The Dean and the Dish-cloths (1937)

From the September 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The servant problem has become an international question of high importance, and reports come from countries as far away as Japan of conferences on the matter.

It has become so urgent in this country that Mr. Brown, the Minister of Labour, is using up some of his vacation pondering over the business to try and find a solution.

What is this servant problem, anyway ? Is it the conditions under which working-class girls are forced to earn a humiliating living that are the subject of examination ? Oh dear, no! The Right Reverend Dean Inge is agitated about the matter and has given his views in an article in the Evening Standard (July 7th).

His first few words show the seriousness of the matter: —

Nobody can deny that the plight of ladies who have to run a house is becoming desperate. They run from one registry office to another. They offer preposterous wages. They put up with language from their servants which in any other employment would lead to instant dismissal.

In the end these poor genteel ladies, who dread the thought of soiling their lily-white hands, are driven to handle a dish-cloth themselves, instead of making dish-cloths of others: —

Finally, they are often driven from house and home and take refuge in an hotel or a bungalow where they do their own household work. The collapse of country house life is due as much to this trouble as to predatory taxation.

We might suggest that the Dean urges upon these people the value of prayer and Christian resignation to the will of God !

The worker, living in slum or semi-slum districts, is hardly likely to break his heart, nowadays, over the collapse of country house life, or the prospect of the Dean’s lady friends having to do a bit of housework themselves. But it is a very good example to the workers of the outlook of people in Dean Inge’s circumstances. The following is a further example of this: —

But how can a young wife, who has her own interests, do the household work and look after her children at the same time ?

The working man’s wife, it is true, manages it, but if a girl has been brought up to expect amenities which require some leisure time she cannot do both, and in thousands of cases the couple decide to have no children.

There we have it. The worker exists to minister to the needs and follies of the idlers; they presumably don’t need leisure. Anyhow, the Christ-like spirit of the Dean is above worrying about them. However, he has a glimmering of the truth: —

We can only conclude that there is a social prejudice against domestic service; and a girl who is not ashamed to stand behind a counter thinks it derogatory to answer a bell. There is in fact a lingering flavour of servile associations in domestic service which is resented in a democratic age.

It has taken a long time perhaps, but at last daughters of working-class people are revolting at the particular degradation as a rule associated with domestic service, though the need to live drives them into that service.

Another side of the picture was given by a writer in a letter to the News Chronicle for August 16th: —

The hours are too long, from 7 in the morning until 10, 11 or 12 o’clock at night sometimes.

I for one have had to serve a three-course dinner at 11.15 p.m. for four persons, to say nothing of the washing-up afterwards.

The food for the staff is often poor.

We almost live on corned beef for our lunch.

Breakfast one Dutch egg, one piece of streaky bacon, tea, bread, cakes if you buy them yourselves.

For a meal at night, bread again.

There is no thought the staff might like cheese or something tasty.

Imagine a basement kitchen in the middle of winter without a fire or boiler to warm it.

Whoever invented frilly caps and aprons should be made to wear them. You can’t sit down in comfort for fear of creasing them.

Under Socialism, when we all live in equality and there will be no fine ladies afraid to soil their hands, or fine gentlemen requiring male nurses to tie their ties, the degrading characteristics and the unnecessary frills will be removed from the business of cooking and housework, as well as the drudgery.

Gilmac.

Sex and the free market (1985)

From the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

What glorious offers the market presents us with: if you can afford to pay the price there is little that is not on sale. Food, clothing, shelter, theatre, books . . . and sex. The market knows no limit to what it can tempt the buyer with. You want sex? Then hand over the cash, sign the cheque. American Express will do nicely. In a buying and selling society sex is a commodity an item to be purchased — and money is the key to access.

The supplier of the sexual commodity is called a prostitute. There are some male prostitutes who sell to women and many males who sell their services to other men. but the overwhelming majority of prostitutes are women. As members of the working class, who have nothing to sell but their labour power, prostitutes sell sexual satisfaction — or, at least, the crude pretence of it — to male buyers.

