Law and Property. (1911)

From the October 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is often thought that the existence of the “law” is a providential thing, and that its maintenance (usually expressed in the term “preservation of law and order”) is an aim worthy of the greatest effort of every citizen.

But history proves that the law is closely linked with property, that is that the first exists for the protection of the latter.

Now does the working class possess property? If so, then to that extent the law protects the interests of the working class, even though that law is framed and exercised by the capitalist class. But such is not the case, for the proletariat is propertyless, and possesses but one commodity, viz., labour power.

But what about his clothes, his furniture, etc., do not these constitute the worker’s property ? The answer is, no. For by what are these necessities procured ?

They are procured with the wages of the worker, and if we read Karl Marx carefully, what do we find on this particular point ?

This—that wages (in the hands of the capitalist) are a part of capital, and that the capitalist ultimately receives again that particular portion known as wages.

By attending to his physical needs the labourer reproduces labour-power, which labour-power is given back to the capitalist for the accumulation of more capital—the production of surplus-value.

Therefore it is obvious that the working class have no property, and to speak of the “preservation of law and order” is synonymous with the phrase “perpetuation of capitalism.”

The law is the safeguard of the class in power; its function is the suppression of the voice and claims of the subordinate class and the monopoly of the means of life by the ruling class. The Socialist recognises that the economic basis of any society determines the nature and functions of the institutions built upon that basis. Law is a capitalist institution, and therefore works for the benefit of the capitalist class.

J. H. Lamb

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

Is Money the Master? (1976)

From the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite the fact that the great majority of people never manage to obtain very much of it, money is without doubt the dominant thing in the life of everybody.

Those who have little of it are usually those who work for wages producing the wealth of society. Those who have a lot of it are usually those who produce nothing, but who own means of wealth production. Right away a contradiction presents itself. Those who spend their lives working, carrying out all the multifarious tasks in the world, when they come to the end of their working lives have accumulated precious little. Productiveness and possession are polar opposites.

Money is to the system we live under what oxygen is to organic life, the essence of existence. To most people’s minds, money is part of the natural order of things without which continued existence would be impossible. Money, or considerations resting on money, forms the basis of nearly everything we say and do. It is the centre of most everyday conversation. The theme and plot of most of what is euphemistically called entertainment on TV etc. The politician of the system would be speechless if he could not refer to money. Every promise and reform scheme from pensions to pollution and from H-bombs to education is argued in money terms. The reason given for promoting many reforms is to save money. The excuse for not pursuing others is that they haven’t got the money. Which is shadow and which is substance is a question most would find hard to answer. Such reverence is felt for money that its complete artificiality is rarely noticed.

Exchange & Incentive

To establish, as Marx did, that money is a means of exchange, a standard of price and a measure of value, is to raise the question as to why such a medium is needed. Again, most people and certainly the politicians would not answer the question. The working class need money to obtain life’s essentials, food, clothing and shelter. People have to buy and sell in order to live. It is accepted that access to life’s needs is possible only through money. So money is all-powerful. The legal machinery of the state stands ready to punish anyone found trying to obtain goods without money. Another contradiction. If money is there to circulate goods, why is it a barrier standing between you and what you cannot afford—even though you helped produce it?

If audiences in Hyde Park are anything to go by (they must represent a cross-section of the working class) money is the only conceivable incentive for doing anything in the minds of most people. That such a distorted view of life can prevail as popular opinion underscores the fact that the dominant ideas in society are those of the ruling class. (No, this does not rule out Socialism, because ruling-class ideas will cease to dominate when the workers have had enough of capitalism.) The idea that money is the real incentive for doing anything is part of the wider ideology of capitalism, an attempt to justify the profit motive.

The capitalist only risks his money in investments because he hopes profit will be forthcoming. This keeps him on his toes because he has to compete, and profit is his just reward for the service he provides for society. The workers, of course, should be grateful because he provides them with work. So monetary gain, in one form or another, is normal and natural. After all, nobody does anything for nothing. Simple, isn’t it? You must be a crank or a utopian dreamer to advocate a world without money.

Social Relations

The pundits of capitalism can avoid the really awkward questions, because their crude rationalization— the three-card trick—is accepted. Where did the capitalist get the money which he seeks to reinvest for further profit? How did a minority come to own and control the means of wealth production in the first place? Does not man’s development stretch back over many hundreds of thousands of years of communal existence without money, and without private property in the means of production? Were the first class systems (the beginnings of recorded history) not built upon the violent theft of common land and the ownership of slaves? Is the wages system operating throughout the world today anything more than a form of slavery?

The capitalist (state or private) is not saddled with direct personal responsibility for feeding, housing and maintaining his employees, as was the slaveowner. He pays them a wage out of the wealth they produce and which he owns, and they maintain themselves. Also, unlike the slaves of old who changed hands when they were bought or sold by their owners, the modern wage-slave is “free” to hire himself to any capitalist who is interested in his particular skills or abilities. This is what freedom amounts to for the working class.

But while a wage-worker can divorce himself from a particular capitalist, he cannot for long divorce himself from capital. Wage-labour is utterly dependent upon capital. Capital is utterly dependent upon wage-labour. They co-exist in mutual antagonism. Capital can live only on continuous supplies of fresh labour to reproduce it by the creation of new wealth, and labour submits to the draining away of its life- force, because in replenishing the vampire capital it is allowed to maintain and reproduce itself.

Those who believe the money system is natural and eternal have not begun to understand the world they live in, or the many phases of development through which human society has passed. Man did not descend from the trees clutching bundles of inflated dollars, roubles or pound-notes and head straight for the nearest supermarket. The nearest supermarket was about two million years away in the future. The universal rôle of money is a fairly recent development, historically speaking. For the far greater part of man’s existence he has produced the wherewithal of life without the use of money.

Attitudes

“Nobody does anything for nothing.” That is a glib piece of ignorance on the part of those who think money is the only possible incentive, but in another sense it is true. Man has always worked and produced to stay alive. That is not doing something for nothing. Even today, with the prevalence of the perverse attitudes ingrained by capitalism, people do a tremendous amount of work without receiving any money. The satisfaction gained by millions of people from the often back-breaking work of gardening, in many cases, simply to create a colourful display of flowers, is one of hundreds of possible examples.

