeks always to increase his profit which means that, out of the total wealth that the workers produce, he seeks to increase his share. The larger the capitalists’ share, the smaller the workers portion.

To increase his profit the capitalist tries to cheapen the price of wage-labour, increase the price of goods to be sold or reduce the amount of wage-labour used. All three of these methods are detrimental to the wage worker. In the first instance he gets lower wages, in the second his wages will buy less because the price of commodities will be higher and in the third case, the introduction of labour saving machinery or the reorganisation of an industry will cause some workers to have their work intensified whilst others can be idle if they cannot find another employer. So the wage-labourers resist the capitalist’s attempts to increase his profit.

The wage-labourer also seeks to increase his part of the total wealth produced. He strives for higher wages. Things that were originally luxuries become comforts and finally necessities. To be able to read and write was once an accomplishment for the wealthy only, now it is a necessity for the humblest wage-worker. A Sunday suit of clothes, holidays, passenger transport were once luxuries and are now very essential needs. Radio has passed the luxury stage and can be considered a comfort, in time to be a necessity. These things become essential for the workers who seek to increase their wages to enable them to acquire these new needs. Variations in the price of things that have long been established as essential needs—food, houses and clothing, cause the worker to seek to adjust his wages whenever the variation is upward. The capitalist will put on the pressure to cheapen the price of labour-power when the variation is downwards.

So the two, wage-labour and capital, are continuously locked in a ding-dong struggle. The worker will find the capitalist’s discipline irksome and he will organise in a Trade Union in an endeavour to have a say in the conditions under which he is to work. The capitalist will have to resist again. The capitalist will jealously guard his trump card, the political weapon, and use it when the workers become a little too audacious.

The worker sells his labour power either by time or by amount. When he sells it by time he receives a wage rate calculated by the hour, day or week. He strives to reduce the amount of time over which he sells it by struggling for a shorter working day or shorter working week, whilst maintaining his total wage at the previous level. The capitalist, on the other hand, endeavours to increase the working time without a wage increase, thus gaining for himself a larger share in the total wealth. When labour power is scarce he will increase the total time by demanding overtime work and he will pay for such time at special rates, still ensuring himself a profit.

When the worker sells his labour power by the amount it is known as piece work. Here he is paid, not by the measure of time but by the quantity of wealth produced in a given time. This urges him to intensify his work by working as hard and as fast as he can in order to increase his total wage. Now-a-days piece work is referred to as "payment by results" or "incentive bonus.” The effect is to squeeze the maximum amount of energy out of the worker in the minimum amount of time. This is most useful to the capitalist when the market is good and orders are flowing in rapidly, when he is competing with other capitalists to get goods to the market in the shortest possible time. Piece work is often a prelude to a re-adjustment of time rates. Having enticed the worker to betray just how fast he can work he is then called upon to work at that pace for a time measured wage.

All these points are the issues which keep wage-labour and capital perpetually at war with one another.

There are some features of wage-labour which resemble slave-labour. So much so, in fact, that it is often referred to as wage-slavery. Although the capitalist only requires the workers energies he cannot have them separate from the body which generates them. The worker cannot rise in the morning, extract a quantity of labour power from himself, wrap it and send it to his employer with a stamped addressed envelope, then return his body back to bed with a pipe and a book. The worker must, himself, go to his place of employment and have his labour power extracted by the day, hour or contract. So, during his periods of work, the wage-labourer appears to be owned by the capitalist.

In this relationship of wage-labour and capital the advantages are all with the capitalist. He gets the wealth and the privileges whilst the worker's lot is one of continual work in order to live, coupled with which are his poverty and the insecurity of livelihood. Capital is his enemy. If he destroys capital he destroys wage-labour also, but he does not destroy himself or his ability to labour.

The problem has a simple solution. Having no property the worker must work for a wage in order to live. The capitalist has the property and can employ the worker. Take away the capitalist's property and place it in the possession of the whole of the people and there will be neither propertyless wage workers nor property owning people who can command the labour power of others. Labour remains; so do the raw materials and the machines, but the labour becomes free—free to produce wealth in order that everyone may enjoy it. No wage-labour, no capital, no profits, no markets, no wars to capture markets, no class domination, no classes. Instead, a classless society working to produce the needs, comforts and luxuries of life and having all things available when produced.—Socialism.

One thing is clear. Where there is wage-labour there is capital, and where there is capital there is capitalism. Some would have us believe that capitalism has been abolished in some parts of the world. To test the truth of this is easy. Do the people work for wages? If so, there is capital, and capitalism is the same all the world over. Society will be well rid of both wage-labour and capital.

W. Waters

Aphorisms of Socialism: [IV and V] (1912)

From the September 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Aphorism III.

Being an explanation of the Declaration of Principles of the S.P.G.B.

Aphorism IV.

As in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex.

This Aphorism speaks of “the order of social evolution.” The phrase shall be the starting-point of our explanation.

Society has not always been divided into the same classes that it comprises to-day. The present class division, as was shown in dealing with our first aphorism, is based entirely on the private ownership of the means of life. On this is erected the class distinction, and from it flow the class characteristics. Only this private ownership by a section could, for instance, have developed a wage-slave class (not a class who occasionally work for wages, but a class who have no other means of living than by working for wages).

But previous to the present social system other social systems have existed, upon other bases, and with other classes ruling and ruled.

Under the feudal system, for example, the feudal nobility ruled, basing their power upon a certain qualified control of the land. Under the classic States based upon chattel-slavery, a class of slave-owners ruled.

But the constant feature of society ever since it has had the class formation — that is, ever since classes have existed — has been that the ruling classes have controlled the dominating factor in production.

Under chattel-slavery it was slaves, against whose labour the free men could not, partly from pride and partly from their liability to military service, compete. The feudal nobility of the middle ages had but partial control of the land, hence their dominance was never very complete. Indeed, in England the serfs managed to throw off the shackles of serfdom and gain a position which, though still subservient, was similar to that of the free Roman citizen of the poorer class, but without the incubus of slave labour to drag them down to ruin.

But against this persistent feature of class society is the constant characteristic of the democratic societies which preceded them — the means of living belonged to no one : they were open to all.

This gives us the key to the aphorism. Without private property, without privilege in the means of living, there can be no class distinction or class domination.

The emancipation of the working class, therefore, since it can only be accomplished by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, leaves nothing to form the basis of domination. Thus it follows that the emancipation of the working class must end class domination, and must involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.

_______________________

Aphorism V.

This emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.

Before the present social system came into existence the feudal nobility were the ruling class. But it was characteristic of the feudal system (as of any system that was capable of any other ending than ruin and chaos), that they could not prevent the rise to power of a new class. The source of this was largely in the towns, where surplus products of a “non-perishable” nature were produced, which fell into the hands of a class who made commerce their business.

The sources of the merchants’ wealth were capable of much greater extension than those of the nobles, partly because the products of the country districts, being more perishable than town products, did not lend themselves so readily to international commerce, and partly because the serf, having rights in the land, was chiefly producing articles for his own consumption, and only working for a strictly limited time for his feudal superior, while the handicraftsman of the town was already producing “commodities” — goods produced for sale.

It was quite in the nature of things that with the increasing productivity of labour the capitalist side of production — the production of commodities by wage-labour — should tend to increase rapidly, and certain geographical discoveries (the way to the East round the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of America) gave tremendous impetus to this side of industrial development. The laws and restrictions placed upon commerce and production — partly feudal, partly customary to the different trades — pressed heavily upon the rising class, and so it was natural that, as their wealth and power increased, they should direct their attention toward gaining social supremacy.

As the new class rose the serfs gradually rose from servitude also, and long before the merchant forerunners of the modern capitalist class had achieved ruling power, serfdom had ceased to exist in this country. The serfs had shaken themselves free of most of their feudal shackles and stood now as independent peasant-proprietors.