What is the state of the market? It is difficult to assess how many prostitutes there are in Britain. Certainly, there are thousands of full-time prostitutes, thousands more who earn part of their income by selling sex, and — as will be explained further on — many thousands more who are effectively prostitutes, even if that is not in their job description. The number of prostitutes working in the cities is growing, with more women workers each month entering the supply end of the sex market. This recent increase can be explained: firstly, the recession which has led to mass unemployment has hit female workers hardest and therefore women and girls who would once have earned a wage through more conventional employment are now forced to make a living "on the game"; secondly, the low wages and unacceptably tedious jobs usually offered to young girls who are on the dole leave many of them deciding that any way of making a living is better than the indignity of the dole queue or extra-exploitative employment; thirdly, the growing rejection among female workers of the traditionally idealised image of being a wife within a happy family has led many to seek freedom from the stereotypical role of womanhood, only to discover that freedom under capitalism amounts to no more than the opportunity to become an independent item of sale on the market.

Romanticised images of prostitutes who are only in the job because they choose such work are mythical and insulting to the women who end up doing a job that no human being should have to do. Such images are akin to the popular depiction of tramps as "eccentrics" who sleep in the gutters by inclination rather than compulsion. We can dismiss the bogus picture of the high-class whore who lives in an apartment in Mayfair, dresses in Paris fashions, wears the best perfume and sends her children to public schools. In reality, most prostitutes are miserable, frightened and ashamed women who have been trapped into the job in the illusory hope that it will offer an escape route from poverty. Every day a stream of young girls travel to the big cities, their numbers increasing as small town poverty becomes more wretched believing that they will find relief from their impoverished existences in what proves to be a bewildering environment in which money is the sole passport to survival. It is no coincidence that red-light districts are usually in the close vicinity of main-line coach and train stations. In order to survive — to eat. to pay rent, to buy some clothes which might help them obtain a "decent" job — it is tempting to accept the offer of the pimp who tells them that they will be provided with security as his employees. Drug addicts, usually driven to their addiction by their frustration with a world of buying and selling, find themselves further frustrated by lack of money to buy drugs. These are ready recruits for the pimps. And the worn-out old women who are lonely and miserable and often sick, they too are driven onto the streets as discount commodities — “you can have her for half-price as she’s past her prime".

While seduction is erotic, the efforts of the sex-sellers are cold and loveless and hollow; if the pleasures of sex are exciting, the hurried moments of purchased sex are dull and dehumanising. The market not only turns practical existence into a struggle in which those without money lose, but also generates a sickly emotional poverty — a bankruptcy of human feelings.

Getting back to market values

In those glorious years of "Victorian Values”, so beloved by she who presides today over the screwing of the British working class, the rich grew prosperous thanks to unfettered exploitation while tens of thousands of women workers were turned into prostitutes. There were 80,000 prostitute women in Victorian London (Prostitution in London, Mayhew and Bracebridge. 1862). a figure supported by the most reliable academic source of the time, the medical journal, The Lancet, which declared in 1857 that one in every sixty houses in London was a brothel and one in every sixteen women a prostitute. Three years later The Saturday Review stated that there were 360,000 full-time prostitutes in Britain. Contrary to the conventional belief that Victorian sexual practices conformed to a strictly "decent" code of moral values, it is clear from an examination of historical facts that poverty, then as now, forced workers to throw decency and values to the wind. Indeed, with one in every sixteen London women forced to sell sex in order to earn a living, one can understand why our present Prime Minister, motivated by a desire to push workers off the dole queue, is so anxious to revive Victorian values. It was not only women "on the game" who were considered to be sexually purchasable in Victorian Britain: most servant and factory girls were considered open to offer by those with the money to take their pick. Victorian autobiographical tales abound with rich young capitalists who desired a female employee of theirs. How could women workers afford to refuse these offers, knowing that their future employment was at stake? (Still today, many a female employee has to make the undignified choice between accepting her boss’s advances or getting the sack). And how could women, slaving for hours for a pittance of a wage, find it easy to resist the temptation to sell their sexual favours for a sum greater than they might earn in a week? So it was that those who owned and controlled the means of wealth production and distribution demanded and obtained power over every aspect of those they exploited. (Incidentally, this was but a subtle continuation of feudal morality which gave the landlord the right, and the female serf the duty, to engage in property-determined sexual relationships.)