Buried somewhere deep in the muddle-minds of the money-incentive school is the vague suspicion that work, as employment, lacks any satisfaction and sense of achievement. People only do it because they have to. Perhaps what they are really trying to say is that they can’t imagine any mentally healthy person doing many of the jobs done today, unless made to. Capitalism engenders many such tasks. Jobs that are monotonous, unfulfilling or socially destructive: we might instance banking, insurance, munitions-making and thinking-up fairy stories for TV commercials—there are many more. Work under capitalism means employment, working for wages. Work has lost much of its pleasure for most people. The idea of work (as employment) is not to produce clothing, food or furniture, but to obtain money. Surely this relegation of usefulness and the elevation of money to the supreme position in society, far from being a reason for the universal acclamation of money, is the strongest ground for condemning capitalism.

Very early in his life Marx understood and wrote about human alienation. Marx was a great admirer of the works of Shakespeare, and in 1844 he wrote an appreciation of Shakespeare’s grasp of the nature of money. Marx quotes from Timon of Athens:

Gold ! yellow, glittering, precious gold ! No gods,

I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens !

Thus much of this will make black white; foul fair; 

Wrong right; base noble; old young; coward valiant. 

. . . Why, this

Will lug priests and servants from your sides;

Pluck stout men’s pillows from behind their head;

This yellow slave

Will knit and break religions; bless the accursed;

Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves,

And give them title, knee and approbation 

With senators on the bench: this is it T

hat makes the wappen’d widow wed again;

She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores 

Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices 

To the April day again. Come, damned earth.

Thou common whore of mankind, that putt’st odds 

Among the rout of nations . . .

Image or Reality ?

Marx’s essay, where he also quotes from Goethe’s Faust, runs to five pages. Space prevents reproduction in full. It is a stirring piece of writing. A short excerpt might prompt another look at capitalism by some of those who too readily swallow its sales talk.

I am an evil, dishonest, unscrupulous, dull-witted man, but money is held in honour — hence so is its possessor. Money is the highest good, hence its possessor is good: money saves me the trouble of being dishonest, so I am assumed to be honest. I am dull-witted, but since money is the real spirit of all things, how can its possessor be lacking in spirit? More-over, he can buy the cleverest people; and if a man has power over the clever-minded, is he not cleverer than they? I who, through money, can do anything the human heart desires — do I not possess all human virtues? Does not my money therefore transform all my inabilities into their opposite?

Capitalism has the deceptive knack of turning things into their opposites. The imaginary has thus become the greatest reality. Man’s power does not derive from money. The power of money derives from man.

Socialism will end human alienation. In a world based upon common ownership, money will not exist. People will relate to each other purely as human beings. They will co-operate to produce life’s requirements and freely use or consume what they need. Under capitalism, need can only manifest itself through money; capitalism presumes that where money is lacking, no need exists.

Harry Baldwin

We measure our needs by society (1958)

From the April 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

"A noticeable increase of wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid growth of wealth, luxury, social needs, social enjoyment.

Thus, although the enjoyments of the worker have risen, the social satisfaction they give has fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capitalists, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the state of development of society in general.

Our needs and enjoyment spring from society, we measure them, therefore by society and NOT by the objects of their satisfaction.

Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.

Wage-Labour and Capital. Karl Marx.

Paradox or Illusion ? : Old Ghosts in New Pyjamas (1920)

From the July 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fair but False.

An article by Christopher Sandiway which appeared in “Reynolds’s Newspaper” of June 6th, while written in the fullest sympathy with the workers, presents in a new form errors that were exposed many years ago by Marx in his famous work, ”Value, Price and Profit.” If those who wish to help the workers towards their emancipation would only study this work, they would not be in danger of perpetrating the illusions so ably exposed there.

Mr. Sandiway tells an imaginary friend, who is, presumably, a so-called brain-worker, that when his wages go up the value of the hand-workers’ wages goes down.

Not so Simple.

Now this is obviously untrue, for if one section of the workers obtains a rise of wages the increase has to be paid by the capitalists, who cannot reduce the wages of the other sections, or raise prices because of that increase. They must therefore pocket the loss.

Mr. Sandiway is not aware of this fact, so he goes on to elaborate the idea. He says :

  “Let the entire population be represented by ten men, the product of whose labour is owned and controlled by the landlord and employing class. After the latter have taken all the produce they require, the remainder we will imagine, is placed in a store and will just supply the men’s material necessities. The allowance is a fixed quantity, or may vary in a slight degree at the will of the controllers.”

The True Facts.

This illustration by no means represents what happens. In the days of Pharaoh goods may have been stored and rationed in the manner suggested, but even then the total quantity had to vary according to the number of slaves to be fed and could not, therefore, be fixed. The capitalist method of production does not rest on chattel slavery; its method is wage slavery. Under the first the worker was the property of his master and was completely under his control. But the wage slave is free to bargain over his conditions because he is the sole owner of his labour-power. It is true that he bargains at a disadvantage, but the it he does bargain and can, if he prefers to starve or beg, refuse to sell his labour-power places him in a different position from the chattel slave. The share he obtains of the wealth produced is no longer dependent upon the will of the capitalist and the latter does not take what he requires but what he can.

Continuing, Mr. Sandiway says:

  “Supposing the wages of the men to be equal at first, each is entitled to l-10th of the contents of the store. But one man who goes to work in a silk hat and frock coat, demands an increase to keep up appearances. If therefore his wages are doubled the contents of the store must now be divided into eleven parts, for one man counts as two. This man’s share is thus 2-11ths, and the remaining nine get 1-11th each, prices have thus gone up for all, since the quantity for the same money is less.”

What it Leads To.

As Mr. Sandiway has failed to show that in capitalist society the total share of the workers is fixed, but only imagines it, his figures are purely imaginary and the ten workers, instead of continuing to receive the 10-10ths among them, now receive ll-10ths. The real value of the wages of the nine men has not changed : the tenth man has doubled his income, and the fact that he can buy double the quantity of goods that each of the others can buy does not make their position any the worse.

