Family History and Beyond (2025)

Book Review from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remembering Peasants: a Personal History of a Vanished World. By Patrick Joyce. Penguin £10.99.

The author was ‘the London-born child of Irish rural immigrant parents’, and here he examines the history and current situation of peasants, concentrating not just on Ireland (where he discusses his own family history) but also Poland, and in addition with some attention to Italy. It is an eloquent and wide-ranging account, supported by a range of photographs, the earliest dating back to the late nineteenth century.

One chapter deals with the problem of defining who counts as a peasant, but there is no simple answer to this. Peasants are not necessarily serfs; they consume (part of) the products their work creates, with the family and its economy having a central role. They do not seek to maximise their income, and either owned the land they worked or had long-term tenancies. They may produce for the capitalist market, but the extent of this varies according to time and place. They live in ‘cultures of scarcity’, where prosperity for one person means another going without. Any money earned was not re-invested but kept at home or lent at very low interest rates. And ‘peasant societies are societies of the gift, not the commodity … What is given should be given freely: that which is given without expectation of return feeds the giver again and again.’ (The different tenses in this paragraph reflect those in the book.)

Religion often involved various traditional beliefs being incorporated into christian world-views, but ‘Religion usually had the law on its side, and so it also had the support of those who upheld the law, the landowners and state.’ There was a great deal of ‘everyday suffering’, and in some places it was the best of the crop that was surrendered in rent. Most years there would be ‘pre-harvest famine’ from spring onwards.

A powerful chapter deals with peasant revolts and rebellions. Peasants could feud with and even kill each other. There was a code of behaviour, which even the powerful had to recognise, and minor acts of revolt, such as quiet sabotage, could be used to get even. Sometimes this could escalate to violence and murder. In Ireland in 1882, for instance, a land agent was killed after many hundreds had been evicted and an estate converted to a place for fishing and wildlife shooting. There were larger peasant uprisings, such as the German Peasants War of 1524–5, the Romanian rebellion of 1907 and the Tambov Rebellion in Russia in 1920–1. The twentieth century indeed saw much violence inflicted on peasants: ‘These barbarities were foundational for the emergence of modern states.’ Most of those imprisoned in Soviet gulags were peasants.

Depending on the terminology used, peasants have now largely been replaced by small farmers, and globally over a billion people still do agricultural work, mostly in India and China. But whichever labels are employed, it is clear that peasant history was largely one of struggle, poverty and repression.

Paul Bennett

Letter: Capitalism was Necessary (1948)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following letter criticising the article in the October Socialist Standard entitled "Will ‘The Last Hottentot’ hold us Back?"

Dear Sirs,

Capitalism is Necessary.

Gilmac, at the beginning of his article in the October Socialist Standard, chiding those who talk in a superior way of backward races, writes the word “backward" in inverted commas, as though its use is unjustified. Later he uses the word without quotation marks, as though its use is justified. We gather that peoples can be backward in one way and not in another; they are good enough mentally but backward socially. In his own words, they lack the “social conditions favourable to the development of Socialist ideas." By social conditions he obviously means capitalist conditions. So it seems we have got to wait for the Hottentots after all.

Once the backward peoples “take part in building up capitalism on their own account," he says, “then they cut the cord that ties them to the past." So that is what they need, says the Socialist—Capitalism. "Everywhere native populations are stirring restlessly, struggling to cast off the shackles of the past in order to enter the heritage of today"—that is, the heritage of Capitalism.

Gilmac says: “India is undergoing the birthpangs of a capitalist state which will soon transform its primitive village economy," and “the primitive agricultural communities of India will soon be overwhelmed as India gets upon its capitalist feet." India must have Capitalism, implies Socialist Gilmac. Capitalism is necessary in India. And while the Indians are enjoying the necessary Capitalism, Gilmac will presumably say: "Capitalism is horrible; away with it and replace it by Socialism."

I can imagine a S.P.G.B. seaman disembarking at Bombay this week and meeting an Indian steelworker. As he would be anxious to spread Socialist propaganda the following dialogue might take place:

Socialist: Comrade, you have a miserable life. You are born in poverty, you live in poverty and misery and you die in poverty. Capitalism is the cause of this.

Indian worker: Yes, I am poor and miserable. What would you substitute for Capitalism?

Socialist: Socialism! Under Socialism all would work and all would share in the wealth produced, so we would all be well off.

Indian worker: That sounds fine to me. We must have that.

Socialist: Wait! You can’t have Socialism yet. You haven’t had enough Capitalism. You must have Capitalism to prepare you for Socialism.

Indian worker: You tell me Capitalism is awful and that I ought to do away with it and have Socialism, but you also say I can’t have Socialism until I have had more Capitalism. You are telling me mutually contradictory things. If I must have Capitalism, as you say, I will put up with it, and not waste my energy grousing about it.

I should like the S.P.G.B. answer to this question: If Capitalism is necessary and inevitable in the evolution of human society towards Socialism, why grumble about it?

If you print this letter, I suggest you keep my heading, if it states your position correctly. It will, however, look somewhat peculiar in a Socialist journal.

Yours faithfully,

G. Davies

London, S.W.17.

Reply.

Mr. Davies makes no attempt to deal with the substance of the article he criticises, nor does he deny that Capitalism is rotten and produces wars, poverty in the midst of plenty, degrades the wealth producers and causes a host of other evils that spring from the particular type of class ownership in which it is rooted; his only argument is that if Capitalism is a necessary evil why grumble about it? He forgets that most of man’s conquests of natural forces have been accompanied by necessary evils, and that it was only by "grumbling" about them that these evils were eventually either eliminated or considerably reduced. In the social sphere the horrors of the early factory system, which degraded, demoralised and decimated the factory population, were responsible for fierce protests that helped to bring about changes in factory methods. The protests were just as much a necessary product as the factory system itself. According to Mr. Davies’ curious ideas of necessity there should have been no protests, and children from the age of six or seven years of age ought still to have been abandoned to the unbridled lust for profit and exploitation of people like the cruel factory owners of the middle of last century, who battened upon human misery.

Mr. Davies refers to the phrase the “heritage of today" as if it simply meant the Capitalist social organisation itself, but it meant more than that; as the article makes clear it also meant the ideas that develop out of Capitalism, the opposition to Capitalism from which springs the desire for the common ownership of the means of production that will involve the disappearance of clashes, of trading, of money, of the exploitation of man by man and of all forms of social privilege except those which are accorded to the young, the old, and the infirm. By giving birth to ideas like these, and by demonstrating that it is incapable of bringing comfort and security to the mass of the world’s population, Capitalism of necessity digs its own grave.