But the rising capitalist class could only elevate themselves on the backs of the class of free peasants. It was from their ranks, chiefly, that these new masters looked to recruit that abundance of cheap labourers they desired for their factories. Already the break-up of the bands of retainers of the feudal nobility had supplied great numbers, and the dissolution of the monasteries had set free a great many more, but still the factories cried for more workers, and only the class of peasant-proprietors could supply the needed increase.

Events, however, proved favourable to the needs of the capitalists. An enormous demand for wool had sprung up, and in consequence the land began to wear a different aspect in the eyes of the landed aristocracy. It presented a means of keeping sheep, and hence of acquiring great wealth. Unfortunately, the peasant proprietors were in the way. The small agriculturists, whom the capitalists so badly wanted in the new manufactories and whose fields the aristocrats coveted, were clearly altogether out of place upon the land. That was a matter which the capitalist class and their landed opponents could agree upon, for all their class antagonism.

So the two combined to drive the peasants from the soil. At first they were dispossessed of their fields without any legal form, but later the classes interested passed, under various pretexts, legislation which made the expropriation of the peasants more swift. They were hunted out by troops, their dwellings were burnt to the ground, and their lands were appropriated by the great landlords and laid down in pasture for sheep.

The legislation passed against the dispossessed peasants makes terrible reading. They were expropriated at a rate far too rapid even for the rapidly growing capitalist industry to absorb them, hence their presence on the earth was inconvenient and unwelcome. Laws were passed, therefore, aiming at wiping out the surplus. Under Henry VIII (see Karl Marx’s “Capital.” Chap. XXVIII) sturdy vagabonds were to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood ran in streams from their bodies. For the second offence of vagabondage the whipping was to be repeated and half the ear sliced off. For the third relapse the offender was to be executed as a hardened criminal. Under Edward VI it was ordained that if anyone refused to work he was to be condemned in slavery to the person who denounced him as an idler. If he was absent for a fortnight he was to be branded on the forehead or back with a letter S and became a slave for life. If he ran away three times he was to be executed as a felon. Under Elizabeth similar’ laws were made. For the first offence a whipping and branding, unless someone would take him into service for two years; for the second offence execution unless someone would take him into service for two years; for the third offence execution without mercy. In the reign of James I the expropriated peasantry were subjected to like enactments.

Hollingshed says that 7,200 were executed in the reign of Henry VIII, while Strype records that in Elizabeth’s time “rogues [those, for the most part, who had been robbed of their land] were trussed up apace, and that there was not one year commonly wherein three or four hundred were not devoured and eaten up by the gallowes.” The same individual states that in Somersetshire alone in one year forty persons were executed.

These laws, and many others which cannot be mentioned here, remained in force even as late as the beginning of the 18th century, while in France, for three-quarters of a century later, laws as severe were active against the workers.

Other periods of history show the same bloody repression of subject classes by ruling classes, even from the dawn of written history. And the savage repression and avenging of the Paris Commune of 1871, together with numerous examples at Barcelona, Moscow, and elsewhere on the Continent, at Pittsburg and Lawrence in America, and at Featherstone and Tonypandy in England, of recent years, show that the same factor which we see running through all written history still persists. That factor is the life and death struggle between the classes.

This teaches us that with classes, however it may be in exceptional individual cases, economic interests govern actions. Convinced of this, and holding to it as a guiding principle, and knowing moreover that the interests of the master class is diametrically opposed to those of the working class, we assert that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.

This, of course, does not preclude the possibility of some few members of the master class rising superior to their environment and their class interests, and rendering good service to the workers’ cause. Capitalists, like workers, are human, which is why, as a class, they are actuated by their class interests. But for the same reason individual capitalists may be moved by any other human emotions, even to the extent of taking up the battle of the oppressed class.

The difficulties in the way of their doing so, however, are stupendous. Their outlook upon life is entirely different from that of the workers. No other system of society ever lent itself more to illusion than the present one, No other system ever so effectually concealed the chains of bondsmen and so artfully surrounded slaves with the atmosphere of freedom. The position of the chattel-slave was always very clear, indeed it appeared that he got nothing for his labour. Yet he, at all events, never starved, and was robbed of a comparatively small proportion of his product. The modern wage-slave, on the other hand, appears to be free; nobody owns him and he even has his foot on the social ladder – he may own property; perhaps he does own a bit, or has some money in the teapot. He actually has a vote. It seems that he is robbed of nothing, that he is paid for all he produces. Even the forces of the State seem to be necessary to hold markets abroad for the disposal of his products and of his the rich cargo of teapot at home.

All this presents difficulty enough even in the case of the worker, assisted as he is by his class interest in seeing through the sham. But it is an almost insurmountable barrier to those born and bred in the atmosphere of capitalist circles, so much so that the few who do get some glimmering of the position are in most cases shut off from true democracy by class arrogance and class prejudice. They are generally the superior ones, and must lead.

It is just here that our clause applies with greatest force. Without shutting the door against any who subscribe to our principles and act in accord with them, it is upon the working class that the working class must rely for their emancipation. Valuable work may be done by individuals, and this work may necessarily raise them to prominence, but it is not to individuals, either of the working class or of the capitalist class, that the toilers must look. The movement for freedom must be a working class movement. It must be founded upon the understanding of their class position by the working class. It must depend upon the working class vitality and intelligence and strength. Until the knowledge and experience of the working class are equal to the task of revolution there can be no emancipation for them. Hence they must control all individuals in their camp, no matter which class they may belong to, and they must be guided in the conflict by the principle of the class struggle, which is based on the irrefutable fact that all written history is a history of class struggles, and the knowledge that the emancipation of the working class can only be the fruits of a class struggle, and therefore must be the work of the working class itself.

A. E. Jacomb

The Wind on the Heath (1960)

From the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gypsies are in the news again. Dramatically, because a couple of them have been involved in murder cases and, more prosaically, because of a recent spotlighting of their continual clash with some county by-laws and state regulations. These laws control the rights of vagrants, the permissible period for roadside and common camping, child education, and so on. Some county authorities, in trying to enforce the law, have come under fire from the Gypsies' romantic sympathisers (who are often well enough endowed with worldly goods not to live in a caravan, nor sell clothes pegs for a living).

What is the background to this controversy? Where did these strange folk come from; what is their history? The safest theory is that they stem from the Doms, ancient outcast tribes in India who were musicians, dancers and metal workers. Some Persian monarch, it is recorded, transplanted such a group to the Tigris Valley and North Syria. In 855 A.D. the Byzantines moved them to the Balkans. All the while, they continued their old crafts of metal working, making music and dancing. Records from Greece and Rumania show them, in the 1340's, as serfs and personal slaves of the land-owning Boyars—which they continued to be, in Rumania, right up to 1850. The Turkish invasion of the Balkans caused a widespread emigration and some Gipsy bands, in the 1440's, were caught up in this, moving to Central and Northern Europe.

They seemed to have been under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Church. Some evidence indicates that a Papal order required them to do penance for embracing the Moslem faith whilst they were living under Turkish rule. It is all rather uncertain. Some authorities have them in Europe far earlier, descendants of the wandering metal workers and tinkers, standing apart from the tribes. Here, in fact, is the origin of the “Wayland Smith” legends.

The Gipsy custom of stealing and telling fortunes caused some townsfolk to doubt the sincerity of their penance and the story, like their welcome, were rather thin. All manner of harsh laws were enacted against them. In 1500 the Imperial State annulled the safe conduct which the Princes had issued to Gypsies. Italian states banished them. Some German states ordered all male Gypsies to be shot. Henry VIII forbade separate Gypsy courts and Elizabeth I for a time banished them under pain of death. The Commonwealth executed some simply because they were Gypsies; on the continent they lived in constant fear during the witchcraft manias. Strangely, the Inquisition gave them protection from these. Spain became very popular with the Romanies and many of them moved in, eventually to embrace Spanish names and manners.