We would be wrong to imagine that Victorian conditions no longer exist in the modem capitalist world. In Bangkok, for example, it has been estimated that one in every three females is a prostitute. And even those employed as wage slaves in the hideous sweatshops of that city are vulnerable to the sexual demands of those who can afford to buy what is not officially for sale.

Where capitalism forces workers into undignified acts there are always moralists ready and waiting to blame the wage slaves for their sins. The vicars, never far from the scene when hookers are in town, are there to sample the wares and then tell the wretched women to repent. Repent for what for being too poor to afford to live in idleness. like the rich ladies of the capitalist class whose parasitism the vicars are there to defend? The venereologist. William Acton, writing in 1857. listed as the main causes of prostitution "natural sinfulness", "the preferment of indolent ease to labour" and "fall from virtue" (Prostitution. Considered In Its Moral, Social And Sanitary Aspects). According to William Bracebridge, prostitutes were not real women: "there is a great abandonment of everything that one may strictly speaking denominate womanly". And if prostitution was caused by sin. as was the common view, then the task of moralists had to be to offer the poor sinners severe correction an activity which many a vicar has indulged in with less than lofty motives. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister, earned the popular nickname "Gladeye". in recognition of his strenuous efforts to redeem "fallen"" women — usually back at his place. Special refuges for so-called fallen women were set up in the mid-nineteenth century — places designed to deny their occupants any kind of sensual comfort in the hope that abstinence would make them forget their sinful impulses.

Prostitutes have always been expected to feel guilty for being the victims of poverty. Not all have complied: on 24 February. 1858 The Times published a letter from an unashamed prostitute — signing herself "Another Unfortunate'" — in which an extremely clear explanation of the cause of her misfortune was given. The letter led to widespread shock among the miserable moralists, causing the editor of The Times to respond, disgustedly:

They have no remorse or misgivings about the nature of their pursuit; on the contrary, they consider the calling an advantageous one, and they look upon their success in it with satisfaction (25 February. 1858)

One might apply the same words to the editor of The Times, being a man paid a fat salary to publish lies.

The letter from "Another Unfortunate” is a unique insight into why a working-class woman became a prostitute, which would apply today as then. She describes her colleagues as "we, who are not fallen, but were always down" and asks

Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has society to abuse me? Have 1 received any favours at the hands of society? If I am a hideous cancer in society, are not the causes of the disease to be sought in the rottenness of the carcass? Am I not its legitimate child; no bastard. Sir?

She was correct: capitalism creates the walking symptoms of the market disease and it ill-becomes apologists for the market to condemn them.

In The Times of 3 July, 1985 Peter Kellner commented on an article which had appeared a week earlier in the Sun. The latter rag, in its usual effort to search the sewers for news unworthy of adult reading, ran a story under the headline PROSTITUTE CHRISTINE IS A TORY COUNCILLOR It seems that Christine Pearson, a councillor in Thanet, had been revealed by the Sun to be a practising prostitute. The validity of the report is of no concern here. Kellner's comment on the story is worth quoting, however:

I can see no coherent argument for terminating a Conservative councillor's political career on the grounds that she has been accused of selling sex . . . I defy anyone to name an occupation that applies Thatcherite principles more completely than prostitution. It is. surely, the ultimate form of flexible, non-unionised. labour-intensive small business.