Capitalism became a necessary evil once sections of mankind had got upon the track of the advantages to be derived from privilege but it also, in its time, conferred benefits as well as evils upon mankind. In the general march towards Socialism it has played a valuable part. Capitalism has been both revolutionary and reactionary. It was revolutionary in the sense that, at considerable cost in human suffering, it developed the productive forces to a pitch where it became possible to guarantee comfort and security to all, relieving mankind from blind dependence upon natural forces; it is reactionary in the sense that, being founded upon privilege, it is now a barrier to the achievement of this comfort and security. Socialism, a necessary product of Capitalism, will absorb all the valuable productive achievements of Capitalism but it will abolish class ownership of the means of production and, at the same time, the multitude of evils that spring from this class ownership; it will abolish privilege, thereby leaving the way open to a free, full and happy life-for all. Capitalism has taught mankind the value of associated labour on a world scale; the profit motive which is its central idea, sordid though it is, sent people scurrying all over the earth, and delving deep under the earth, to make the earth fruitful; it developed marvellous machines and methods of production, but now, as far as the advanced nations are concerned, its work is finished and its fruit has become rotten; what remains to be done is to take advantage of its accomplishments and turn its achievements from means of causing suffering to means of bringing happiness.

Now let us turn to the imaginary dialogue between an Indian worker and an S.P.G.B. seaman which Mr. Davies regards as so devastating to the position we take up. We preach Socialism to the Indian worker, to the Hottentot and to every other worker; we recognise, however, that, regardless of our desires, Capitalism is still continuing to develop in India and elsewhere and that the Western workers have not yet decided to establish Socialism. We further appreciate that though India cannot at the moment jump straight into Socialism without a considerable development of industry and ideas yet it can learn from the advanced nations, learn both industrial methods and socialist ideas, and that it can do so comparatively rapidly. If India does happen to lag behind when the workers of the advanced nations establish Socialism then, for the reasons outlined in the article criticised, India would have no difficulty in becoming absorbed into the new world social system, the advantages of which would be obvious from the outset and would be easy to absorb.

Where backward people “take part in building up Capitalism on, their own account” they do “cut the cord that binds them to the past." It is also a fact that this development, as we have already shown, brings them nearer to the achievement of Socialism. On the basis of this Mr. Davies argues that we should advocate Capitalism to the Indian worker as a stepping-stone to Socialism. What he overlooks is that Capitalism is already well developed in India, in spite of areas of backwardness, and that Socialist ideas are already spreading there. It is, therefore, the Capitalist who advocates and builds up Capitalism in India and the Socialist who advocates Socialism and builds up the Socialist movement. The Socialist does not say to the Indian worker “Wait! You can’t have Socialism yet. You haven’t had enough of Capitalism. You must have Capitalism to prepare for Socialism.” What he does say is: You can have Socialism as soon as the majority of the Indian workers understand Socialism and want it! Therefore study it and work for its achievement.

From the foregoing it will be seen that Mr. Davies’ suggested heading is wrong; Capitalism was necessary but is no longer. That, however, will not prevent it from undergoing a hothouse development in areas where it has not yet made great progress. On the basis of Mr. Davies’ argument there would have been no social evolution; chattel slavery and other forms of social organisation would still be flourishing because nobody would have "grumbled” about their evil consequences. Unfortunately for his argument they did "grumble,” just as, no doubt, he grumbles when Capitalism pinches him in some directions. It is certainly astonishing to find someone cavilling at grumbling after the fearful consequences of the first world war, the last world war and the prospect of still more terrible experiences in the new war that is foreshadowed ; wars that were and are a necessary consequence of the Capitalist social order. Mr. Davies seems to have been blinded by his logic and, like the imaginary Hottentot, is out of touch with developments in the world in which he lives. 

Gilmac.

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

From the August 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

I.—The Proletarian and the Handicraftsman.

We have already seen in the previous chapter (See “From Handicraft to Capitalism.”) that capitalist production pre-supposes the divorce of the worker from the means of production. In large capitalist concerns we find on the one hand the capitalist who possesses the means of production but does not himself take part in production; and on the other hand the wage-workers, the Proletarians, who possess nothing but their labour-power, by the sale of which they live, and whose labour alone creates the products of the large concern.

In order to obtain the number of wage-workers necessary to satisfy the requirements of Capital, it was, as we observed, in the beginning essential to rely upon the aid of force. To-day such aid is no longer needed. The advantage the large concern has over the small enterprise suffices to expropriate and throw upon the labour market year by year a sufficient number of peasants and handicraftsmen, who together with the progeny of the already “freed” wage-workers more than satisfy the capitalist craving for “new human flesh” ; and this happens not only without infringing the laws of private property— but on the contrary by relying upon those laws.

That the number of Proletarians continually increases rapidly is so obvious that even those who would like to make us believe that Society is governed by the same conditions that prevailed a hundred and more years ago, and who are painting the future of small enterprise in the rosiest colours, do not venture to deny it.

Just as in production the large capitalist concern has become the dominant form of industrial enterprise, so in State and Society has the industrial wage-worker taken the most prominent place within the working class. This position was occupied four hundred years ago by the peasant, and a hundred years ago by the petty bourgeois.

The industrial wage-workers are already in all civilised countries the largest class ; it is their conditions and views, which increasingly determine the mode of life and thought of the other sections of labour. But that means a complete revolution in the prevailing conditions of life and forms of thought among the great mass of the population; for the conditions of the wage-workers, particularly of the industrial Proletarians (and under the capitalist mode of production agriculture becomes also an industry), differ totally from those of former categories of labour.

When the peasant or handicraftsman was the free owner of his means of production he commanded also the full product of his labour. The labour-product of the wage-worker, however, does not belong to him, but to the capitalist, the purchaser of labour-power, the owner of the necessary means of production. It is true that the wage-worker is aid for his labour-power by the capitalist, but the value contained in is wages by no means equals the value of his product.

When the industrial capitalist purchases the commodity labour-power, he naturally does so with the intention of utilising it in a profitable manner. We have seen that a certain amount of labour creates a certain amount of value. The more the worker labours, the greater (under otherwise equal conditions) will be the value he produces. If the industrial capitalist would let the wage-worker, whom he has hired, work only so long as to produce a value equal to the wages he receives, the employer would make no profit. But even if the capitalist would like to pose as a benefactor of suffering mankind, capital calls for profit, and the capitalist does not turn a deaf ear to this call. The longer the worker toils in the service of capital beyond the labour time necessary for producing the value of his wages—that is to say, the greater surplus there is left—from the total product created by him after the value equivalent to his wages is deducted, the greater is the surplus value (as this excess value is called) the greater is the exploitation of the worker, which finds a limit only in the exhaustion of the exploited and—in the possible resistance offered by him to the exploiter.

To the wage-worker private property in the instruments of production meant therefore from the outset something altogether different to what it signified to the handicraftsman or peasant; for while to these two it was originally the means of securing to them the complete ownership of their product; it has been for the wage-worker, and ever will be, nothing else but the means of exploiting him, of depriving him of the surplus value which he has created. The wage-worker from that standpoint is anything but a lover of “private property.” And in this connection he not only distinguishes himself from the property-owning peasant and handicraftsman, but also from the handicraftsman of precapitalist times.