The Gypsies were allowed to have their own courts, and to live under their own customs, because they were regarded as a separate race or nation. This was finished in the upheaval caused by the break-up of feudalism in Europe. Peasants were being thrown off the land, merchants were fighting the old feudal lords, aspiring ruling classes tussled with the Roman Church for its land and wealth. Dreadful wars laid Germany waste. Religious intolerance and bigotry with weird maniacal theories tore open the ideas of the Middle Ages. Serfs, landless peasants and unwanted soldiers took to the roads, trying to escape their states’ harsh laws and treatment by joining Gypsy bands. Thus, the Gypsies became connected, in people's minds, with criminals and outlaws and the word Gypsy became a synonym for ruffian and ne'er-do-well. England, France and Spain deported many Gypsies to the Americas; when Australia was discovered, many were shipped there. Such is the tenacity of the Gypsies that they stuck to their old ways in these distant lands—and many still continue to do so.

The Gypsies have shown no desire to uncover their origin. They have, in fact, been content to. be known in Europe as Egyptians; their headmen were referred to as “Counts of Little Egypt.” They were traced to India through originally, the work of an Hungarian named Valyi, who in 1763 noticed a similarity between the language of some Malabar Hindu friends and that of the Hungarian Gypsies. This started a more scientific study of the Romany language, which is now placed as stemming from Aryan, although so far nobody has been able to find the particular area from which such a dialect could have evolved directly.

Although some Gypsy customs have been modified by the areas in which they live, others have remained more or less constant. One of these is the matrilineal nature of their clans, which lays it down that men can only join a clan by marrying into it (although this custom is reversed in the case of the headmen). Property seems to be inherited by the men, although women can and do inherit it. The moral customs of a clan are decreed by the Tribal Mother. The Headman is—or was—elected to his position. The title of Gypsy King and Queen is in fact a misnomer conferred upon them by outsiders which the Gypsies, being sharp, have used to some advantage. The clans, when they reach any considerable size, tend to break up into new groups; it is doubtful if they still exist in the older form in developed countries such as Great Britain.

In spite of everything the Gypsies have clung to their existence to this day. Sometimes—especially in the Balkans and the Middle East—they have existed by doing work that was frowned upon by others; work like latrine cleaning and public hangings. In Spain they provided the bulk of the tobacco factory workers—which must upset a lot of romantic concepts about them. In Spain, also, they have achieved fame by their dancing skills. The industrialisation of Northern Europe has give them the somewhat higher standards of furnished caravans—higher only when compared to their brothers’ tattered tents. Their speciality —and in Hungary some built up fortunes by it—was horse dealing.

But one by one, the doors have been closing against the Gypsies. The horse is fast disappearing as a beast of burden. Mass produced metal and plastic ware is helping to kill the craft of tinkering. A trained mechanic, not a lore-stuffed Gypsy, is needed to repair a combine harvester. Hertfordshire, for example, as a county which accommodates lots of workers in well laid out, expensive dormitory suburbs and estates, is not very keen on having the roads and commons littered with old tins and burst mattresses left there, to boot, by non rate-paying Gypsies. This county, with its agriculture mainly consisting of market gardens, dairy farms and corn crops, worked by modern mechanisation, has little need for floating, seasonable labour. In contrast, Kent is famous for its hop fields and fruit farms. Even today, these need extra casual labour in season, especially for hop stringing and twining, in which Gypsies play no small part. Kent is trying to establish permanent camp sites for the Romanies—and is regarded, therefore, as a humane county by the starry-eyed Gypsy addicts. Even so, things are changing in the hop fields. New hop picking machines leave only one-third of the crop to be picked by hand. Hop-pickers have seen their numbers reduced over the last 20-odd years from 100,000 to 22,000.

It seems, then, that the days of the wandering Gypsies have not long to run. No tears for that: because they live a life on the move in caravans: it does not follow that theirs is an idyllic existence. They have to find some sort of work in order to live; in spite of their reputation as thieves, it is certain that the proceeds of stealing would not last them for long. And anybody who has picked fruit on piece rates will know that it is no more romantic or idyllic than work on a factory bench. Groups which try to exist by just plain begging rapidly degenerate into whining outcasts, devoid of human dignity. Many people wonder why anyone, even a tiny minority, should try to stand outside the world of hire purchase, mortgages, television and social hygiene.

For centuries, Gypsies have tried to hold themselves aloof. But as it has done with so many others, capitalism is about to catch up with them.

Jack Law

Analysis of Wealth. IV. Accumulation. (1916)

From the September 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 3.

Capital is an accumulation of surplus-value. Whatever the original capital with which capitalist production started may have been it has long since disappeared, consumed by the capitalist class.

Likewise with the individual upstart. Even if we grant that by “his own exertions” he becomes possessed of a sum of money, this sum does not become capital until he uses it to exploit labour-power. As this process continues his capital comes to consist of accumulated surplus-value, while his original sum disappears in consumption.

Other things remaining the same the accumulation of capital implies an increase in the demand for labour-power ; for capital, in order to remain itself, must grow by the exploitation of ever more labour-power. This in itself gives rise to an increase in the rate of wages, since in the course of time the demand must tend to outstrip the supply as provided by normal increase in the labouring population.

Capital, however, is by no means satisfied with this state of affairs. It sees in the natural limits of population a limit to the rapidity of its own growth. Hence as we have shown in a former article, it exhibits a historical tendency to force on the productivity of social labour by specialisation of individual functions and by the introduction of machinery. Thus it wrings from a given quantity of labour-power a larger proportion of surplus-value. Therefore, along with the accumulation of capital goes an alteration in what Marx calls its technical composition. Its constant portion, i.e., that invested in the passive factors of the labour process, increases at the expense of the variable element which purchases labour-power.

This enables production to be carried on on an ever-increasing scale without the demand for labour-power increasing sufficiently to cause a rise in its price. On the contrary it reduces the demand for labour-power to such a point as to cause a permanent over-supply of workers ; in other words, it creates an industrial reserve army—the unemployed.

The larger the scale on which an individual capitalist does business the more he is enabled to economise and reduce the number of his employees in proportion to work done. The cheaper, therefore, can he sell his commodities (since they embody less labour) and the keener becomes his competition against his rivals. They in turn are forced to economise and to and “extend the scale of their operations as rapidly as possible. In the long run the large capitals become larger while small ones get absorbed or wiped out ; for the market soon refuses to bear the increased weight of goods supplied by this acceleration of production. This centralisation of capital causes further economy and increases the industrial reserve army.

Thus in the process of accumulation we observe on the one hand a tendency to increase the productivity of labour and on the other hand a contraction of the market for its products, seeing that the growth of the unemployed lessens the demand for commodities, both on their part and on the part of those actually employed whose places they are ever ready to take.

These two forces act and re-act on each other to an increasing extent. The competition of the unemployed forces the actual workers to submit to the lowest wages and the maximum amount of work. This increases the accumulation of capital, which in turn intensifies competition among the capitalists for the market, causing further economies and more unemployed.

At one end of the social scale, then, we have the concentration of capital in fewer hands and consequent luxury and idleness ; at the other end, absence of all wealth other than than necessary to secure the workers’ continued existence in a state of overwork, coupled with a deadweight of destitute wretches denied even that questionable privilege. This state of affairs arises inevitably from the very nature of capitalist production, and its special features are aggravated with every step in capitalist progress. Even the statistics compiled by capitalist authorities, governmental and otherwise, bear out this conclusion.

So far we have examined only the growth of capital. It remains for us to consider its origin and destiny. Assuming on the one hand a class with the means of production and on the other a class without these means it is easily seen that the former can exploit the latter to an ever-increasing degree.