People in glass houses

Under capitalism, if you are a member of the working class you need to sell what you possess — your mental and physical energies to whomever will make a purchase. All workers are prostitutes for wages. How many women are employed as barmaids, hostesses in clubs or waitresses in restaurants and are told, either explicitly or implicitly. that part of their function is to give a few thrills to the customers? How many secretaries and others employed in traditionally female jobs have little option but to accept that they are partly employed for their ornamental value? How many young girls are conditioned to want to be glamour models, even if that means being paid money to be humiliated? How many wives would soon lose their source of income from husbands if they refused to provide sex and who dictates the terms of its provision, the one with the money or the one who is dependent? How many parents condition their daughters to behave in ways which will make them desirable to men with money looking for wives? Did not Marx refer to marriage as "legalised prostitution" and, for millions of women, is it not their role in life to be the property of a keeper? Of course, there are important distinctions between these ways of earning an income and prostitution, but the distinctions are not half as great as some would like to pretend. A letter under the headline "Life In The Pool" in The London Standard of 2 July, 1985 makes the point:

I cynically regarded my former job as a secretary as mental prostitution. This was crystallised by a spell or two in Civil Service typing pools. A nice lady sits at a desk with a register in which she enters men who want their letters typed and selects from a mass of available girls somebody to minister to one of these men . . . When the girl returns from being dictated to her name and the time she spent with him is entered. Then how long she takes to do the work (A kind of madam, the supervisor7)

Capitalism conditions workers to deceive themselves into thinking they are not quite as downtrodden and humiliated as the next person: whites are thankful not to be black, men think they are better than women and women who are not "on the game" are glad to be living in more civilised conditions than those who walk the streets. But, in one way or another, all of the virtually propertyless class are walking the streets, selling what they have to whoever will pay to take it from them. Who is the wage slave to condemn the prostitute?

The right to sell your body

In recent years movements have emerged, not seeking to abolish the cause of prostitution but to make it easier to suffer as a prostitute. Without doubt the laws on soliciting, like most laws under capitalism, are designed to punish the victim. In Britain the law does not punish the consumer who buys sex, but the women who sell it meet with several legal impediments. Opposition to these laws has come from two sources. Firstly, there are those grotesque libertarians of the so-called Right groups like the Federation of Conservative Students and the Libertarian Alliance who argue that no laws should exist to fetter any commercial transaction, be it the sale of heroin or the selling of sex through regular market channels.

Secondly, there are those feminists who have demonstrated the limitation of their social understanding by demanding the right of prostitutes to carry on their business undisturbed. Being reformists — whose aim is to mend and not end this rotten system the feminist campaigners do not have as their objective the eradication of the poverty which forces women to sell their bodies to men surely, not the action of liberated women — but the entitlement of women to pursue their undignified and oppressed employment in legal safety. While there is nothing wrong with prostitute women forming a trade union to defend themselves against market pressure (as they have done in some countries with state brothels), it is utter stupidity to equate such action with the quest for “women's liberation".

The legal right to be a prostitute gives the opportunity to be abused, exploited and wasted as a human being. Those who identify with such a right are the enemies of all workers, both women and men, and should be treated with the hostility reserved for those who obstruct the path to genuine human liberation.

Steve Coleman

The Position in Lancashire. (1909)

From the October 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

When dealing with the condition of any section of the working class the primary question always is, what are their wages? What is their cost of living ? A Government enquiry was commenced in October 1906 into various matters dealing with the wages of, and the prices paid by, the working class in Burnley, and the result was .published in the Burnley Gazette of February 12 1908. Compared with London prices, which are taken as 100, the prices index number for Burnley for all commodities was 95. The index number of rent and prices combined in Burnley was 87 compared with 100 in London. Taking the London rate of wages as 100, the Burnley index number for the building trades was 85, in the engineering the same, in the printing it was 81, in the furnishing trades 81. In the cotton trades the earnings of the male and female weavers are the same—for a four loom weaver it is given as from 22s. to 28s. per week. This, it must be remembered, is when working full time and when work is of good quality. It is absurd to claim these figures as a fair indication of the average wage of the weavers. In the Manchester Guardian of July 29th, 1908 it was stated in a special article that “If we go back for 34 or 35 years it will be seen that rates of wages are no higher to-day in the textile trades (including operative cotton spinners and weavers and jute and linen operatives) than they were in 1874.” Another fact worthy of note was thus stated by Mr. Philip Snowden in a speech in the House of Commons on January 30th, 1908, “In the most important of our industries, particularly in the textile trades, the actual number of persons employed was less than it was at some former decade.” The recent blue book “Public Health and Social Conditions,” gives the number employed in the textile trades in 1851 and 1901 as 1,671,681 and 1,301,685 respectively. Every fundamental industry wherein machinery is well established shows the same feature; this in spite of the much larger amount of raw material handled.