To see where his suppositions finally lead him we must follow Mr. Sandiway further.

First he supposes that another man of the ten obtains a 100 per cent, rise in wages, which, on his previous manner of reckoning (he cannot even take the trouble to get his own arithmetic right, and when his “silk hat” doubles his 1-10th he has, not 2-11ths but 2-11ths !) leaves the remaining eight with 1-12th each. Then he says

  “The remaining eight seeing prices rising, and being manual workers,’ down tools,’ and as it is a question of mere paper without real material loss to himself, the controller agrees to double their wages. The contents of the store must now be divided into twenty parts to correspond with the money out-flow, each man getting 2-20ths, or 1-10th, and things are as they began.”

There is one question that Mr. Sandiway might have asked himself. If the capitalists can by the issue of more paper money, or by raising prices at their own sweet will, cancel a rise of wages, why do they resist the demands of the workers at all? Why do they not adopt one or both of these expedients and save the disorganisation of business caused by strikes, of which they complain so bitterly ? He is cute enough to see that increased production might not, of itself, bring down prices. He says:

  “Extra production may merely take the form of luxuries for the well-to-do. It may even be wilfully destroyed to keep up prices, or cornered for the same purpose.”

But if any of these expedients are necessary to the capitalists in order to prevent prices from falling, Mr. Sandiway’s previous speculations fall to the ground. Capitalists destroy wealth by agreement when supply overtakes demand, thus showing that they are quite incapable of exercising collective control over the production of wealth. They only find out that supply is overtaking demand when prices fall. That they have to adopt such panic measures as destroying wealth shows how completely they are market ridden with regard to prices.

Among his other illusions Mr. Sandiways imagines that high prices can only be explained by the dwindling value of money. He calls it “the great bradbury illusion” and he thinks that he has explained what happens in his illustration where ” 2-20ths being found equal to 1-10th, things are as they began.” Of course he has really explained nothing.

If two bradburys will only buy the same amount of commodities that one did previously one of three things must have happened. Either the prices of commodities have gone up while the value of the gold represented by the bradbury remained the same, or the value of the gold has fallen, necessitating more of it to express the same value in commodities, or the value of the gold and the prices of commodities have both risen, but prices in far higher degree. If Mr. Sandiway thinks that the pound note does not represent one pound in gold, he must explain why it is that pound notes can be exchanged for gold at the Bank of England on demand.

As neither he nor any of the inflated currency cranks have yet succeeded in explaining this point, nor have attempted to show that the value of gold has fallen, they have failed to prove a paradox, and we are justified in presuming that things are what they seem — that prices have actually risen and not that paper juggling makes it merely appear so.

There are two factors that may cause prices to rise : first, an increase in the labour-time required to produce commodities ; secondly, the demand being greater than the supply. Under the first heading an increase in the labour time required to produce commodities, and under the second an extension of markets, which would increase demand, or the elimination of competition through the industrial paralysis of large wealth-producing areas.

With regard to the main stream of commodities that provides for the maintenance of society, it is an indisputable fact that the labour-time required for their production, instead of increasing, diminishes. Modern machinery and methods, constantly improving are continually reducing the labour-time required for production. It is obvious, too, that no new markets have been discovered. If there had been, the necessity for a world war to decide who should dominate existing markets would not have arisen. There remains, then, only one explanation of high prices—the elimination of competition through the commercial paralysis of large industrial areas. The countries that have been worsted in the world war are failing to compete, thus leaving a shortage of commodities to be made up by the victors, the irony of the situation being that the wage-slaves who fought and created these possibilities for their masters, have to submit to the higher prices, the capitalists strenuously resisting, all the while, every effort of theirs one-time “heroes” to raise wages.

All the cheap clap-trap about the “vicious circle” of wages rising, then prices, to be repeated again and again, is mere bluff, the object of which is to restrain the workers from asking for more. High wages are not the cause of high prices. Prices are high because demand is greater than supply, and the workers are compelled to struggle for higher wages in order to maintain their standard of living. When prices fall it will be because the markets cannot absorb all the goods produced, then unemployment will be greater and wages will fall. Thus wages are seldom for any length of time above the bare cost of living on the average, and such periods are about balanced by the periods when they are below. And it becomes increasingly difficult for the workers to force up wages, even on a rising market, because during the most prosperous times the supply of labour-power is always greater than the demand.

If Mr. Sandiway, therefore, examines the capitalist method of production in itself instead of looking at the results and imagining the process, he will find that the capitalists do not take from the wealth produced by the workers “all the produce they require.” Instead, they take all the wealth produced, and after realising by its sale the surplus value contained in it—the value added to the material over and above the wages paid to those who add that value (i.e., the workers) —use the proceeds partly to satisfy their personal needs and partly to extend the process of exploitation. The difference between the actual result and Mr. Sandiway’s being that the capitalists reduce the quantity of labour-power they purchase when the demand for commodities slackens, and, consequently, reduce the amount of produce that goes to the workers. The workers’ share is not fixed, but varies according to the capacity of the markets to absorb the products of their labour.

If Mr. Sandiways were to examine the figures relating to the number of workers engaged in productive work and the large number serving the capitalists personal interests. He might then realise how small a portion of the total wealth produced goes to the actual producers. He would also realise that prices would go up whether the workers asked for more wages or not, if the markets were favourable. He would also find that wages bear no relation to prices. Being the price of labour power, they can rise and fall quite independently of prices, and that without affecting them, as there is so wide a margin between the total wealth produced and the total wages paid.

If his sympathies are with the workers, therefore, Mr. Sandiway should study these facts instead of telling them that when “the brainworkers get a rise in wages it is at the expense of the handworkers” and vice versa. He should then tell them that the real antagonism is between the working class as a whole and the capitalist class, that while they are forced to struggle for higher wages when prices rise, their wages fall when the demand for labour-power slackens, thus keeping them always on the poverty line.