The question arises, however, as to how this relationship was established. Orthodox economists and other apologists for things as they are assure us that it is solely due to the virtues of the possessors and the vices of the proletariat. If by virtue we mean work, however, we have already seen that the accumulation of capital by no means bears out this fairy tale. At present and for centuries the workers with all their toil have been unable to accumulate. If the capitalists saved money by work it was an extraordinarily long time ago. We are forced, then, to turn to history for a solution of the problem.

The system of society immediately proceeding the present social system in the course of evolution we know as Feudalism. It consisted of a complex hierarchy of lords and vassals bound to each other by the duties of military support and obedience and the right of protection. As a basis for this system was serfdom. The land was parcelled out among the lords and their subordinates, and while the latter cultivated the land of their lords they had land of their own for their personal use. In the towns chartered freemen carried on handicrafts and commerce. Thus reciprocal obligations existed and were established by feudal law and custom. No man lacked the means of subsistence, or an occupation. The lords exploited their subordinates, but the latter possessed something tho modern wage slave lacks—security!

The decay of feudalism forms the starting-point of capitalist development. In England it was spread over the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. By degrees the peasants and handicraftsmen freed themselves from servile duties and became independent producers, while in conjunction with the growth of trade and the production of commodities arose and flourished the merchant class, who sandwiched themselves parasitically between the producers on either side of the exchange and incidentally fleeced both whenever occasion offered.

The feudal nobility, exhausted, in numbers and resources, by friction among themselves, disbanded their retainers, who thenceforth become propertyless men seeking employment for a living. Large estates passed into the hands of wealthy farmers and burghers, who did not hesitate to evict the tenants in order to convert one-time arable land into sheep pastures. The new nobility also confiscated common land for similar purposes spurred on by the increase in the price of wool. The spoliation of the Church during the Reformation aggravated this condition, and by the end of the 16th century a considerable labour-market had come into being, consisting of expropriated agriculturists, disbanded retainers, and forlorn monks.

The process went on in stages till the 19th century, when the last vestige of the old yeomanry disappeared. At first legislation from Henry VII. onward attempted to stem the tide of usurpation, but in the 18th century the law itself had become the instrument whereby the robbery of the people was effected. Private force was supplemented by the force of the State, which has remained to this day the agent of the plutocrats. From the first it penalised the disinherited for their misfortune : flogging and branding them was its most merciful means of dealing with them.

This, as Marx says, established the “discipline necessary to the wage-system,” and encouraged the new-born proletariat to submit to the low wages and long hours at first legally enforced by the State.

As the workers became habituated and resigned to their fate the severity of the penal legislation relaxed, only to be applied with all its original vigour again when the workers found in combination a means of parrying the onslaught of the masters.

If to-day Trade Unions and strikes are legal it is only because the capitalists have been able to circumvent the determination of the workers by counter organisation, increased economy, and the corruption of the unions themselves.

The labour-market once established, the genesis of the capitalist class followed as a matter of course. In agriculture the farmer, one­-time agent for the landowner, was transformed into an independent exploiter. Whereas the independent peasant had previously produced many of his own requirements, such as clothes, in addition to purely agricultural products, now, as a wage-worker for the capitalist farmer, he had to purchase these elsewhere. Hence arose a domestic market for capitalist industry in the towns. Merchants and money lenders were not slow to take advantage of this. Employing numbers of disinherited peasants, etc., they entered into competition with the independent handicraftsmen of the guilds, and owing to the larger scale of their operations and the division of labour in the workshops which they introduced, they were ultimately able to outstrip the guildsmen in the race. In the face of this competition the guilds went to pieces and added more exploitable material to the labour market. 

At the same time there arose the struggle between the capitalist nations of Europe for world domination. Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England followed one another in rapid succession in exploration and conquest in Africa, America, and Asia, plundering the natives of their wealth and converting them into slaves for export to plantation colonies. The plunder thus obtained by the agents of the “merchant adventurers” helped to form new capital in England and on the Continent for the exploitation of white slaves.

These are the methods, drawn very mildly, by which the modern “respectable” class rose to power. The depths of their historic depravity are in direct proportion to the “loftiness” of their professed ideals. Champions of Justice, Freedom, and Charity, their career is indelibly stained with robbery, slavery, and murder. Need it be added that it shows no signs of improving from the standpoint of the workers ?

To sum up, modern wealth or capital is a product of social labour, past and present, which has been and continues to be monopolised by a small class of individuals, which grows relatively smaller as the mass of disinherited producers increases. In its origin it destroyed the unity which existed between the producers and their products, including the means of production, thus reducing them to social outcasts, having no access to the means of life as provided by nature and society. This relationship it perpetuates and uses as a means of self-expansion at their expense.

Technically, however, it indicates economic progress. In the place of the isolated workers of the middle ages able to produce but a meagre variety of articles of wealth, we have to-day an international combination of producers using a highly complex organisation of machinery, means of transport and distribution capable of providing comfort and leisure for all.

What prevents this desirable consummation of industrial development ? The reader who has followed this analysis will readily see that it is the capitalist character of this social wealth, i.e., its private ownership, which alone stands in the way. The private property of the many workers has disappeared before the private ownership of a few idlers. To return to the former state is neither possible nor desirable. It is not our business to destroy the fruits of centuries of toiling agony, but rather to enter into possession of them ; and as the means of production become ever more concentrated and incapable of control save in the mass, the only alternative to private ownership by the few is common ownership.

This will reunite the producers with their means of production and simultaneously preserve technical progress, for it is this progress which forces on the revolution. It unites them in the productive process and reduces them all to the level of wage slaves for the maintenance of capital. Hence it breeds a community of interest and a common consciousness. Let us speed on the day when they will unite in one organisation with a common purpose. Let us rally them round the Socialist standard, and establish Socialism, the cooperative commonwealth.

Eric Boden

[Concluded.]

Slavery and History. The Evolution of Subjugated Labour. (1909)

From the February 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

The essential characteristics of slavery are, we find, human subjection to and labour for the profit of masters. When man’s labour produces more than is indispensable for his maintenance, slavery is born. Prisoners of war, instead of being killed and eaten, or simply killed, are kept alive in order that they may work for their captors. Thus slavery is unknown to the more primitive folk of the savage, hunting stage. As defined, however, it is found wide-spread among peoples of a higher development, and passes historically through innumerable modifications. Nevertheless, three leading forms successively mark the course of later social evolution, namely, chattel-slavery, serfdom, and wage-labour; for the latter comes well within the definition.

We are well aware that the popular notions on slavery, and, indeed, those fostered by capitalist journalism, are mostly confined to an acquaintance with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Herbert Spencer’s view of the matter may, therefore, well be quoted as showing the far wider scope of the institutions. He says, (Vol. 3, p. 456, Prim. Soc.),

“The current assumption is that of necessity a slave is a down-trodden being, subject to unlimited labour and great hardship ; whereas in many cases he is well cared for, not overworked, and leniently treated. Assuming slaves everywhere to have ideas of liberty like our own, we suppose them to be intolerant of despotic control: whereas their subjection is sometimes so little onerous that they jeer at those of their race who have no masters. Assuming that their feelings are such as we should have under the same circumstances, we regard them as unhappy ; whereas they are often more light-hearted than their superiors. Again, when we contrast the slave with the free man, we think of the last as his own master ; whereas very generally, surrounding conditions exercise over him a mastery more severe and unpitying than that exercised over the slave by his owner : nature’s coercion is often worse than man’s coercion.”

Spencer had to make out that the subjection of the wage-workers to the capitalist class is simply “nature’s coercion,” but otherwise his view is quite acceptable.