These journeymen formed the transition from the master handicraftsman to the Proletarian, just as the concerns in which they were employed in larger numbers form the transition from petty enterprise to large industrial concerns. Yet how different they were to the Proletarians !

They were treated as members of the master’s family and they had the prospect of becoming masters themselves. But the wage-worker is only a hireling and condemned to remain a wage-worker. In these two points is summed up the cause for the difference between a handicraftsman and a wage-worker.

As the journeyman belonged to the family, he ate at the same table and slept in the house of his master, and the question of shelter and food did not exist as far as he was concerned. His wages in money were only a part of what he received from his master for his labour-power. The wages served less the purpose of satisfying the most necessary wants (which, as has been pointed out, were supplied by living with the master) than for the purpose of obtaining comforts or of saving, of accumulating the means required for setting up as master on his own account,

The journeyman worked together with the master. When the latter extended the hours of labour unusually, he was himself as much affected thereby as his assistant. There was therefore no strong desire on the part of the master to extend the working hours to the point of exhaustion, and even where that was the case, such intention was very easily restrained. Whenever the master endeavoured to make his own conditions of labour as agreeable as possible, the journeyman too, benefited thereby.

The instruments of production, which the small master required, were so few and simple that the craftsman did not need considerable means to set up as master. Every handicraftsman consequently had the opportunity of becoming a master; in fact, he already anticipated that position, and as he had to save in order to obtain the means to this end, he was as decided a defender of private property as the master craftsman.

It is necessary to point out that here the conditions of handicraft are being considered as they originally arose in pre-capitalist times.

Let us now compare with them the conditions of the wage-worker.

In capitalist industrial concerns wage-workers and capitalists are not active together; and although, in the course of economic development the industrial capitalist has acquired a separate identity from the merchant proper, and although the capitalists of commerce and those of industry have become two distinct sections, the industrial capitalist, strictly speaking, still remains a merchant. His activity as capitalist— as far as he at all plays an active part in his undertaking—is limited, like that of the dealer, to the market. His duties are to purchase as suitably and cheaply as possible the necessary raw material, auxiliary materials, labour-power, etc., and to sell as dearly as possible the goods produced in his concern. In the sphere of production he has to do nothing else but to see that the workers perform the largest amount of work possible for the smallest wages possible; that the largest amount of surplus value be squeezed out of them. The longer they work, the better for him. He does not get tired if the working hours are too long, he does not perish if the mode of production becomes a murderous one.

The capitalist is therefore far less considerate concerning the life and limb of the worker than was the master handicraftsman. The prolonging of the working day, the abolition of holidays, the introduction of night-work, the compulsion to work in damp or over-heated workshops, or places filled with noxious gases, etc.: these are the “improvements” which capitalist industrialism has brought to the worker.

The introduction of machinery has still further increased the dangers to the health and life of the worker. He is now chained to a monster which seizes upon him with gigantic strength and maddening speed. Only the closest, never-faltering attention on the part of the worker attending such a machine prevents his being caught and crushed by it. Safety arrangements cost money, and the capitalist does not introduce them, unless he is compelled to do so. Economy is above all the main virtue of the capitalist; and that demands his limiting the space in his factory and finding room in it for as many machines as possible. What does it matter to him, if by so doing he endangers the workers’ safety. Workmen are cheap ; but large, commodious premises are dear.

But the capitalist method of applying machinery changes the conditions of the workers in yet another manner for the worse.

The tools of the handicraftsman were inexpensive, and seldom required such considerable alterations as would have caused them to become altogether useless. It is different with the machine. That costs money, much money. If it becomes prematurely useless, or is not worked to its full capacity, it will bring the capitalist loss instead of profit. But the machine wears out not only in use, but also when standing still. On the other hand the increasing application of science upon the economic domain, resulting as it did, in the invention of the machine, has the effect of continually producing new inventions and discoveries, sometimes of greater, sometimes of less significance, and constantly causing, now one, now another kind of machine, at times even the entire plant of a factory, to become incapable of keeping up with competition, and thus to lose their value before having been completely used up. Owing to this uninterrupted evolution in the technical aspect of machines, every one is in danger of becoming valueless before being used up. This circumstance affords the capitalist sufficient ground for using up every machine from the moment he purchases it as speedily as possible. That is to say, the application of machinery in production is a spur to the capitalist to extend the hours of labour, to carry on if possible, an uninterrupted production, and to introduce the succession of day-and night-shifts, which means that the abominable practice of night-work becomes a permanent institution.

When the application of machinery first began, some idealists declared that the millenium had come, that the machine would relieve the worker from his labour and make him a free man. But in the hand of the capitalist the machine has become the most powerful lever for the purpose of making the labour-burden of the proletarian a crushing one, and his servitude unbearable and murderous.

But it is not only in respect of the hours of labour that the wage-worker under the capitalist mode of production is worse off than the handicraftsman. The wage-worker does not eat at the table of the capitalist nor live at his dwelling-house. He may dwell in most miserable quarters, feed upon refuse, why, even be in a starving condition, yet the comfort of the capitalist is not in the least disturbed thereby.

The meaning of the terms “starvation” and “wages” used to exclude one another. Then the free worker could only fall a victim to starvation if he was unable to find work. Everybody who worked had also to eat. The capitalist mode of production merits the distinction of having reconciled the two contradictions,—”starvation” and “wages”—and of having made “starvation-wages” a permanent institution, and even a mainstay of present society.

Blogger's Note:

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

The Purpose and Method of Colonisation [3] (1914)

From the August 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last issue.)

“The great beauty of capitalist production,” said Marx, “consists in this—that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-worker, but produces always in proportion to the accumulation of capital, a relative surplus population of wage workers. Thus the law of supply and demand is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that indispensable requisite, is secured.” (“Capital,” p. 794)

In such “highly civilised” countries as England, France, or Germany, the organisation of wealth-production for profit, e.g., to the glory of capital and consequently in the sole interest of the possessors thereof, the capitalists, is to all intents and purposes complete. How “the poor,” that is, the members of the working class, have been made, and are being made, to view as part and parcel of their “inevitable fate” the awful consequences, and notably the constantly harassing insecurity, resulting for them from such production ; the apathy with which the male workers can see their manhood destroyed by suffering their wives and children to endure the most cruel privations and humiliations, especially in times of unemployment; the dull resignation with which they look forward to their “evening of life” and “honorable ease”—in the workhouse, if unable to depend on friendly or children’s aid; in short, the readiness with which they accept their degradation and misery in the face of the most ostentatious display and squandering of the wealth they have produced ; the success, on the other hand, with which the chloroforming fetishes and superstitions of patriotism, religion, hero-worship, etc., are inoculated ; also the respect shown to the “strong arm of the law” and the rest of the foul institutions of oppression: all these things, which clearly demonstrate the “superiority of ‘our’ working class,” must constitute a source of great gratification and felicity to our masters.

It would almost seem that, unlike all preceding stages and forms of human co-existence, the capitalist system is to last for ever and ever, were it not for the discontented and strife-stirring Socialist. Only the latter, indeed, will not see that property and profit are far more sacred than human life, and will not recognise that without capitalist “enterprise” the working class would be in a worse way.