F. Foan

A Brief Exposition of Socialist Theory. (1920)

From the January 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

Contrary to what many people suppose, Socialism is based upon a very solid foundation of scientific formulae. These scientific explanations of social phenomena, or in brief, theories, though not numerous, are of immense value to the cause of working class emancipation, for they give a proper direction to those longings and aspirations which must inevitably arise within a slave class not utterly beyond redemption, instead of leaving those worthy and very desirable emotions to the mercy and misdirection of uneducated sentiment. The writer proposes to briefly survey these theories in this series of articles, and to show their significance.

The first of the formulae to come under our notice is that which goes by the name of the Materialist Conception of History, the formulization of which we owe to Marx and Engels, although the principle was independently discovered and expounded by Lewis Morgan, the great American sociologist.

The Materialist Concept is a key to the interpretation of history. As its name implies, it attributes to material things the cause of that ceaseless change which is the subject matter of history, and is directly opposed to other interpretations of history, which ascribe historical change to human and superhuman intelligence.

The Materialist Concept declares that the roots of social change are to be found in the means and methods by which society gets its livelihood. Society gets its living by production. Men "only produce when they work together in a certain way," says Marx ("Wage-Labour and Capital"). "In order to produce they mutually enter upon certain relations and conditions, and it is only by means of these relations that their relation to nature is defined, and and production becomes possible."

This being so, it is plain that the nature of those relations must be determined by the stage of development reached by the means and methods by which they get their livelihood. Let us find an example in the old threshing flail and the modern threshing machine.

The flail, being a nonexpensive tool operated by one man, could be and was. at all events in the period which it typifies—the Middle Ages —owned by the man who operated it. It is clear, however, that the modern threshing machine cannot be owned by the operator, since it takes not one, but about a dozen men to operate it. It might be jointly owned by them all, in which case the relations set up between them would be those of partners ; it might be owned by one of them, or by somebody who took no part in the working of it, in which case the relations between the operators and the owner would be those between employees and employer, or it might be owned by the community as a part of the socially-owned means of production, in which case an entirely new set of social relations would arise. The same relations, however, which arose out of men getting their living together with the flail (as one of the instruments of production) can never shape themselves out of the co-operative operation of the threshing machine.

It must not be taken that our example shows that what has converted the peasant, operating his own flail for his own benefit, and standing in a certain group of relations to those about him, into a wage worker operating a threshing machine for a master, is the development of the threshing tool into the threshing machine merely. As a matter of fact, of course, this development was a slow and tortuous process, and various means have been resorted to to knock grain out of the ear—treading out by oxen and threshing by horse-driven machines, for instance. The relation of wage worker and employer, also, developed generations before the modern threshing machine was invented. Indeed, it is quite plain that before the latter could becornr a practical proposition this one thing essential to its operation as a general means of production had to exist—a class of men who were willing to work for wages.

Nevertheless our example shows that the flail (the terms are used as symbols of the prevailing
instruments of labour), as a means of enabling men to work for themselves, and the threshing
machine, as a means of employing men for wages, are the foundation of two separate and utterly distinct sets of relations between men, social relations, in short.

A. E. Jacomb

(To be Continued.)

Link to Part 2.

Aspect: Increasing Misery (1971)

The Aspect column from the January 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The theory of The Socialist Party of Great Britain is Marxist in the sense that certain of our key ideas about society, economics and politics are derived from Karl Marx.

Although our case rests entirely on its own merits and not on what Marx may or may not have said, we have always been ready to defend Marx’s views where we believe them to be correct against criticisms based on an ignorance of what he wrote.

Recently for instance, the Guardian claimed that “Marx has been proved wrong on fundamentals; the workers far from being denied a fair share of profits and so becoming poorer, are vastly better off”. Is this true? Was it fundamental to Marx’s economic theory that under capitalism the workers would come to own less and less material possessions?

The short answer is, No. Marx did not believe that the amount of goods and services the workers consumed would necessarily have to decline. What he did say was that the misery of the workers would increase, but he did not equate this misery with destitution. For him, as we shall see, misery referred to the general circumstances under which workers, however well-paid, had to live and work.

Poverty can be used in two senses: absolutely, to refer to a low standard of living in terms of a given small amount of goods and services, or relatively, to refer to a low standard of living compared with that of others. There can be no doubt as to where Marx stood on this issue. In one of his earliest economic writings Wage Labour and Capital (first given as a series of lectures in 1847, and revised and republished by Engels in 1891) Marx wrote:

  A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut. The little house shows now that its owner has only very slight or no demands to make; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighbouring palace grows an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls. 

  A noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the enjoyments of the worker have risen, the social satisfaction that they give has fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the state of development of society in general. Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.” (Marx-Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1, pp.93-94, Moscow, 1958)

Marx understood subsistence, too, in a relative sense. According to his theory, wages fluctuate about the subsistence level of the worker. Certain critics (and even supporters) have taken this to mean that there was a fixed amount of goods and services above which real wages could never rise. This so-called Iron Law of Wages was repudiated by Marx. He regarded the subsistence level as something which varied not only amongst workers of different skills but also from place to place, in the same place at different times and even, to a small extent, under the influence of the workers’ own trade union activities.

To suggest that Marx expected wages to fall towards, and even below, some absolute poverty line is to misunderstand him completely.

Marx also writes in Wage Labour and Capital that, even though the most favourable situation for the working class under capitalism is the fastest possible growth of capital, “however much it may improve the material existence of the worker, does not remove the antagonism between his interests and … the interests of the capitalists” (p.98). Marx returned to this theme in Chapter XXV of Capital which considers “the ‘influence of the growth of capital on the lot of the labouring class”.

Marx’s comments on the occasions when the wages of some workers have risen as a result of a temporary labour shortage again make it quite clear that high wages do not end the economic exploitation of the working class.

  The more or less favourable circumstances in which the wage-working class supports and multiplies itself, in no way alters the fundamental character of capitalist production.” (p.613).

  A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it. (p.618, Moscow, 1961). 