In offering our fellow workers some information on the condition of their historical forebears, we shall, true to the materialist conception of scientific Socialism, see in the evolution of slavery, not the idealist’s progress of ideas out of ideas, independently of material conditions, from earlier cruelty to later gentleness, but simply a reflex of the movement and progress of productive methods. A remodelling of institutions not according to heaven-sent aspirations, high ideals and “moral” religions of Greek, Mahometan and Christian, but as the further expansion of economic forces required.

The earlier written histories describe the Mediterranean and North European peoples as being, many of them, advanced to the threshold of civilisation, and still organised by kinship in contradistinction to organisation according to the territory inhabited; some living largely by agriculture, and others, like the Semitic tribes of Western Asia and Northern Africa, a pastoral, nomadic life. Private property was accumulating amongst them, even to the land itself in some cases, while domestic animals, cattle, goats, and so forth, were such everywhere. It is above all upon this new factor that depends the subsequent history of civilised peoples, including the evolution of slavery. Military raids were frequent, and provided conquerors with plunder, more fertile lands, and, above all, with prisoners, who were made to tend the cattle, or to do the more laborious work of the fields. At a later stage the ranks of slavery were swelled by poor citizens or tribesmen selling their children, and even themselves, into bondage in payment of debt. The book of Leviticus hands down to us the rules for the treatment of both the “stranger” and Hebrew bondsmen.

Greece.

Some of the Grecian tribes when they conquered a neighbouring people simply bound these to the soil and compelled them to bring to their conquerors a certain fixed part of their produce, leaving their family institutions untouched, and even allowing them to accumulate property. Thus, amongst others, the Spartans held their helots ; and indeed, much of the military organisation of the former was required to keep the helots in subjection, for they long retained the memory of their free condition.

In Attica and Corinth, the distinctly commercial states, however, great numbers of chattel-slaves, largely barbarians, were held and exchanged. “At the time of the greatest prosperity the whole number of free Athenian citizens, women and children included, amounted to about 90,000 ; the slaves of both sexes numbered 305,000 and the aliens foreigners and freed slaves—45,000.” (“Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” by F. Engels.) Slaves furnished all kinds of useful labour. Many were in domestic service, others were cooks, bakers, tailors, miners, labourers on agricultural estates, seamen, oarsmen, etc., while the State had slaves for soldiers, and even policemen. “The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominous service.” (Engels.) In Greece, although their condition underwent important changes, the slaves were mildly treated, and enjoyed considerable legal protection. Slaves came increasingly to acquire property rights and then, as Spencer has it, “the slave’s condition was much that of a freeman paying heavy taxes.” As to the outcome, Engels says that

“The great number of slaves is explained by the fact that many of them worked together in large factories under supervision. The development of commerce and industry brought about an accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few hands. The mass of the free citizens were impoverished and had to face the choice of either competing with their own labour against slave labour, which was considered ignoble and vile, besides promising little success, or to be ruined. Under the prevailing circumstances they necessarily chose the latter course, and being in the majority, they ruined the whole Attic State. Not democracy caused the downfall of Athens, as the European glorifiers of princes and lickspittle schoolmasters would have us believe, but slavery ostracizing the labour of the free citizen.”

Rome.

In the earlier period of Roman history the head of the family (paterfamilias) had full power of life and death over all the members of his household—wife, child, and chattel-slave—and all were treated in general with great rigour. Slaves when old or otherwise useless were often “exposed” to starve upon an island in the Tiber. Many servile revolts are recorded—some of them of formidable proportions. That under the gladiator Sparticus in 73 B.C. lasted over the course of three years, and was only suppressed by a mighty effort by the Roman State—and this in spite of the fatal lack of cohesion and discipline among the men, who in seeking their freedom could not escape the temptation to linger in Italy for the plunder of the cities.

Later, under the Emperors, multitudes of slaves were employed in the various mechanical arts, while the cruelty of the masters was restrained by law, and property might be acquired. Further, the continual warfare with its consequent strain of military service upon the citizens resulted in the impoverishment of the poorer of these, and their lands passing into the hands of a few great landholders. Agriculture became entirely a slave occupation, carried on upon great estates called latifundae ; a system that led to the depopulation of Italy and the extinction of any class capable of resisting the Imperial tyrants or the barbarian invaders who followed.

The attitude of Christianity towards slavery was, and is, well exhibited in the notion of St. John Chryostom, that the apostle did not insist on the suppression of slavery because it was desirable that men should see how truly the slave could enjoy liberty of soul—the slavery of sin being the only real slavery. Indeed, Christianity is quite innocent of the milder treatment of slaves during the later Roman period, or of the decline of chattel-slavery, for, as Spencer puts it, by the partial failure of the supply of slaves through conquest, “the Romans were obliged to have recourse to the milder but more tedious method of propagation ; and this improved the condition of the slave by rendering his existence and physical health an object of greater value to his master.” Negro slavery in America is fairly well known, and considerations of space prevent us from giving it special treatment here. However, it is well to mention that it arose in consequence of the great demand for agricultural labour there, of a kind suited to hot and damp climates. It received its great impetus from the invention of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century, when cotton became definitely available for clothing in competition with wool and flax. The “peculiar” Southern institution was abolished only when it threatened to prevent the full expansion of normal capitalism based upon wage-labour ; and the clash of material interests there involved an expenditure of blood and treasure rarely matched in history.

Collapse of chattel-slavery.

Now while the Teutonic eruption all over the European portions of the Roman Empire brought with it its own, as yet but little developed, servile institutions, yet it is true that this famous period roughly marks the transition (amongst Western peoples) from personal to territorial slavery—from chattel-slavery to serfdom. The steady degradation of the free population and consequent contraction of markets, resulted in the decay of the large-scale slave-worked agricultural estates ; and since the great numbers of slaves now became a burden upon their owners, these were now largely freed, and small-scale agriculture by “colonists” replaced the older system. These small cultivators paid a fixed sum, or a proportion of the product to landowners, and in other respects were indeed the prototypes of the mediaeval serfs. With regard to the Germanic overrunning of Gaul, Seebohm is quoted by Spencer as inferring that the mediaeval serf was the “compound product of survivals from three separate ancient conditions, gradually, during Roman provincial rule, and under the influence of barbarian conquest, confused and blended into one, viz., those of the slave on the Roman Villa, of the colonus or other semi-servile and mostly barbarian tenants on the Roman Villa or public lands, and of the slave of the German tribesman, who to the eyes of Tacitus was so very much like a Roman colonus”

Feudal Europe.

The wide-spread prevalence of the type of subject labour known as serfdom characterises above all the Middle Ages with its baronial sway and feudal organisation of society. The barbarian conquest of the ancient world, in spite of an intellectual setback, did, after all, but continue social evolution—reinvigorated, however, by the new blood from the northern forests. During and after the migrations the conquerors settled amongst the older cultivators, taking the major portion of the land and working this themselves, aided by the bondsmen they held. The long period of war and conquest had, however, left its mark upon their social organisation. The chieftains’ families had acquired the privileges of hereditary and military aristocracy and remained at the head of a new social class (itself a result of the new division of labour : cultivators—warriors), the professional soldiers. Continual warfare between the various military chieftains (e.g., the Heptarchy in England) induced most of the agriculturists, organised as these were in village communities, to place themselves under the care of a lordly “protector,” in return for which protection they surrendered the titles to their lands. Monasteries and churches in this way became, during the ninth and tenth centuries, amongst the largest landowners, and their bishops and abbeys powerful nobles. The protecting lord, baron, seigneur and his retainers had to be fed, clothed and sheltered in their massive castles and were able to exact this by commanding the services of the protected vassals for definite periods— corvée. This servile condition existed, however, in different forms : the services to be rendered and the civil rights vary with time and place. The monarch sometimes, especially in later times, sustained by the burgher class seeking its particular interests, ruled in favour of the lighter forms of serfdom.