No wonder that, with such queer notions as these, we are also credited with being unqualified to duly appreciate the great Christian work of systematic up-“lifting” organised by our pious masters, under great difficulties, in the colonies. Nevertheless, we realise at least the difficulties of their task, knowing, as we do, that man has a rooted objection to being robbed. 

It is notorious, and has already been referred to here, that the arrival abroad of the enterprising pioneer of civilisation has been marked everywhere by obstinate resistance on the part of the “uncivilised” natives, and that, more than at home (where the conditions satisfactory to capitalist exploitation are already at hand), the “necessity” for wage-labour has to be constantly demonstrated by the display and frequent application of the full strength of the arm of the law. Brute force, in fact, plays the chief part in the process of “converting” the natives to serve God Capital, in other words, into wage-slaves. The missionary, as already said, forms only the cloak, the avant-garde of the bourgeoisie, behind which lurks, an agent a thousand times more powerful and convincing than the silly “Word of God,” to wit—the gun. By blood and infamies, deceit and vile trickery, in which the agents of the bourgeois parasites are well versed, the separation of the natives from their own conditions of labour and means of subsistence is effected, and thus is secured the exchange of their liberty for that ominous capitalist “freedom,” which is so well and so “profit”-ably (to the capitalists and their hacks) established at home, and which only the wicked Socialist does not enjoy.

It will not be necessary for our purpose to refer here to more than the previously mentioned bloody expeditions to one of the continents oversea, namely Africa, and it will also be sufficient to quote from only a few of the colonial capitalist mouthpieces to prove our contention that the object of colonisation is, besides confiscation of the natural resources, the forcible subjection and exploitation of the natives. Moreover, the history of one colony only reflects what, in the main, has been and is going on in the rest of the capitalistically backward countries, so soon as they have been discovered to possess things convertible into exchange-values, and men ignorant of, and uninfected with, the blessings of civilisation and Christianity. And since enough is known in these islands about the dirty work that its greedy millionaire Empire-builders have accomplished abroad, the experience in colonies of their rivals, the Germans, may serve as evidence in support of our foregoing statements.

Although with Bismarck’s “blood and iron policy” before them, and in spite of the sacrifice of at least 150,000 innocent human beings (as stated in the German Reichstag on 4th March, 1913) on the altar of “Kultur” and civilisation since the arrival of the German “Kulturtrager” in Africa a generation ago, the organisation of capitalist production there is as yet very incomplete. In the vast tropical territories of Africa, which the German has set himself to open up and colonise, the control over, or—in bourgeois terms—the “freedom” of, the native workers is still far from being in the right groove ; these men are scattered about and can still escape from dependency on the capitalist for their, means of subsistence—to mention only one difficulty. It is doubtful whether even the genius of Lloyd George could devise a scheme delivering those men more speedily and inexorably into a better grip of the Christian employers.

Unlike the modern proletarian, many of those natives can still manage to return to their wonted mode of living, and so disappear from the labour market, to the great chagrin of the colonist. Hence, the great controversies raging in the colonial Press, in the Reichstag, and elsewhere, around the “labour-problem”—the problem being, of course, to secure a greater and more regular supply of those wonderful men, who,—as the learned Dr. P. Rohrbach has discovered (Luderitzbuchter Zeitung 27.3.1914) “possess a large amount of labour-power—in fact, FAR MORE THAN IS USED UP, ON AN AVERAGE, FOR PROVIDING THEIR ORDINARY AND VERY PRIMITIVE REQUIREMENTS OF SUBSISTENCE.” (From the connection in which the above words appear, it is evident that their author is entirely unconscious of the fact that he is referring here to the greatest of all human discoveries, seeing that the bourgeiosie owes its existence, and capitalist enterprise its stimulus, to this same surplus labour. This is certainly fortunate for him, bearing in mind the fate of one economist for putting in almost the same formula his discovery of the sole source of—PROFIT.)

More direct compulsion and recruiting is, according to some colonial experts, necessary, while others clamour for more indirect pressure to make the natives yield their precious surplus labour-power. “There must be no fake weakness,” says Rohrbach, while numerous other learned toads are equally loud in their denunciations of “misplaced humanitarianism in connection with the labour question,” and the justification given for advocating such direct constraint is that: “In Europe and all other advanced countries everybody (meaning naturally the working class) is compelled to surrender their full energy to work and a great many must toil beyond their physical capability.” (Luderitzbuchter Zeitung 27.3.1914). This after centuries of civilisation and “progress” !

Professor Anton, in an article on the “Labour Question,” which appeared last April in the “Koloniale Rundschau”—the organ of the German Association for the protection (!) of the Natives—and was widely circulated in the Colonies, says that “Since the colonising people cannot wait until the higher requirements, or over-population and hunger, induce the natives to constant work in the service of others, there is no alternative but to substitute direct compulsion for the unwillingness of the natives to do work for their foreign masters.” As Anton admits, on the same occasion, “free labour” is “besides by no means an exclusive condition to­-day in the tropical colonies, … as all colonial authorities avail themselves of direct compulsion on an extensive scale.” In fact, where necessary, the Divisional Magistrates in certain districts of East Africa compulsorily procure workers for plantations, as can be proved from a confidential circular to planters’ associations, which says in effect: “The Authority is prepared, as hitherto, to procure, through the medium of the native chiefs, to every European enterprise as many workers as possible from the neighbouring native communities.” (“Usambara Post,” 16.5.14.)

Besides the existence of direct compulsion, there is in most of the tropical countries the unscrupulous professional labour-recruiter, and it is obvious and has repeatedly been admitted, that the recruiting does not always take place of the natives’ own accord and free will, but that thousands of defenceless and ignorant blacks fall victims to the cunning, fraudulent, crafty, underhand expedients of those ignoble “procurers.” Small wonder, then, that when the so deceived natives discover what has happened, and become troublesome or run away, they fall from misfortune to misfortune, and thus provide the gutter-Press at home occasionally with the means to work up a circulation at the expense of their sufferings.

To meet half-way the above mentioned apostle of over-population and hunger, Herr Eduard Woermann, the wealthy Hamburg financier, who is “largely interested in the colonies,” has given a sum of 6,000 Marks as a prize to the Colonial Institute for the best treatise on the following question :

“Through which practical steps can the German Colonies obtain an increase in the birth rate and a decrease in the infantile mortality amongst the native population—THE ECONOMICALLY MOST VALUABLE MO­TIVE-POWER of our colonies? ”

The result of the competition, which is to be published next year, will no doubt provide us with more details of what is to constitute those people’s increased happiness. Meanwhile we can appreciate the modesty of this shining light of capitalism to have kept silent about the necessity of the capitalist in the process of wealth-production. Or could it be that Herr Woermann has nothing to learn from the modern “economists” ? What about Directive Ability ?