Later in the same chapter just before the passage about the “accumulation of misery”, Marx explicitly states that high wages do not affect the misery of workers either:

   In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. (p.645)

Clearly by misery Marx cannot have meant absolute poverty. For, as this passage shows, workers may be better off materially but still worse off in some other sense. This referred to the conditions under which they had to work. Marx mentions the boring drudgery workers had to perform under capitalism in place of the pleasure they could get in a Socialist society from creating useful things. He also mentions the fact that workers are employed by capitalists and deprived by them of the fruits of their labour. As he put it in 1875 in a criticism of the Iron Law of Wages:

  The wage-worker has permission to work for his own subsistence, that is, to live, only insofar as he workers for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter’s  co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labour by extending the working day or by developing the productivity, that is, increasing the intensity of labour power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment. (“Critique of the Gotha Programme”, Selected Works, Vol. II, p.29)

In the next article we will examine this concept of “relative wages” which Marx did believe would tend to decline under capitalism.

In the meantime readers are referred to two useful articles: 

• Poverty or Misery? Socialist Standard, January 1957. 
• Marx’s “Increasing Misery” Doctrine by Thomas Sowell, American Economic Review, March 1960.

Aspect: Relative Wages (1971)

The Aspect column from the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month we refuted the suggestion that Marx held that under capitalism the amount of goods received by the working class would gradually fall below the poverty line. We showed that by “misery” Marx could not have meant absolute poverty of destitution because he stated on a number of occasions that working class misery would grow, even if wages were high. Finally, we promised to examine in this issue the concept of “relative wages”.

Marx first introduces this concept of  in Wage Labour and Capital, one of his early lectures on economics dating from 1847.

In section IV Marx distinguishes three relations involving wages:

First, the actual sum of money the worker receives from his employer which he calls “nominal wages” and which we would now call “money wages”.

Second, the actual amount of goods and services which at any time this sum of money will buy, or “real wages”.

(In this age of inflation workers are all too familiar with this distinction.)

Third, says Marx, “wages are, above all, also determined by their relation to the gain, to the profit of the capitalist – comparative, relative wages”. Relative wages, he goes on, “express the share of direct labour in the new value it has created to the share which falls to accumulated labour, to capital”.

Marx himself had not invented this idea; it was originally put forward by David Ricardo. Indeed at this time before he had fully worked out his theories Marx could properly be described as a “Ricardian socialist”, as the followers of Ricardo who gave his theories an anti-capitalist aspect were called.

Relative wages (i.e., the workers share in the product of their labour) can fall even though real wages (i.e., the amount of goods they receive) have risen, as a simple example will show.

Because value is measured by the amount of labour expended over time, the total amount of new value produced in a given time will always be the same (provided the skills of the workers remain unchanged). Thus if productivity increases and more wealth is produced in the same period, then the prices of each individual commodity will fall but the total value of all of them together will remain the same. Assume that, as a result of an increase in productivity, prices fall by 5 per cent. If wages remained unchanged, then real wages would rise by nearly 5 per cent. Relative wages, however, would be unchanged. But say money wages were to fall but not by as much as prices. The workers would still be better off in terms of the goods they received but their relative wages would have fallen.

As Marx put it:

  The share of capital relative to the share of labour has risen. The division of social wealth between capital and labour has become still more unequal. With the same capital, the capitalist commands a greater quantity of labour. The power of the capitalist over the working class has grown, the social position of the worker has deteriorated, has been depressed one step further below that of the capitalist. (Wage Labour and Capital, section IV)

Nearly twenty years later in 1865 Marx returned to this theme in another popular lecture on economics. Here he assumes that wages fall by as much as prices, which would mean that the workers would be no better off materially, and comments:

   Although the labourer’s absolute standard of life would have remained the same, his relative wages, and therewith his relative social position, as compared with that of the capitalist, would have been lowered. If the working man should resist that reduction of  relative wages, he would only try to get some share in the increased productive powers of his own labour, and to maintain his former relative position in the social scale. (Value, Price and Profit, Chapter XIII)

We are now in a position to say in what sense Socialists think the working class tends to become worse off as capitalism develops. They tend to become worse off in terms of the value of the amount of goods they receive compared with the value of what they produce. Saying that under capitalism the share of the working class in the wealth they produce will tend to fall is quite a different proposition to saying that the amount of goods and services they receive will fall. Most of those who accuse Marx of having believed that capitalism would reduce the working class to starvation have failed to understand this key distinction, which he took over from Ricardo, between relative wages and real wages. Relative, rather than real, wages is what tends to decline.

Capitalism is not to be justified by comparing the standard of living of most workers today with the lower standard of their grandfathers’ yesterday. The valid comparison is between what people get today and what they would get if modern industry were commonly owned and geared to producing for use not profit.

In any event, the case for Socialism does not rest on capitalism producing a poverty-stricken and down-trodden working class. Indeed, if capitalism were to do this Socialism would be impossible because it could not be  established by what Marx called “one level mass of broken wretches past salvation” (Value, Price and Profit). Socialism, both for its establishment and for its functioning, demands people who have learned the technical and social skills needed to live in a modern technological society. It is by training the working class in this rather than by completely impoverishing them that capitalism undermines itself and produces its own grave-diggers.

The case for Socialism rests on the fact that a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production can provide a better life for people who are now members of the working class, in terms of quality as well as in terms of satisfying material needs, than can capitalism.

The Professor and the Dustman (1974)

From the April 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Professor Samuelson’s book Economics: An Introductory Analysis is 794 pages long. It is the basic textbook for students of economics at American universities. In this mass of words there are only a meagre dozen or so references to Marx and Socialist ideas. That fact alone speaks volumes about the conspiracy against Marxian economics and Socialism in the so-called centres of learning.

Bland statements in the book like “A billion people, one third of the world’s population, blindly regards Das Kapital as economic gospel” display the Professor’s ignorance. How many people (in Russia and China, presumably the main places to which he is referring) have actually read any of Marx, let alone Capital? and what has state-capitalist Russia got to do with Marx’s main thesis that capitalist society, having created by technological advancement the possibilities for satisfying all man’s physical needs, should be replaced by Socialism — that is, a world-wide system based on common ownership and production for use?