The wages received by the male workers are thus really inadequate to rear a family upon a “civilised” standard. Often a whole family are to be found working in the mills—man and wife, and children full and half time. Pretty fairy tales are in circulation in “middle-class” circles anent the earnings of these families when all are merrily working. One would imagine that the Income Tax assessors are missing a fertile source of revenue. But, alas, this state of financial felicity is temporary: the children marry and set up wigwams of their own, and pass through the old struggle and suffering.

Our readers know well the wage conditions in those trades where the wives of the workers work side by side with men. And for years the proportion of women to men workers has been steadily increasing. Many of the older mills are terrible from a hygenie point of view; the clouds of artificially formed vapour floating in the air do not add to their salubrity. And women toiling in such holes to within a few weeks of child-birth does not tend to produce a race of Spartans, even with the help of municipal milk depots, lady inspectors, and, let us say also, state feeding of children. We cannot wonder that such districts are notorious for their enormous infantile death-rate. Baden Powell’s boy scouts, in this part of the country at any rate, would not make ideal advertisements for a beef extract. Imagine the long ten hours of toil, every day producing miles of shoddy, adulterated cottons, every yard of which is a replica of every other yard ; stuff which would be disdainfully refused, often, by our slum proletariat, and intended ultimately for a far distant market. And our women folk up North have been so perverted by spending half their living hours under such noxious and tense conditions that it is said many of them actually prefer it to the alternative of domestic drudgery. Perhaps under capitalism there is little to choose twixt the two desolations.

There is, I understand, a legend in existence, well believed, holding that in the Lancashire textile towns a large number of the workers own the houses wherein they live. Now it is certain that to only a very small proportion does this apply. A certain number of houses are purchased by the workers with the aid of money borrowed from building and co-operative societies. It is well known that in very many cases married women, where possible, go to work in the mills to help eke out the earnings of the husband. In some instances the attempt is made to lay aside the money earned by the women folk to purchase a house through the co-operative or other societies. This money earned by the women—at an inculcalable injury to health it is sure—is the creator of some miniature working-class fortunes. The hoards are made at this cost; many of the married women actually take out their children at five o’clock in the morning to a pseudo-mother to be nursed until the cessation of work. And when man and wife return “home” after the day’s toil they find a dreary, cold home, and are face to face with that amount of household work which all know to be in itself sufficient to tax the powers of any normal woman. Anti-Socialists and others propagate tales of working-class wealth as expressed in building societies, co-operative societies, penny banks, house property, and so on. But fancy a tradesman calculating his financial position by overlooking his assets alone ! What about working-class liabilities ? I imagine it would be a fairly safe assumption to regard the assets in house property of the Lancashire textile workers as heavily balanced by their liabilities in the form of doctors’ bills, credit drapers’ accounts, money lenders debts, mortgages and other accounts owing to—the capitalist class.

This, then, is the position. The majority of Lancashire workers do not, and never expect to, own their houses. A minority attempt to, and after a few years’ struggle (wife working at mill, etc.) give up the fight in disgust. Another minority, with the help of luck and the gift of the “money sense,” sometimes even manage to get hold of a few houses, rise out of their class, and become object lessons in thrift and parsimony to the rest of the proletariat. But “one swallow does not make a summer,” and the fact that a few lucky, financially acute working men rise out of their class is no more a proof that the whole working class as a class could so be saved than the fact that a few Roman slaves were manumitted was a proof that Roman chattel slavery would be abolished in that manner.