The majority of our colonial enthusiasts, of course, would rather see more indirect methods, notably hunger, permanently established amongst the natives, and so get the (sufficient) supply of “motive-power” (at home known as “hands”) into that automatically working way which, as Marx says, is the great beauty of capitalist production. They know that direct and legal forms of compulsion are “attended with too much trouble, violence, noise” and, last but not least, expense; while hunger, for example, is a “peaceable, silent, unremmitted pressure,” just as Woermann realises what a great blessing is the existence of a large industrial reserve army.

And lest there might be any doubt about the motive underlying all efforts and controversional proposals, whatever their nature or source, we give room to the declaration of the “Deutsch Ostafrikanische Zietung” which appeared prominently in their organ (4.6.1913) as a statement of their position and policy in the matter of the “labour problem.”

It says literally :

“It may be briefly recalled (but the policy of our friends in the North had caused a renewed flaring up of the rising of 1905-1907, which has only just been suppressed with great sacrifices in blood and money. It must now be openly admitted that the insubordination of the Warnwera and Wandonde tribes, the general rising of the Wamakonde and Wamaraba, . . . had been caused through the preliminary steps taken by the Government in compulsorily recruiting natives as plantation workers. . . . We do not advocate general compulsory recruiting of workers through the Government, because it is impracticable, but demand instead the exercise of a persistent indirect pressure—differentiated according to the individuality of the particular communities— A PRESSURE WHICH WILL MAKE THE MILLIARD VALUES SLUMBERING IN THE INACTIVE ARMS OF THE NA­TIVES, ACCESSIBLE TO THE GERMAN NATIONAL WEALTH.”

For national wealth, read—capitalist class.

There is the truth about the hypocritical cry of “Kultur” in a nutshell—”Kultur,” indeed, if thereby they mean exploitation and robbery, naked and unashamed !

It is proposed to deal subsequently more in detail with some of the methods in operation and advocated, which supply, and are intended to supply, the pressure necessary for the “education” and accelerated “advancement” of the natives into the abyss of wage-slavery.

Rudolf Frank

(To be Continued.)

The Purpose and Method of Colonisation. [2] (1914)

From the July 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last issue.)

Every analysis of, and enquiry into, the conditions of the overwhelming majority of the peoples of Christian civilised countries will and must reveal the fact that, so far is this civilisation from giving or promoting genuine joy in life, there is a very real justification for the common reference to this existence as “the burden of life,” if not for the necessity of having “to bear the cross” in silent resignation. Surely, then, it is anything but desirable or justifiable to inflict such “burdens” upon other peoples who live in happier circumstances—free to enjoy the natural bounties surrounding them, and above all, the fruits of their labour.

The records of many individual missionaries, explorers, travellers, etc., besides being almost invariably full of praise for the physical beauty and soundness of the greater number of more or less primitive peoples, and paying high tributes to their skill, moral qualities, etc., such records with equal frequency depict the free and happy existence of the “uncivilised” as compared with the sordid “struggle (!) for life” of civilised man. In a recent number of the “Samoanische Zeitung” for instance, the following appeared:

“In this sunny climate with glorious scenery around us, we forget the squalid, sordid atmosphere which envelops all great European cities, and the fierce, stone age struggle for a bare living in which hundreds of thousands of men and women there are piteously involved. When we compare the happy condition of the Samoans and other Central Polynesian natives with that of the abject poor in England, America, and Russia, we feel sorry for the latter. . . . Let us not, then, over educate the native, and especially let us not instil into his mind the belief that cash is the main chance. For many of us it is, but not for him.”

And from an East African paper I extract the following, written by an experienced traveller:

" . . . On broad well-kept roads . . . the villages and huts of the Washambaa people and other native tribes can be reached ; there one can observe them tilling their fields, feeding their children, collecting the milk from their herds, and one cannot help a feeling of envy at the leisure which they can enjoy in these proceedings. They live simply, and without a care in the world—not tilling much more than is required—most of the food practically grows into their mouths, but they are almost too ‘lazy’ to grasp for it. Black children with dark clear eyes and well-fed little “tummies” are hurrying through rich banana-groves and break down the fruit ; if it is ripe they eat it, if not, it remains on the ground to rot.

“During my travels there I was often reminded of other parts of the world I had visited and I drew comparisons. Thus, many a landscape made me think of Italy ; there, for example, between Amalfi and Sorrento (Italy) with its disrupted mountains and high plunging brooks, an industrious people wrings treasures from the soil. On the mountainsides there are teeming vineyards, whose yield, however, the hungry, begging multitude of children, who imploringly stretch out their meagre fingers at the approach of the visitor, can never enjoy !”

Apart from the absence of anything that modern society, as at present constituted, could offer to other leas advanced races to guarantee the latters’ enhanced welfare and happiness—supposing for a moment that the bourgeoisie, of all human societies, were capable of such an altruistic feeling—there is the indisputable and glaring fact that the Bourgeoisie utterly reject any idea of association with, or relationship other than unconditional distinction, from the colored, and especially the more or less primitive black races—not to mention their abhorrence for such notions as “equality” or “brotherhood.” This fact, then, would also constitute a queer explanation for the Bour­geoisie’s keen interest in colonizing and their support of missionary effort. Not only the Colonial Press, but writers and politicians at home take every opportunity to lodge their pro-tendencies. “We will not have any equality or test against any what are called “negrophile fraternal relation with those African races !” vituperate those superior, if conceited, Sons of God. “Assimilation of our high-standing working class (c’est bon !) with the detestable, lazy rabble of Africa ?—Never!” they rave. One feels it necessary to remind the enquirer, that the coming of the vulgar “civilized” has no more been invited by the “detestable, lazy rabble” than the presence of the bourgeoisie is appreciated. What, then, one may ask, is the incentive—the purpose of the missionary effort ?

Now, although the disinterested apostles and propagandists of Christianity, and the rest of the vulgar satellites of the bourgeoisie, often let the cat out of the bag by themselves boasting of the commercial value (to their paymasters) of their missions, there are none the less the assertions of their more hypocritical, or shall we say ignorant, brethren affirming pompously that the object of their “missions to the heathen” is their great concern for the education, moral and intellectual uplifting, and general welfare of the natives of foreign “uncivilised” lands. Childish as this assertion may seem at this time of day, even to the non-Socialist, it is nevertheless the officially declared and avowed object of missionary organisations, besides being frequently used by those following on their heels.

It will, therefore, not be superfluous to have on record in the “Socialist Standard,” fresh evidence from Colonial mouthpieces of our Christian promoters of “civilisation,” that the sole object of the colonization and opening up of foreign “uncivilised” countries, is first of all the forcible appropriation of their natural riches (wealth), which the native, of course, never dreamed was by the Will of God ordained to serve a purpose far higher than that of being merely enjoyed as means of subsistence.