Samuelson also states the following (pages 105-6):

  His (Marx’s) assertion that the rich will become richer and the poor poorer cannot be sustained by careful historical and statistical research. In Europe and America there has definitely been a steady secular improvement in minimum standards of living, whether measured by food, clothing, housing or length of life.

It is about time the Professor came out of his academic dark-room to look at the real world round him. For the working class, that is the vast majority, a study of Socialist ideas would put them on the right lines for solving the myriad problems they face all over the globe. The first step is to analyze correctly the society that surrounds them: a step equally necessary for the intellectual and the manual worker — say, the Professor and his dustman.

Capitalism is the system of society that exists over most of the world today. Those areas of the globe that are still surviving in semi-feudal conditions are being unavoidably brought into it. What is this system of society? It is based on private (or State) property relationships. The resources necessary to create wealth of whatever form are owned by, and therefore operated in the interests of, a small minority of the population. Production of the essentials (and luxuries) of life takes place solely because the owners of the means of wealth production hope to make a profit when what is produced is sold on the world markets. The ultimate object is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the capitalist class.

There are certain features of capitalist society which can be distinguished. The converse of the fact that the instruments of production and what is produced belong to a small minority is that the vast majority own nothing other than their ability to work. Most workers in this country do not own the houses they live in, the cars they drive nor the washing machines they use; often even the clothes they wear are on credit. The fact that most people own almost nothing is even more apparent at the factories and offices where they work. The machines, raw materials etc. that they use, and the commodities they produce, belong to others. Other features of the landscape of capitalism are buying and selling, money, prices (including of course wages), employer and employee, and production for sale (commodity production). All these are identification marks of capitalism. They are all evident in the U.K., U.S.A., Russia, China, Japan, etc. Some of these things existed in a limited form in pre-capitalist society — e.g. a limited amount of commodity production in feudal society; none of them will exist in Socialist society.

Another characteristic of capitalism is great wealth alongside great poverty. The wealth of capitalist society is evident in vast luxury items (expensive houses, cars, hotels and so on) but the poverty side is even more evident. If it wasn’t, then government statistics make it abundantly clear. A report was published on 22nd February 1974 (see The Guardian of that date) based on figures from the Central Statistical Office. ‘‘Whatever happened to the Welfare State?” by George Clarke of the City Poverty Committee argues that living standards for one British citizen in four are now worse than they were in 1937-8. The report compares what an average family could purchase in 1937-8 with 1972, and shows that (largely because of increased food prices) one in four may well be worse off.

This sort of revelation (which, by the way, is constantly coming out of official sources) is of no surprise to the Socialist. It will clearly be a surprise to the Professor. In 1849, in his series of articles which later were published as a pamphlet under the title Wage, Labour and Capital, Marx pointed out that all wants stem from a social source. Man’s expectations depend on society’s possibilities at any given stage in man’s development. He says:

  A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it now shrinks from a little house to a hut.

When mankind is capable of producing vast quantities of things necessary to satisfy all sorts of desires which were unthought-of even fifty years ago, man’s social desires — his requirements of society — are raised proportionately. Accordingly, whether man is a socially satisfied creature depends on what needs are met at a given stage of his development. Queen Victoria did not miss a tv; now most workers at least rent one.

Because of the restrictions capitalist society places first upon production (limiting it to what can be sold on the market) and second on the consumption of the majority (the pay-packet and salary-cheque are only forms of rationing), man’s social wants are continually unsatisfied. This is what was meant by Marx when he said that under capitalism the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Note that this does not mean, as the academic misrepresenters like our Professor seem to think, that the worker necessarily becomes worse off in absolute terms. Obviously workers now use washing machines, cars, etc., that they were never able to have the use of in the past. What it does mean is that capitalist society creates contradictions for the working class by throwing up the possibilities of ever-increasing amounts of wealth whilst restricting the workers’ access to that wealth.

By its nature this outmoded system of society creates wealth, that wealth in turn creates increased demands by the workers — and yet capitalism is totally incapable of satisfying them. And those recently-published figures show that not only in relative terms do the workers get poorer as capitalism “advances”, but that in some cases they become worse off in absolute terms as well.

Anyone want a copy of Samuelson ?

Ronnie Warrington

A Labour M.P. on Russia (1953)

From the August 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the early years after the Russian revolution most people who went there went looking for something and they usually succeeded in finding what they looked for. It often depended on their prejudice or ignorance whether they found good or evil. Some claimed to see Socialism there but the S.P.G.B. said that the new rulers of Russia could not do otherwise than build up capitalism in Russia at that time and in that stage of economic and historic development. We rejected then as now all claims that Socialism was being introduced.

What to others has been miraculous achievement has to us been the normal course of capitalist industrial expansion; in a country which arrived late on the capitalist scene and had a lot of catching up to do.

If people who go to Russia believe that Socialism or Communism exists there, they will look at Russian institutions and see differences which don’t really exist or they will magnify superficial differences out of all proportion. This self-deception or misguided observation undoubtedly exists, quite apart from deliberately coloured press, screen and radio propaganda.

Mr. Harold Wilson, President of the Board of Trade in the Labour government, recently returned from Russia and wrote two articles for the Dally Mirror (June 8th-9th, 1953) on what he saw.

On the whole Mr. Wilson painted quite a rosy picture of Russia but he shows very clearly what is his own standpoint. The report opens with the revealing statement that “ten years from now Russian Production—unless China absorbs some of it—will be challenging us in the world markets.”

“The Russians are behind us now—but they are catching up.”

Although the articles were open to be read by something over 4,000,000 members of the working class, the “us” referred to is the British capitalist class because “world markets” are not the assets or interests of the workers. This fact holds good for our fellow workers in Russia too.

We are told “most women work, and old men too.”

“Of two old men, waiters at my hotel, one was nearly eighty.”

Piece-work in Russia

Mr. Wilson, when in the Labour Government, was thereby associated with government propaganda to encourage “piece-work” as a means of stepping up production. He also used to be on the staff of the Ministry of Labour and must be familiar with the complaints of British workers that as output rises piece-rates are cut by employers. He found the same in Russia.