Decline of serfdom.

In England typical serfdom gradually disappeared toward the close of the Middle Ages, and in most other European countries considerably later. It was abolished in Russia by Imperial edict as late as 1861. Serfdom had its frictions, as witness some robust rebellions- e.g., the villeins’ revolt under Jack Cade and Wat Tyler, likewise the Jacquerie in France and the Peasants’ War in Germany.

But the determining influence in its decline, in the last analysis (as in the case of all other social phenomena with the exception of the earliest experiences of the race, when society was more under the influence of sexual relations) was essentially economic, although a superficial reading of history may provide an idealist and purely political explanation. The progressive division of labour and its application in newer and more efficient methods, together with the resulting growth of cities, has everything to do with the rendering of serfdom obsolete and incompatible with progress. In England the change from the old, large, open field, yet scattered, small-plot system of agriculture, to the enclosed field system, together with the displacing of husbandry in favour of pastures, for sheep raising, in response to the demand for wool, had much to do with decreasing the need for numerous workers fixed to the land. “Owing to the spread of new agricultural methods, their services ceased to be valuable,” says Spencer, quoting Cunningham.

The development of the bourgeoisie in the cities and their need of defenders resulted in many serfs finding refuge and livelihood with them. In Italy the serfs were largely feed in this way, while the wide-spread demand for money on the part of the nobles during the Crusades, and in emulation of the now prosperous city merchants, led the manorial lords to look rather to rent payments than to services ; and finally it was being discovered that “free-labour” was more efficient and profitable than “servile-labour.” Spencer has it that “German observers in Russia, as quoted by Prof. Jones, say that a Middlesex mower will mow as much in a day as three Russian serfs. The Prussian Councillor of State, Jacobi, is considered to have proved that in Russia where everything is cheap, the labour of a serf was double as expensive as that of a labourer in England. In Austria the work of a serf is stated to have been equal to one-third that of a hired man.”

It is of some interest to note that vestiges of serfdom survived in England until quite recent times. Thus colliers and salters were bound for life to the mines in which they worked, and their sons with them, until the end of the eighteenth century, while well into tho nineteenth century a “free” labourer could not choose, so were conditions arranged, to leave his employer without incurring risk of punishment. Finally, as regards the real relations of servile and free labour, and the determining causes thereof, the views of these two, certainly not Socialist, and eminently respectable, thinkers, may not be out of place. Thus, John Adams in the American Congress of 1776, “That as to this matter, it was of no consequence by what name you called your people, whether by that of freemen or slaves. That in some countries the labouring poor men are called freemen ; in others they were called slaves ; but the difference was imaginary only. What matters it whether a landlord employing ten labourers on his farm gives them annually as much as will buy the necessaries of life, or gives them those necessaries at short hand ?” (From “Lost Principles of Sectional Equilibrium,” by “Bararossa,” 1860.) Herbert Spencer concludes in this way. “When slave labour and free labour come into competition, slave labour, other things equal, decreases as being less economical. The relative lack of energy, the entire lack of interest, the unintelligent performance of work, and the greater cost of supervision, make the slave an unprofitable productive agent. Hence with an adequate multiplication of labourers it tends gradually to disappear.”

Reviewing, then, slavery in the only fruitful manner, that is, historically ; considering its origin, manifestations and developments, we find that so-called free-labour—wage-labour—falls into its proper place as a later development, of servile production. Free-labour is seen then, to have its roots in chattel-slavery and serfdom, and its future—but to that, shortly. For while labour has been gradually freed from the shackles of chattel and villein conditions, it yet undeniably partakes of the essential characteristics of slavery, viz., human subjection to and labour for the profit of masters. Its distinction from the older forms is sufficiently indicated in the well established Socialist term—WAGE-SLAVERY.

However, the existing order, capitalism, based upon wage-labour, contains and develops within itself its own negation, as did the earlier social systems. The ancient order, based upon chattel-slavery, could not survive the degradation consequent upon the fullest development of that basis, and gave way to the agricultural and military barbarism, which soon developed the feudal system, leaning mainly upon serf-labour. This in turn prepared within itself its own destroyers,—the merchant and artizan class of the towns, the bourgeoisie, who, overthrowing the nobles, and also the King where he could not be made to serve their turn, have become the dominant class, and have moulded society much in their own sanctimonious image. The historically indicated negation of capitalism is Socialism: and the revolutionary instrument of its achievement is the modern class of wage-workers who, stripped of property, are compelled to seek a livelihood by selling to the bourgeoisie their labour-power, but who, in so doing, at the same time acquire an understanding of the conditions of their own development, become class-conscious, and organise for their emancipation. Thereby “emancipating society at large from all its exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.”

History dictates the final overthrow of slave-founded society, and the establishment of fraternal society—SOCIALISM.

John H. Halls

Perverted History. The “Socialist” Countess’s Twaddle Exposed. (1917)

From the June 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Little more than half a century has passed since in Japan the Samurai surrendered their privileges into the hands of the Mikado, and with their sacrifice the new Japan was born…. Suppose that our aristocracy, as a class, were to emulate the Samurai, that they were to place at the disposal of the State the Mother Earth that belongs to the State by right. They might reasonably accept a moderate recompense, something that would provide for them and their children on the scale of modest living that will become the rule when we begin to meet the price of war . . . How far fairer it would be for us to recognise and accept the truth and go as the Moors went from Spain, where they too had become an anachronism, though the beauty that made their sojourn remarkable lingers to this day. If we would make the supreme sacrifice of our traditions we could trust the common sense of our countrymen to see that no plutocrats stepped into the place we had vacated ; we could make our bargain with the State that it should be the supreme landlord spending the rent to make the lovely countryside at least as valuable to national life as the ugly town. We who came into the high places of Europe with the false halo of conquest would retire from them in the real halo of renunciation, and our act of supreme sacrifice would be a better memorial than the best of us could have hoped to gain.”

The above is from an article by the Countess of Warwick which appeared in the “Daily Chronicle” of April 12th, 1917. The article is entitled “We Must Go.” The “We” is the “hereditary landowners,” to whom the appeal is made to hand over their land to the State, in the interests of greater productivity, and in justice to the workers, who have bled for it.

How the latter can benefit in any way from the proposed surrender of lands is made no clearer by the Countess than by any of the Fabian or I.L.P. treatises on the same subject.

State ownership of land, or, indeed, of any of the means of wealth production, solves no problem for the working class. Only common ownership with democratic control can do that. State ownership, that is, collective ownership by the capitalist class, as with the Post Office, for instance, leaves the workers still wage-slaves. The introduction of labour-saving machinery would therefore have the same effect as it has to-day. The countess, like many another reformer, overlooks this fact, though it should be obvious. She says: “The country has great needs, and if it is to remain solvent the united work of one and all following the latest developments with the most complete equipment will be inevitable.”

This policy in the past has resulted in increased unemployment for the working class ; its extension, therefore, can only result in greater poverty, arising from still further increased unemployment. State ownership of the land excludes the working class from the soil, except in the capacity of wage-workers. They are mere subjects of exploitation to those who provide with their capital the “most complete equipment,” and the rent to be paid to the State for the use of the land.

The fallacy of State ownership, however, has been so often exposed in these columns that we can afford to leave it for the present and deal with the other fallacy contained in the first quotation—that a ruling class has ever in the past renounced, or is likely in the future to renounce, its privileges and power unless compelled to do so by superior force. There is no record in history of a ruling class abdicating in favour of a class weaker than itself. Nor is there any record of a ruling class so imbued with a moral sense of justice and consideration for the class it governed, that it would, knowingly and willingly, sacrifice the meanest of its privileges to assist that class to its emancipation. The ruling class in capitalist society is stronger in its determination to maintain its rule and possesses more powerful weapons than any previous class in history. Its barbarity, as every contest with the workers testifies, equals and its hypocrisy exceeds, that of any previous ruling class.