Further, and necessarily, the forcible subjection and exploitation of those peoples for the benefit of the cosmopolitan clique of capitalists and concession hunters, since for the purpose of success in the piratical enterprise of appropriation it is necessary to have the co-operation of the natives themselves. And it is here the “good offices” of missionary societies come in. They offer the cloak behind which to hide the brutalities connected with the conversion of the native from an owner of his land and independent conditions of existence into a propertyless wage-earner—the element which is as indispensable to Capital as is the stomach to the human being. All the talk of education, moral and intellectual uplifting, etc., simply resolves itself into an effort to imbue the native with the due respect for that mysterious quality of all things known by the “civilised” as Value and Price, and the inestimable virtues of industry and abstinence.

It is, besides, a matter of history how the various peoples, who to-day “enjoy” the company of “cultured civilised man,” have been and still are being “educated” and “guided.” The Putumayo horrors still haunt the memory and are in themselves sufficient to prove how far from the truth is the impudent assertion that the concern of the “pioneer of civilisation” is the welfare of the natives. Indeed, the blood of thousands of innocent men, women and children cries out aloud against such a lie as this.

A glance over the map of Africa, for example, which has in later years in particular received the attentions of the Gospel merchants and their “followers”—the concession hunters—will prove to the world in whose service the former are, and will provide for posterity a lasting example of Christian love and brotherhood.

The governments of Germany, England, France, Belgium, Italy, etc. have vied with each other in their disinterested desires to help on the work of “education” and “uplifting” pre­liminarily started under the auspices of their sky-pilots, while the factory hells of Krupp and Maxim and other murder-instrument makers have been kept busy supplying the wherewithal to furnish the recalcitrant with a dose of the eternal bliss promised by the missionary. Almost each designative name on the map recalls the cold-blooded slaughter of numberless innocent human beings in the most cowardly and fiendish manner, although the whole extent soldiers will, of course, never be told. One has of the horrors perpetrated by the Christian to be satisfied with what filters through, and can only gather from one’s knowledge of the all-pervading greed of that sinister and dehumanised 20th Century product, the modern capitalist class, what the innocent multitudes of the natives can expect once they come into the clutches of our masters.

Who of us, who are Socialists, can forget the Congo or the Tripolis atrocities, the wholesale slaughter in South Africa, the massacres in Egypt and in the Sudan, the butcheries in Algeria and Morocco, the systematic murders in German East and South-West Africa ? All of which have been perpetrated, and are still being perpetrated, in order to obtain access to, and confiscate the riches of the land, and by the same token force the natives into the labour market !

As a rule, after the chiefs of the staff in the human slaughterhouse have had their day and their “purse” for successfully establishing their masters’ authority abroad, the equally deadly, if less noisy and often more deceiving, weapon of legislation completes the work of brigandage and the consequent impoverishment of the subdued peoples. Thus, last year’s “Land Act” assigned to the 4 millions natives in the South African Union, 11,000,000 morgen land out of the total area of 142,000,000 morgen, the remaining 131,000,000 morgen being in the occupation of 1,250,000 whites. The provisions of the Act are, of course, such as to prevent the natives from acquiring land outside the scheduled areas, and to leave them no alternative but the wage-labour market—no escape from the dependancy on the “profiteer.”

It is obvious that so long as a man can find his means of subsistence freely provided by nature, e g., so long as he owns means allowing of the production of the things whereby he lives, he need not and will not sell himself to another man ; in other words, he is not fit material for capital. This fact alone is sufficient to indicate that expropriation of the native is an indispensable condition. And just as the history of the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe is marked by a series of revolutions and wars ending, as it did, in the complete dispossession of the great mass of the people of every vestige of independent property, so the natives of “uncivilised” Africa have to go through this metamorphosis as soon as they have the misfortune to come in contact with the modern bourgeoisie. Capital, the demon inseparable from the bourgeoisie, is as we know, not a thing—it is a social relationship and requires the existence of a huge class of men and women deprived of all possibility of producing their own means of subsistence. The crucial point in the Colonies is, therefore, to ensure the separation of the natives from their own conditions of labour and their root, the soil; and thus create there that “high-standing” artificial product of modern society, the proletariat, which is synonymous to saying—”the poor.”

Rudolf Frank

(To be Continued.)

A Brief Exposition of Socialist Theory. (Continued.) (1920)

From the February 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

The example of the difference of the relations between men getting their livelihood by means of simple instruments of labour (typified by the threshing flail) and those producing their sustenance by means of more advanced means of production (typified by the threshing machine) which we have given by no means exhausts the field. Just as the social structure consists of much more than these primary and personal relations, so much more in the social life takes shape from the character of the instruments of labour and the methods in which they are used. Man stands not only in relations with his fellow men, but also with the world about him, and as far as these relations are within society they have their base in the conditions of wealth production.

In the classic age of the flail, for instance, the general means of producing wealth were about on a par with that implement. It was the day of the windmill, the spinning wheel and distaff, and the primitive loom. In the towns the smith's hammer rang out, without a rival in the production of ferrous ware. Everywhere was handwork, everywhere tools. Machinery, if not unknown, was of so little importance as to have practically no influence upon the method of production.

In such conditions as this what was the relation of men toward the world ? We have already seen that the instruments of labour in general belonged to those who operated them. Among the artizans of the towns, possibly, were many exceptions, but the lower we descend in the scale of the development of the instruments of labour, the more do we find the energies of the workers occupied in the production of the primary necessaries, food, shelter, and clothing. Therefore, in the period of which we are speaking, the production of these things were the predominating industries, and it was the general conditions prevailing in these industries which determined the general social relations.

It was not, therefore, the handicraft of the towns which determined the social form, but the economic conditions of rural industries.

Ignoring, then, the seeming contradictions of the towns, where goods were certainly produced for sale, let us turn to the countryside.

The worker of the Middle Ages, owning the simple means by which he produced his living, had an outlook upon the world entirely different from that of the modern worker. This difference commenced with his relation to the product of his toil. His very object was different when he took his instruments of labour in hand. The modern worker starts out to produced wealth which shall be the property of the owner of the implements he operates, but the feudal worker, owning the tools with which he worked, laboured to produce wealth for himself. Hence while the modern worker realises that his function in life, and therefore the reason he is permitted to live, is to work, the mediaeval worker could not take this view of himself and his relation to the world.

He worked to live. The product of his labour was a different thing at the moment of its production, from the product of the toil of his present-day prototype. The latter, producing wealth which, on production, belongs to someone else, necessarily produces what that other requires, and he cannot escape the conviction that he is only permitted to work (and therefore to live) in order to produce it. The feudal worker, on the other band, producing wealth for himself, produced those things which he required to satisfy his own needs, hence he saw himself only working to live, and took an opposite view of his place in the world to that of the wage worker of our present system.

A. E. Jacomb

(To be Continued.)

Gifts versus Commodities (2019)

From the April 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In pre-capitalist ‘traditional societies’ reciprocal transactions tended to take the form of gift exchanges. But a gift exchange is not at all the same as a market exchange. It is driven by a totally different kind of dynamic.