   “They are on piece-rate there. But the piece-rate changes. As some people work faster and earn bonuses so the rate is cut—and all workers have to keep pace so that they can earn a living wage.”

The ex-Labour leader was not kind enough to tell us if in his opinion this sort of thing is Socialism, but if it is then they had better insert another “ S” in the U.S.A. and call that socialist too for exactly the same conditions prevail there. Of course we know that the Daily Worker will tell us it is “socialist wages” and “socialist competition” but they never say where it differs from capitalist wages and competition.

It seems that the Russian propaganda agencies have got the workers at it to even a worse degree there than ours have here.

   "Anyone not pulling his weight would not only be reported to the factory committees. He would be taken into a corner by his fellow-workers and get rough treatment. He would be letting the side down, perhaps imperiling the wage-rate—and hampering production." (Mr. Wilson's italics.)

Those capitalist powers ranged up against the Russian bloc MUST of necessity pretend that a totally different set-up obtains there, and the Russian bloc of capitalist nations must play the same game.

How else could they kid their respective wage-slaves to treat each other as enemies. It was exactly the same old story about Germany. If the workers of both sides got the idea that it was fundamentally the same system the world over, when they were told it must be fought they might think of fighting it at home, only with knowledge and understanding instead of bombs and guns.

Wages, Prices and Capitalism in Russia

In comparing prices of goods in Russia with their equivalents here, Mr. Wilson unavoidably makes obvious the fact that workers in Russia do the same with their wages as they do here—eke out an existence from pay-day to pay-day. “A man’s suit of the lowest price and quality costs £8 17s., a pair of low-grade shoes £1 14s. 6d. Medium quality rayon stockings—only the well-to-do wear the Russian equivalent of nylons—were 16s.” He puts the wage rate for an “unskilled worker” at roughly £5 and says “ Rents are low. They are fixed in relation to wages—usually between three and five per cent, of the weekly wage. Even so it takes hard work to provide any margin of extras.”

So there are low-grades and high-grades, low-qualities and higher-qualities, the well-to-do and the not so well-to-do.

The first thing to be straight about when ascertaining what social system prevails in any given country, is a definition and an understanding of what constitutes a social system and how to tell one system of society from another.

A system of society is the particular form under which men come together with the means of production and the sum of social relationships arising therefrom at a given stage of historic and material development. The fundamental feature which distinguishes capitalism from all other systems is the "relationship of wage labour to capital.

Marx on Capitalism

All kinds of things have been falsely attributed to Karl Marx. Lip-service has been paid to his teachings by those who try to pass as socialists. In Russia his name has been used to justify and bolster up state-capitalism. In the western bloc his name has been dragged through the gutter as a means to discredit something Marx never stood for. Both sides have freely adapted him to suit their ends, to stabilise their positions in the propaganda war.

How few have ever attempted to study the works of Marx and other socialist writers is made plain by the wide-spread confusion of the working-class. Consequent ignorance and confusion make it immensely difficult to put over the real socialist case, and people like Harold Wilson only foster that ignorance and confusion.

Marx spent the better part of his life attacking the wages-system and seeking as we do, its abolition. In “Capital” (William Reeves 5th edition) he asserts:—

    “Capital is only produced where the holder of the means of production and of subsistence meets on the market the free labourer who comes there to sell his labour-power, and that single historic condition includes an entirely new world. From that point capital proclaims itself as an epoch of social production.”
   “That which characterises the capitalist epoch is this, that labour-power acquires for the labourer the form of a commodify which belongs to him, and his labour consequently assumes the form of wage-labour.” (page 131- 132.)

In “Wage Labour and Capital ” Marx wrote:—

   "Wages, therefore, are not a share of the worker in the commodities produced by himself. Wages are that part of already existing commodities, with which the capitalist buys a certain amount of productive labour-power."

(Page 12. Marx’s Italics.)

  “If the silkworm's object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-worker.”

(Page 13.)

After showing how exploitation takes place under capitalism (through the working-class creating greater values than they receive in wages), Marx goes on to say, in his own italics:—

   "Capital therefore presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They condition each other: each brings the other into existence."

(Page 21.)

The only reason for workers needing a wage packet at the end of the week is because they are a propertyless class. Owning no means of production they therefore, in order to live, must hire themselves to those who do own. The State is the administrative and coercive apparatus of class rule, and only exists in societies torn with class struggles waged over property in the means of production.

Housing and Hovels

Further similarities between capitalism in Russia and capitalism (State or Private) in the rest of the world come out when Mr. Wilson tells us:—

   “I saw some of the houses. Housing is Moscow’s black spot
   “In the city centre, a stone's throw from the Kremlin, there are over-crowded hovels far worse than anything in our big cities. In most of these whole families live in a room 15 ft. square. But re-housing is going on fast with skyscrapers springing up. The homes I went to see on a suburban estate were much better.”

Looking round the shops and meeting the people Mr. Wilson observes:— “Sunday in a Moscow department store is like Saturday in a British department store.” The people he met were not “ sinister men with guns in their pockets nor shivering wrecks waiting to be thrown into the salt mines.”

The masses there seem to have the standard working-class outlook:— “Next to production, they talked about football.”

Mr. Wilson did not say anything about the weighty allegations of the widespread use made of forced labour by the Russian Government and we can well understand that Russian workers who resent the dictatorship may have considered it safer not to express such views to him.

He was there before the sudden removal from office of Beria so we do not know what explanation he would have given for the political set-up that renders such events inevitable.

Perhaps he ponders on how much safer it is to be a Minister administering capitalism in Britain than to be doing the same in Russia. Russia in fact is going through the phase of catching up with capitalism in the Western countries. As Mr. Wilson puts it:— “In a generation they have carried through an industrial revolution that took us 150 years.”

Being first to appear the British capitalist-class had it all their own way for a while and could allow the development of more than one party to represent sectional interests of the ruling class, land-owners and industrialists.

Some of the early struggles the workers had here are yet to be won by their fellows in Russia. A good point is made by Mr. Wilson in closing: — “remember that the ordinary people of Russia are just—ordinary people.” This can be said for every country in the world.