But, the reader will ask, does not the countess give actual examples from history where a dominant class voluntarily abdicated? Both these examples are misrepresentations of the actual facts. Take the case of Japan. In that country the system of society previous to 1868 was similar in its essential features to the Feudal system of European countries. The Samurai were the military class, composed of territorial nobles, called Daimios, and their vassals or retainers. Strictly speaking, however, the term Samurai applied to these latter only. They and their families were kept by the Daimios, or had lands assigned to them for which they drew the rent, as under the Feudal system in Europe. This applied to the Daimios as well, who numbered about 255, and whose incomes varied between 10,000 and 1,027,000 koku of rice per annum.

The revolution that abolished this system was not of the same sanguinary character as the bourgeois revolution in France in 1689, or the English revolution in the time of Charles the First. “The two parties,” says Arthur Diosy, “were too unevenly matched for the struggle to become a severe one.” Therein lies the secret of its relatively peaceful consummation. The Daimios were between the devil and the deep sea ; they submitted to the inevitable—on the best terms they could obtain. They received from the State an annual income equal to one-tenth of their former income, and were relieved of the responsibility of maintaining the Samurai, who were taken over by the Government to form the nucleus of the Army and Navy. Those who held hereditary incomes were given the opportunity to sell their rights to the Government for half cash and half Government bonds.

Unlike the revolution that broke up the Feudal system in Europe, the Japanese revolution was projected, or rather accelerated, from outside the nation. Attempts to establish trading relations by occidental powers, sometimes, as in the American expedition under Commander Perry, involving a display of naval forces, rudely awakened the ruling class from their feudal sleep. The Mikado and his nobles were forced to recognise that they must establish their rule on Western lines, or they would speedily become a vassal State to one or other of the great Powers that, with increasing impatience, knocked at her gates with wares for sale—and with heavy artillery to batter them down if their admittance was long delayed.

In these circumstances the Mikado and his nobles, after consultation, and not without military opposition from some of them, took the only possible course to maintain their independence as a nation. They proceeded to organise the nation on the model of their capitalist neighbours, their first care being to establish a fighting force on land and sea, capable of warning off belligerent intruders and guaranteeing a share in the world’s markets to Japanese capitalists.

This action, taken in defence of their independence and based on a compromise or bargain between the nobles and their legitimate ruler, is what the countess describes as a sacrifice.

So much for the first example quoted by the Socialist (!) countess ; now for the second. The Moors entered Spain in 711 A.D., and in three years had “conquered the whole country, except the almost inaccessible regions of the North-West.” The Spaniards, according to their historians, waged almost uninterrupted warfare against them for nearly eight centuries. They gained the upper hand late in the fifteenth century, and then commenced a long period of religious persecution against the Moors, who were finally all converted to Christianity by burning, torturing and other methods approved by the Inquisition.

But their religious opinions were suspected by the clergy under Phillip III, who ordered their expulsion from Spain. “How far fairer it would be for us to recognise the truth and go as the Moors went from Spain, where they too had become an anachronism” says the countess, as though their going was a voluntary act of abdication.

They went, “about one million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain,” says Buckle, “were hunted like wild beasts. Many were slain as they approached the coast, others were beaten and plundered, and the majority, in the most wretched plight, sailed for Africa. During the passage, the crew, in many of the ships, rose upon them, butchered the men, ravished the women, and threw the children into the sea. Those who escaped this fate landed on the coast of Barbary, where they were attacked by the Bedouins and many of them put to the sword. Others made their way into the desert, and perished from famine.”

The Moors ruled in Spain with the same arrogance that characterises every ruling class. Their rule became “an anachronism” because their power was broken and for no other reason. What childish nonsense, what a wilful perversion of history, to pretend that theirs was a voluntary act of renunciation. Yet it is on statements such as these that capitalist tools, wearing the Phrygian cap and waving the red flag of Socialism, gravely inform the workers that the shuffling, grabbing and hypocritical capitalist class will lead the working class, step by step, to its emancipation.

As in Japan, so in every European country—feudalism succumbed before the revolutionary power of the capitalist class. The fact that a compromise was afterwards effected, by means of which, feudal traditions and lineage were preserved, made no difference to the ultimate nature of society. Capital alone had voice. Was it not by means of capital that the wealth-producing class was exploited, and the national exchequer provided with the funds that maintained the fighting forces ? Lords and Barons might flaunt their heraldry, but the capitalist built his State on physical force and allotted monarchy and aristocracy their places in the capitalist State. The aristocracy were absorbed ; they became capitalists themselves and henceforth their interests were identical with those who had accomplished a revolution against them. For all practical purposes landowners and industrial capitalists form but one class—there is no serious friction between them. They control the executive power in the full determination—rarely expressed because so well understood—to maintain the existing system of society, and neither the prayers of morbid countesses nor the groans of their millions of starving victims will ever shake their resolve.

Only the organised might of the working class can break the power of capitalism and bring emancipation. If the capitalist class were imbued with the moral and sympathetic qualities they profess, the poverty and the toll of lives under their system, even in peace times, should have been sufficient incentive for them to exercise those qualities. Not so, however. Their efforts were always in the opposite direction—how to intensify exploitation.

Even the tragedy and devastation of their latest crime, with all the added misery it brings in its train for the working class, has never once caused the question to be raised—except by the Socialist—”Is not the system itself wrong ?”

And let the workers make no mistake, though every capitalist nation took sides and fought to the last man, till every vestige of civilisation were destroyed, the ruling class would never raise that question.

That question must be asked and answered by the working class. At present they are exploited, dragooned, bluffed, trained and educated to the status of wage-slavery. Thus with their intelligence warped, though the largest in numbers, they are the weakest. Let them strip themselves of the capitalist shroud which envelops their minds and they will at once become the strongest class in society. The capitalist class will then lose the opportunity, which they have never shown the slightest inclination to embrace, to win a “halo of renunciation” because working-class emancipation will be accomplished by the working class itself.

F. Foan

The Christian Church & Feudalism. (1933)

From the January 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Lesson in Historical Materialism. 

Christian churches are monuments built out of the miseries of slaves—chattel-slaves, bond-slaves and wage-slaves. They are monuments of plunder and despair.

In certain respects the conditions that existed at the time Christianity was established as the state religion of the Roman Empire, sixteen hundred years ago, were typical of the conditions that have favoured its existence ever since.

The early Roman Republic was of a type common at the time. It was a city state based upon small scale agricultural production with minor trading activities connecting it with similar states outside. Its inhabitants consisted in the main of freemen farmers and slaves. The freemen possessed varying quantities of wealth but all took part equally in the voting and administration of affairs. The early wars of defence grew into tribute-imposing wars and a commercial class developed which brought about internal conflict.

The foreign wars of the republic ruined a large section of the peasants and concentrated landed property in the hands of a small section which formed the. aristocracy or patrician class; fostered the growth of a class living partly on commerce and partly on usury; developed a military force giving allegiance to leaders which eventually grew into a powerful military state; and further increased the impoverishment of the poor by the huge increase in chattel slave labour.

The civil wars that broke out during many centuries, and the direction taken by imperial policy in ruining the agricultural and commercial competitors were the expression in one form or another of the conflicting interests of these classes. It was these movements that threw up names— Gracchi, Cicero, Caesar, Augustus,—that have survived when the tendencies they represented have been almost forgotten.