The co-operative society is natural to Lancashire. It is its stronghold and if anywhere it has benefited the workers, Lancashire should be that place. When these societies originated they had only the small grocer possessed of little capital to fight, and a certain progress was made. But now the company shops are in the field, and it remains to be seen whether the co-operatives can survive in competion with these monster concerns. It would be of interest if some of the co-operative leaders would give us their ideas as to the origin of the precious “divi.” It is extracted, of course, from the unpaid labour of the shopmen, but co-operators seem vague as to its source. Many experiments in co-partnership have been made in Lancashire, and the village of Haggate, near Burnley, is the stock example of successful thrift, providence and foresight. Though a few working men have risen out of their class, the majority are really unable to rise above the economic, mental and moral limits which capitalism has created. The Wholesale Co-operative Society had a turnover of ten millions in 1895 ; at the end of the next decade, 1905, it was twenty millions. So that even if the movement were economically sound it is not keeping pace at all with the development of capitalism.

Lancashire is looked upon as a stronghold of trade unionism, and most of the large towns boast a trades council. These councils have not the least influence upon working-class conditions, and do not make the difference of a pipeful of tobacco to the worker. They will send a resolution on the housing question to the local M.P., pass a vigorous one condemning the Russian atrocities, then the painters will propose resolutions condemning the park-keepers for painting railings to occupy their time during the winter months. It is all petty and ephemeral. “Practical” politics and so-called bread-and-buttter questions tax the energies of the Lancashire trades councils.

Certainly the cotton operatives possess leaders ! Some of them are credited with the possession of “Socialistic” ideas, but

“Lo, there are many ways and many traps

And many guides, and which of them is lord ?

For verily Mahomet has the sword,

And he may have the truth—perhaps ! Perhaps !”

So speaks the Oriental poet. Substitute for “Mahomet” “the capitalist” and the truth is out. Justly do we honour pioneers ! We see so many obsequious camp-followers, so many fakirs negotiating and arbitrating and conciliating, so many “leaders” merely reflecting the opinions of orthodoxy and only too ready to become “revolutionaries” when it pays them, that it is not surprising what an amount of inert opposition the S.P.G.B. has to face. Our Shackletons and Gills are typical of the minor “leaders” in the textile world ; as Meredith put it, “unimpressionable English, who won’t believe in the existence of aims that don’t drop on the ground before your eyes, and squat and stare at you.” Such men are really illiterate. Their education has been a continued accretion of ill-digested, ephemeral facts collided with in everyday life. They are mediocre and pious, that is, they hold certain theological views by virtue of hereditary and environmental influences ; they are temperance agitators because Bill Jones was a drunkard and ill-treated his family ; they are Liberals because Chapel folks are Liberals and Churchmen are Conservatives. Their religion, politics and ethics have a common source in capitalist literature and capitalist journalism. The textile union leaders, then, are hopeless. As Mr. Pickwick said : “It is always best on those occasions to do what the mob do.” “But suppose there are two mobs ?” suggested Mr. Snodgrass. “Shout with the largest,” replied Mr. Pickwick. Our textile leaders are Mr. Pickwick glorified. As we say, they know on which side their bread is buttered.

The only Socialism the bulk of the Lancashire people know of is that of the I.L.P. and S.D.P. —pseudo-Socialism. I.L.P. is, of course, a synonym for Labourism in Lancashire as in other parts of Great Britain. It is safe to assert that every Labour M.P. sent from a Lancashire constituency was elected by Liberal votes. At this moment the S.D.P. in Shackleton’s constituency are threatening opposition because he is shaky in regard to some of their reforms. Not because he is not a Socialist, forsooth ! No. If he would but shout at capitalists as whited sepulchres and advocate state maintenance he would be as acceptable as Irving, and blessed by them. There is no question but the S.D.P. in Lancashire is swamped by the Labour Party ; a reform party outflanked by another reform party, but one asking for fewer reforms. Simply that and nothing more. Politically the Lancashire artizan must be converted from Labourism; industrially he must be converted from the sick-aud-burial-society, thrifty, provident kind of industrial organisation dubbed Trade Unionism.

John A. Dawson

Trade Union Leaders in Confusion (1935)

From the October 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sixty-seventh Annual Conference of the Trade Union Congress met in the shadow of war, and its President, Mr. Kean, opened the proceedings with a touching, if incoherent, appeal for peace. Italy, he said, must be coerced into keeping the peace, by means of economic and financial embargo and, perhaps, by closing the Suez Canal, even if such action led the League Powers into a war with Italy. That is, we must have peace at all costs, even if we have to go to war for it. The logic is shaky, but the meaning is clear enough. Another war to end war! And the T.U.C. and the Labour Party are as blandly ready to send the workers to the shambles as if the last war had never happened.