We want the “ordinary people” i.e„ the workers of the world to equip themselves with socialist understanding and put an end to the system that robs them, by bringing about Socialism, a wage-less, class-less world based on common ownership of the means of production.

To this end once again the Socialist Party of Great Britain extends the hand of socialist fraternity to the workers of the world.

Harry Baldwin

The reform fallacy (1977)

From the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It’s not the narrowness of the Bowl, but the smallness of their spoons.”                                                               — Marx, Value, Price and Profit.

Whilst it is frequently said that the concept of Socialism is quite easy—simple, in fact—the analysis of capitalism is by no means so. Any active Socialist propagandist will confirm that even after opponents confirm the desirability, or even necessity, of a new social order, their main argument for supporting reforms is the “practical” evidence.

Comparisons with the harrowing past, or the starving millions in the Third World, or the situation in Russia, are advanced as arguments for the great "progress” made by social reform meriting continued support. Yet it cannot be denied that the greater the “progress” the more acute the problems. And so we get the paradoxical result that the more reforms, the more sophisticated and elaborate the Welfare State— the more dissatisfaction and protest.

We are regularly reminded that ordinary workers now have colour television, motor cars, telephones, central-heated homes and more leisure. They have holidays abroad, medical treatment and pensions, all things which their forebears never enjoyed. Judged by superficial appearances, discontent should be allayed, strife assuaged, replaced by harmonious content. But it is not so!

To understand the reasons for this requires rather more than a fervent wish for a new society. It is a complicated problem based on relative proportions. If, in spite of the fact that the worker’s productivity has increased greatly by technical progress, the worker’s share or portion of the increased total wealth is relatively less than that of the capitalist, the worker is poorer compared with the values he now produces.

“Peter only establishes his own identity by comparing himself with Paul”, says Marx in Capital: i.e., his needs are what society can now provide. If the Company is able, by new machinery, to turn out twice as much wealth, the worker is producing the same values in half the time. If he goes on strike and gets a 25 per cent, increase in wages he is still 25 per cent, behind his employer, who has replaced a 50-50 division of necessary and surplus labour with a 75-25 one. “By the reduction of the necessary labour-time from 6 to 4 hours with a 12-hour working day, the rate of surplus-value has risen from 100 to 200 per cent., it had doubled.” (Kautsky, Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx.)

Marx gave some explanation of this relative position by the simple analogy of the happy man in his little house, contented enough until there arises

next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks into a hut . . . however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighbouring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

(Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital.) 

The more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him.

(Ibid.)

A recent TV interview with Kevin Keegan, the ex-Liverpool footballer, provided a similar analogy. He described his boyhood: dedicated to football, he was quite small compared with other boys. He said he was put in goal. With the small junior goalposts he could just about reach the top. But as he grew, so did the goalposts until they were so high that he was hopeless as a goalie!

The worker is the goalie and the posts are the system. However much the worker grows (his output) the goalposts always grow beyond his reach. “If, therefore, the income of the worker increases with the rapid growth of capital, there is at the same time a widening of the social chasm that divides the worker from the capitalist, an increase in the power of capital over labour, a greater dependence of labour upon capital.” (Wage-Labour and Capital.)

Horatio.

Gissa job (1988)

A Short Story from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

I went for a job interview recently. beforehand I experienced the trepidation that usually accompanies a visit to the dentist. Suitably softened up I was ushered into the Managing Director's office. My razor sharp brain assessed the situation. All my carefully planned stratagems were of no use, designed as they were to suit a one to one confrontation. I was faced not by the interviewer I had been expecting, but with an inquisitorial panel of four.

For a nano-second I imaged the scene as a nineteenth century woodcut. The present: Capital confronts Labour. The worker stands with his head bowed, his hand extended in supplication. Behind him his hungry family huddle together for comfort. Looming before him are four wolves all dressed in frock coats, their fangs bared. The image changes. The future: Socialism confronts Capital. The four capitalists are cowering in a corner surrounded by a multitude of stern workers who have just effected the transformation from production for profit to production for need.

A questioning voice jerks me back to reality. The persons interrogating me are the owning directors of this private medium sized engineering company. Isn't it odd that those who describe themselves as manufacturers are the ones who don't actually make things with their own hands? Family companies like to project an image of caring paternalism. This type of firm works hard at earning itself a reputation for job security rather than high pay.

"We may not pay the highest wages in the area," they say, "but when you work for us you're a name, not just a number." But woe betide you if even a paperclip goes missing from your desk.

The questions emanating from the quartet are designed to ascertain my suitability to contribute to, and increase, the company profits. These buggers may know nothing of Marx's Labour Theory of Value, but they know what they want. With a working life in front of them they question every action and decision of the past twenty years. If the end result is a feeling of humiliation, rejection and failure as a human being because some other wage-slave was preferred, it's because that's the way the system designed us to feel. Capitalism isn't some abstraction that is best left to the politicians and the bosses to run. Those who own the means of production and distribution have power over your life.

What is unusual, as Sherlock Holmes might have remarked, is that the vast majority of the working class, those forced to sell their labour power in order to live, see nothing unusual in the labour/capitalist relationship. However these self-same workers would agree with Marx that,

The exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person on order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live.
He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity which he has made over to another  . . .  what he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws from the mine, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages, and silk, gold, palace; resolve themselves for him into a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. And the worker who labours for eight hours — does he consider this eight hour labour as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. (Wage Labour and Capital).

Apologists of capitalism might argue that the market system offers me as much freedom of choice as it does the employer. After all, selling your labour power is a two way contract, freely entered into between buyer, the employer, and seller, the worker. And if your abilities and skills are market orientated, then you will have no problem in finding a capitalist eager to purchase the commodity on offer — your working abilities.

Members of the working class who think that a company car and the opportunity to work themselves into an early grave constitute happiness are deluding themselves. No matter how attractive the wrapping, BUPA, Luncheon Vouchers and a gold watch after twenty-five years of producing surplus value; the result remains wage-slavery. As was clear when I went for that interview  . . . 

Dave Coggan