By the first century B.C. the old city state had grown into an empire made up of a huge collection of municipalities subject to tributes imposed by the parent city, and the privileged section of its citizens acquired enormous wealth which they spent in the building of. beautiful villas with marble columns, costly gladiatorial combats and luxurious living and lavish displays of one kind or another. A multitude of Italian, Slavic and Germanic tribes had been incorporated into the Empire. The mode of production had changed from the small production of the peasant farmer to production by slave labour on large estates in different parts of the Empire. The Roman trader had accompanied the Roman army in its pioneering work and a considerable commercial development had been reached which spread a network covering North Africa, Spain, Britain and a portion of the East, but having as its centre Rome—all roads led to Rome.

The old senatorial city-state constitution of Rome was unsuited to this expanding empire with its conflicting' classes and complicated policies. The struggle that took place and was spread over a long period of time modified the power of the Roman Senate and placed considerable power in the hands of the military leaders. The intrigues in the Roman Senate by bribed tools of Caesar as a prelude to his crossing of the Rubicon read strangely modern. The general ruin and misery caused by the civil wars eventually produced a universal desire for peace. A correct appreciation and interpretation of this desire helped Augustus into the position of the first of the Roman Emperors, though both he and succeeding Emperors wielded power under the constitutional cloak of the First Consul of the Empire.

In the early municipalities tribute was exacted through the medium of the elected freemen of the localities, but the growth of Rome as a huge tax-gathering machine brought changes in the instruments of tax-gathering to secure a greater flow of wealth to the centre. Tax-gatherers and municipal officials were appointed from the centre and a huge bureaucratic machine developed, which tightened the hold of the centre upon the Empire, and also brought bribery, corruption and the legal arts to a high pitch of perfection. Usury became a considerable source of wealth and flourished like mushrooms on a dunghill.

Under the Empire chattel slave labour entered every sphere of production, and this form was exploited to its utmost limits, until it became a barrier that limited the further achievements of Roman civilisation. Slave labour is notoriously wasteful, both of soil and of implements, as the slave has no personal interest in the work he is doing nor in the animals and tools he is using. Its cheapness kills the incentive to improvement in means of production. Hence agricultural science made little progress and no means were used to replace the nourishment drained from the earth. The result was a progressive exhaustion of the soil.

The growth of the bureaucratic machine and the increasing rapacity of its personnel, together with, a progressive reduction in the returns from slave labour, tended to make the Empire top-heavy—it was carrying too many and too rapacious drones and unproductive labourers compared with its productive capacity. The increasing burden of taxation reduced the capacity of the municipalities to put armed men in the field to defend the frontiers, and drove the small farmers more and more to sell themselves into slavery, or put themselves in dependence upon powerful landowners, in order to live or to escape military service.

By the fourth century A.D. the whole tendency under the Empire was downwards. Even the rich had misgivings and a feeling of the impending end of their affluence, and were ruthless in their exploitation of the earth and everything on it in the attempt to accumulate and squander as much as possible, with the motto, “make the most of to-day for to-morrow we die.” Hopelessness in the future was the ultimate view that pervaded all sections under the Roman Empire at the time.

The above is a rough picture of the position when Constantine became Emperor of the Roman dominions.

In the meantime, Christianity, a hotch-potch of earlier philosophical ideas, was born and spread through the decaying Empire. The soil was fruitful and it flourished and acquired property which it struggled to retain and increase for hundreds of years after.

It had a message for rich and poor, for freeman and slave. It proclaimed to all who suffered that this life was but a brief span in a vale of tears, a necessary suffering to open the gates of Paradise in a mythical world after death. Those who saw nothing but misery in their life on earth gladly clutched at the hope that this life was only a temporary evil.

The rich it consoled with the following admonitions to the poor:—

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that he are ordained of God.

Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.

For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.

Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.

For this cause pay ye tribute also; for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.

Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due: custom to whom custom: fear to whom fear: honour to whom honour.

(Epistle to the Romans, Chap. 13.)

Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ."

(Epistle to the Ephesians, Chap. 6.)

Ih the Sermon on the Mount passive obedience is preached and the followers of the Church are urged not to resist evil nor oppression but to turn the right cheek to the smiter. It is further impressed upon them by the assurance, "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth," and similar precepts.

The above teachings were an expression of the conditions of the time and were, on the one hand, the hopeless wail of the poor, and, on the other, an instrument to keep the poor submissive. With the spread of Christianity the wealth and property of the Church grew, and with it the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. The Church gathered under its wings for the administration of its affairs officials of various grades, from workers amongst the poor up to the wealthy bishops at its head.

While the Church was growing an economic revolution had been slowly spreading throughout the Empire and was eating at its chattel-slave basis. The dwindling returns from slave labour and the burdens borne by the freeman led more and more to a new form of dependence in industry and on the land. The migrations of industrial freemen were being limited by new industrial arrangements and industrial slaves were acquiring a new form of dependence. Agricultural freemen were being subjected to systems of leasing lands and customary tenancies. Agricultural slaves were granted their freedom on condition that they gave certain free service to their lords, as well as working the lands allotted to them.

Constantine was the largest private landowner in the Empire and by the time he was firmly seated as Emperor the various methods of production were intermingled on all estates, and he found them an almost inextricable tangle on his own. The method of customary tenancy, however, was rapidly growing in favour.

The change the Empire had undergone through the centuries had been fundamental. The old local city state with its ruling aristocracy had passed away and the later aristocracy of Rome were men who owned vast estates in Africa, Spain, and the large territory that at that time went under the name of Gaul. Local ideas had also given place to ideas that were the fruit of a huge agglomeration of people of different races and religions who were grouped under the same Empire. But while the development of a people may halt for a while it does not remain permanently at the same level. When the forces within have developed to their limit new forces are born which require a re-alignment of classes. A fresh surge of development commences in a new direction. Such was the position under the Roman Empire. Slave culture had reached its limit and threatened to involve all in a common ruin. But a new form had been silently superseding it. One that later became known as feudalism.

In these circumstances a church that knew no local boundaries, whose god existed everywhere, whose organisation was supported by a hierarchy of officials, and which proclaimed the divine origin of law and rulers found favour, and fitted with increasing exactitude into the needs of the Empire that was becoming feudalised.

With the growth in the feudal form of production the old governmental machinery became unsuitable and new machinery had to be devised. The passing away of municipal freedom had weakened the capacity of the central executive to appreciate the needs of the vast Empire. Rule by the Senate had not been sufficient to control adequately the huge Empire, and succeeding attempts to make the administration more efficient had degenerated into a struggle between the Senate and' the military chiefs. The effort to bring efficiency and unity into the administration was responsible for the development under one of the Emperors (Diocletian) of an advisory council, at first temporary, and finally growing under Constantine into departments covering the various divisions of treasury, war, judicial functions and so forth. The essence of the new form was its capacity to deal better with the administration of the Empire and yet remain under the personal control of a head.

A number of measures were introduced to bring uniformity into the economic relationships. The result ultimately tied the cultivator to the soil and to his lord, and made succession to these fixed tenures hereditary. But something else had still to be accomplished. A means had to be found for ascertaining the needs and wishes of the people and for sanctifying the decrees of the rulers. It was here the Church stepped in. Burrowing into every cranny of the Empire and the home, amongst the poorest as well as the richest, it possessed an administration with unequalled social knowledge, and an accumulation of property that placed it on the side off the new type of property owners. At his hand Constantine found a suitable and willing tool in burning the feudalised state, and at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. From that time onwards the Church has thrown its resources on the side of the oppressor. In the course of centuries it became itself the largest feudal proprietor in the world, at one time owning a third of the land of Europe. In England in the 16th century it is computed that the Church owned one-third of the land and half the wealth of the country. In fact, it is almost a truism to say that during the Middle Ages the Church and feudalism were the same thing.

Thus feudalism commenced a career that lasted, over 1,200 years, and with it, the Christian Church spread like a blight over the most distant parts of the known world.

Such, briefly, was the material origin of the idealised Christian Church.

Gilmac.