Christopher Gregory in his ‘Gifts and Commodities’ (1982) draws on Marx’s insights to pinpoint the difference:

  Marx was able to develop a very important proposition: that commodity-exchange is an exchange of alienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence […]. The corollary of this is that non-commodity (gift) exchange is an exchange of inalienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal dependence. This proposition is only implicit in Marx’s analysis but it is […] a precise definition of gift exchange.

In a market economy, the buyer and seller confront each other as two separate individuals having diametrically opposed interests as far as the price of the commodity being sold is concerned. They haggle over it and, once a deal has been struck and a price agreed (which will tend to fall somewhere in between what both would have respectively wanted), they go their separate ways.

Rather than some ‘natural propensity’ to engage in self-interested economic behaviour giving rise to a market economy, it was the very growth of a market economy that gave rise to this concept of self-interested economic behaviour. The absurdly unrealistic depiction of human beings as ‘homo economicus’ who only act to maximise what they individually gain from any transaction is the cornerstone dogma of modern economic theory. It springs from an essentially individualistic worldview (implied in the very concept of ‘self-interest’) which was largely bound up with the development of a market economy itself.

Where market transactions tend to atomise and separate individuals, gift transactions move in a quite opposite direction – to cement and solidify social relationships between people by binding them together in a whole host of open-ended and continuing rights and obligations (called ‘total prestations’ in the literature) of which the exchange of material goods plays a more symbolic role. Moreover, the ongoing nature of these rights and obligations is quite different from a market transaction. Once the buyer has bought a commodity from a seller, their relationship to the latter, in theory, ceases forthwith. This is not so in the case of a gift transaction.

In his seminal essay ‘The Gift’, written in 1925, Marcel Mauss refers to the quasi-mystical explanation for the existence of gift transactions offered by a Maori sage called Tamati Ranapiri. The spirit of the giver called the ‘hau’, suggested Ranapiri, resides in the gift itself. Though the gift may pass through many hands it always seeks to return to its original source. An example of this was ‘Kula ring’ described by Malinowski in his The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). This curious social phenomenon involved the circulation of two sets of ceremonial items – shell necklaces and armbands – each going in opposite directions around a group of far-flung island communities in the Western Pacific, via the mechanism of gift exchange.

Here too we witness behaviour driven by a belief that the ‘spirit’ of the giver must return to its source. For instance, it would be considered deeply offensive to hang on to a particular item, thereby disrupting the circulation of goods, let alone to haggle over it as one might with an object of commerce. Of course, we don’t need to interpret this belief that the ‘spirit’ of the giver is entangled in the gift itself, too literally. It is really about the entanglement of communities with each other. As such, it is better understood as a metaphor or ‘motivating myth’, fostering a sense of inter-communal solidarity.

Nevertheless, the inalienable character of the gifts being exchanged brings out a core difference between ‘gift economies’ and capitalist market economies where, in the latter case, we find that the producers – the workers – are permanently alienated or separated from their products. The ‘spirit’ of the workers is completely expunged from the product of their labour by the capitalists who assume complete ownership of it.

Another difference is that, contrary to explanations offered by the market apologists, not only did gift transactions predate market exchanges but they also involved voluntary contractual relations, not between individuals as such, but social groups. In other words between, ‘clans, tribes and families’ as Mauss put it. This runs completely counter to individualistic explanations for the origins of exchange. However, according to David Graeber:

  Over time, Mauss argued, reciprocity can also take on a more competitive cast as assertive individuals – first acting as representatives of clans or other social groups, later in their own capacity (Parry 1986) – end up vying to see which can outgive the other (Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001 p.160).

This is illustrated by the famous potlatch ceremonies carried on amongst the Kwakiutl people on the Northwest Coast of North America.

This was no longer strictly a ‘gift economy’, more a competition over status which became an enshrined principle of ‘aristocratic societies’ predating capitalism. Some commentators distinguish between this and the modern capitalist notions of status in that while the latter is based on the conspicuous accumulation and consumption of wealth, the former involves the periodic giving away of wealth. If so, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; in capitalism too we find wealth being conspicuously given away in the guise of ‘philanthropy’.

The point about competitive gift giving is that it can serve as a means to acquire prestige and hence power within a kind of patron-client set up more typical of pre-capitalist societies. Through it the client becomes indebted and subservient to the patron. This is what facilitates the direct appropriation by a ruling class of an economic surplus from its subjects in a society like feudalism rather than indirectly through the economic mechanism of ‘free’ waged employment under capitalism.

A socialist gift economy?

What of the alternative to capitalism? Socialism has sometimes been described as a kind of ‘gift economy’ where the relations between individuals are based on a system of ‘generalised reciprocity’. That is not a bad description though one might quibble over applying the term ‘economy’ in relation to socialism. As suggested, the identification of a something called the ‘economy’ is something peculiar to capitalism. The universalisation of money-based relationships makes for a kind of vast impersonal mechanism operating according to its own laws and ‘behind the backs of the producers’, as Marx put it. Alienation, the separation of the producer from her product, seems implicit in the very conception of this thing we call ‘the economy’. Socialism might be better described as a way of life than an economy.

According to the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, there are three basic forms of ‘reciprocal exchange’.

Firstly there is ‘balanced reciprocity’ where there is expectation of an immediate return on what is being offered for exchange. This is the norm under capitalism. We can take an item off a supermarket shelf and walk off with it but only on condition that we exchange cash for it at the cash till.

Then there is ‘negative reciprocity’. As the term itself suggests this involves the use of coercion by one party to a transaction to impose disagreeable terms or conditions on the other. The high prices charged by a monopoly which customers have to accept is one example of this. Another is the generalised system of wage labour intrinsic to capitalism itself. This arose partly out of the coercive dispossession of the majority of their limited means of wealth production, forcing them to depend on wage labour in a process called ‘primitive accumulation’ which is still going on today in the form of land grabs in places like Africa.

Finally, there is ‘generalised reciprocity’. Here there is no expectation of an immediate return at all. Nor is there even an expectation that the person making the return should be the same person to whom the gift in question was first offered. As in the case of the Kula ring, the good can pass through many hands. There are many other examples of generalised reciprocity in both preindustrial and capitalist societies.

The tradition of extending hospitality to strangers in Bedouin and other preindustrial cultures is a form of generalised reciprocity. In modern day capitalism, the internet has often been cited as a working example of a gift economy in practice. Individuals voluntarily, and without thought of payment of any kind, contribute time and effort to the stupendous storehouse of information available to everyone that is the internet. As Genevieve Vaughan notes:

  Actually the market is limited and floating on a sea of gifts. Profit itself is a gift as it comes from the part of the labor of workers which is not covered by the salary, their so-called ‘surplus labor’. But there are also the gifts of housework and of nature which are exploited by the market, which does not have to pay for the reproduction of the workers or the clean-up of pollution. As someone said in the recent movie on the internet gift economy, Us Now, the kind of capitalism we are living in has only really been so extreme during the last century’ (gift-economy.com/theory-and-practice-of-the-gift-economy).

These kinds of extant non-market relations might be said to validate and further strengthen the case for a completely non-market socialist future which, in a sense, they prefigure. What they highlight is precisely what the ideology of the market seeks to conceal – our mutual interdependence.

Recall Gregory’s thoughts on Marx’s insights into the nature of commodity-exchange as being an ‘exchange of alienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence’. This idea of ‘reciprocal independence’ is a logical extension of the dogma that the market economy is a purely voluntary and non-coercive institution. To be independent is to be ‘free’.

But the idea flies in the face of reality and fails to see the wood for the trees – the larger patterns of social interconnections that bind us all. The great majority of us, possessing little or no capital, are economically obliged to sell our working abilities to the tiny minority who own this capital. There is nothing voluntary about this; it is a brutal coercive structural fact arising from the class nature of capitalism itself.

Though capitalist ideology can hardly suppress the empirical fact of our practical dependence upon each other as human beings, what it does is to fall back on a second line of defence, as it were, taking this concept of practical dependency and twisting it into something else. Instead of being universally reciprocal it is presented as being something partial and one-sided: the workers are said to depend on the capitalists. The dependence of the capitalists upon the workers is thus ideologically erased by a sleight of hand.

The essence of the gift relationship is the sense of moral obligation it confers upon the recipient of the gift to give something back in return. In capitalism, it is used to entrench the existing social order by inducing a contrived sense of dependency of one class upon the other. Notwithstanding a market ideology emphasising the ‘reciprocal independence’ of buyer and seller, capitalism needs to create some sense of community in which individuals are bound together by bonds of moral obligation.

Socialism too will need to do this as must any kind of functioning society. However, the manner in which socialism will do so will be quite different. The very term itself – ‘socialism’ – springs from the recognition of the completely socialised nature of modern production. There is literally nothing that is produced today that does not involve, directly or indirectly, the input of millions of workers right across the world. Socialism is about bringing ownership of the means of producing wealth into line with the character of modern production.

The recognition that we necessarily depend upon each other, will translate into a generalised sense of obligation to contribute to the good of others, as well as ourselves in a society fundamentally based on the principle of generalised reciprocity.

Robin Cox

This Money Business (1962)

From the December 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some of the many people who don't think that Socialism is a good idea declare that our objective—a world commonwealth in which money and a lot of other things would not be required—is impractical because some sort of money is a necessary part of all human societies, even the primitive ones. Without it. they say, no society could hope to work.

They are wrong.

Even today there are races and tribes who conduct their affairs quite satisfactorily without money. In any case, to try to draw a parallel in this argument with past societies is impossible, because capitalism has given money a distinct function.

Primitive peoples used a variety of objects, some of practical use, some ornamental, which through a loose definition of terms have sometimes been described as money. In Fiji, for example, they used sperm whale teeth; in Eastern New Guinea shell armlets and large stone axe blades. The Abyssinians used rock salt. The natives of the Melanesian Islands consider that strings of shell discs are their most important item of wealth and a lot of labour power is used up in producing them. The purchasing power of these discs varies with their length and colour. Red ones arc worth the most because of the scarcity of the shells from which they are made. These strings are sometimes used in settlement of social obligations. But none of these objects perform the true function of money.

In any society an article is money only when it acts as a medium of exchange and as a measure of value and when it contains within itself the social embodiment of human labour power. It must also be able to measure and to equate all and any commodity against any other. This, of course, eliminates the shell discs which, although they are a form of wealth to the Fijian native who will use them to pay for a canoe or trade them against each other, do not express the market value of all other goods. Such an object—modern, developed, defined, all powerful money—is a typical product of capitalism.

As capitalism moves in on the primitive tribes, building its factories and establishing its other features, a fully fledged monetary system will came into being there. The native will find that he is living under the same conditions as wage workers elsewhere. In order to live he will be compelled to sell his working ability to an employer for a wage which will be based upon what it costs to keep him in a state of working efficiency.

It will make no difference to him whether or not he is skilled, whether he is paid a weekly wage or a monthly salary, whether his employer is the state or some private company. He will be a member of a class which has no economic security and which is cruelly subject to all the anomalies and contradictions of capitalism.

The change from private to common ownership—from Capitalism to Socialism —will mean that as trade and markets cease to exist so also will the need for a multitude of currencies, indeed, for any currency at all. Money could not be of any use in such a commonwealth, unless perhaps as museum relics of a past inglorious chapter in man’s history.

Dick Jacobs

Editorial: Blessings! (1940)

Editorial from the November 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main object of life is surely to be happy. Yet there are quite a number of people in the world to-day who forget this obvious fact or are so distorted in outlook that the mere being happy appears to them as a sign of weakness.

For instance, Dean Inge, in an article on the present war entitled “Blessing in Disguise" (Evening Standard, October 31st, 1940), opens up as follows: —

Every nation that has remained strong and healthy has been obliged periodically to light for its life. This is not an agreeable conclusion for a Pacifist, but such, I am afraid, must be the verdict of history. . . . The amiable but feckless Polynesians are descended from hardy mariners who performed the astonishing feat of crossing half the Pacific in open boats.

There is a fatal flaw in both of the above statements.

Let us, in the first place, glance at the nations that fought for their lives.

The Athenians, at the summit of their wealth and power, fought for their existence against the Spartans. They went down and never recovered. The Romans, at the time their frontiers were most extensive, found their existence challenged by the barbarians upon their borders. The latter over-ran the Empire and Rome went down never to rise again. The same story is true of the succeeding Empires of the Arabs and the Turks. France, under Napoleon, fought for its existence and went down, and in recent years Czechoslovakia and Finland have shared the same fate.

No, it is something else than lighting that is necessary to keep a nation permanently strong and healthy.

Turn now to the “feckless Polynesians." When first visited by the white man they were free of disease, long-lived, and healthy and happy. All travellers who visited them in the early days bear witness, without exception, to the fine physique, beauty, and happiness of the Polynesians. They have been described again and again as childlike in the joyousness of their lives, which were chiefly occupied with swimming and decking themselves out with flowers. It was the coming of the white man that altered all this, turning them into joyless beasts of burden, subject to the strange diseases that afflict the civilised white people all over the earth.

The Polynesian was happy because nature and the climate enabled them to get the means of life with little labour and he had plenty of leisure to be happy. Civilisation deprived him of his former leisure and compelled him to labour painfully to satisfy his needs. It did this because it brought a new idea into the simple life of the native, the idea of private ownership and the pursuit of profit. How the present native population of Polynesia must sigh for the good, old “feckless” days!

But even Dean Inge seems to be dubious about the strong and healthy result of fighting for our existence, for later on in the article he writes: —

  Those who prate about a better social order after the war are talking mischievous nonsense. However the war ends, we shall be an impoverished nation. We shall all have to work harder and spend less. 

What a future for the mass of the population who always have to work hard and have little to spend at the best of times. Better, perhaps, the life of the “feckless” Polynesian, which was full to the brim with happiness, though it lacked all the civilised adjuncts which have cost so much effort to acquire, and yet in the main give so little joy under the present social system.