Mussolini, cries Mr. Kean, "knows no moral principle”—so “we” should bring out “our” poison-gases and long-range guns, to convince him how much loftier are “our" principles. Mussolini has made an “unjust and rapacious assault” on Abyssinia; so Great Britain, upheld by the comfortable conviction of moral superiority, given her by the tale of her just and generous acquisition of world empire, must teach him to play the game according to the rules. The subject races of the British Empire might inquire eagerly just what those rules are; but, of course, ignorant black men cannot be expected to comprehend civilised society. The British T.U.C. apparently does not comprehend it either. They spent days reading the riddle: “When is a war not a war?” and reached the solution, “When the other side call themselves Fascists.” Thus the Fascist is being used to fill the place occupied by the “Hun” in 1914; and the T.U.C.—together, be it noted, with the Communists, with whom they refuse to associate—tell the workers that it is their interest to take up arms against Fascism.

Leaders Mislead the Workers

What a highly convenient catchword is this “Down with Fascism” rallying-cry! Just the slogan needed to disarm the “Left-wing” resistance to war, and transform anti-militarist campaigns into frantic clamouring for the defence of Abyssinia. And these “leaders of the working class” are so muddle-headed in their principles and policy that they are voluntarily playing the game of the National Government—the very Government they have in the past so often and so bitterly attacked. Give them a war they can condone, a slogan obscuring the basic issue, and they readily, unreflectingly, follow the example of the Social-Democrats and others whose 1914-1918 war record will not bear examination.

The S.P.G.B. maintains that the “Fascism” aspect of the matter is the superficial excuse necessary to render war acceptable. The underlying issue is an economic one—the workers of all the countries involved are to be used as tools to make possible the extraction of profit from Abyssinia. Great Britain is inextricably concerned, since Abyssinia is surrounded on almost all frontiers by British territory; since the Blue Nile, source of Egypt’s essential floods, rises in Lake Tana; and since Eritrea and the Somalilands are on the route to India. The British capitalist group are not anxious for war at present; but neither do they want Italy to corner all the profits they foresee in the development of Abyssinia. Therefore, the politicians at Geneva and elsewhere have been treading the knife-edge of diplomacy, endeavouring to give Italy concessions large enough to stave off war, without actually giving Italy a monopoly of Abyssinian exploitation. The workers of the world have no interest in these jugglings. What reason is there for them to support one section of their exploiters against another? Whichever side wins the wage-slaves will still be wage-slaves; the basic problem of present society will remain unsolved.

The S.P.G.B. maintains, as it has done consistently throughout its thirty-one years' existence, that the workers' interests are inescapably opposed to those of the capitalists, whatever political and national trimmings the latter may use to mask their ends. When the workers open their eyes to the facts of their exploitation, and cease to be taken in by the multifarious propaganda of the capitalists and their tools, they will see that their own interests lie simply and only in an entirely new system of society—Socialism—and will struggle indefatigably to establish it. Under Socialism the entire absence of the profit motive will once and for all eradicate the cause of war. When the workers have set up Socialism, then, and only then, will war be impossible.

Equality for Women Workers

Not a word of this did we hear from the T.U.C., and equally indefinite and non-socialist was their attitude on Britain’s internal problems. The economic position of women, the plight of the depressed areas, and the battle for shorter hours were all discussed from a purely reformist standpoint. All these problems are inherent in capitalism, but the T.U.C. conveys the impression that they can be solved piecemeal, without touching the basis of society. This impression is false: some improvements may benefit sections of the workers for a time, but the working class as a whole can never escape from exploitation by such painting the sores of capitalism. The first essential of capitalist society is an army of wage-slaves, people dependent for their lives on the sale of their energies in the labour-market ; and the commodity labour-power commands only the price necessary, for the labourer to continue his existence and reproduce his kind. That is, the workers as a whole—whatever differences and fluctuations may occur in particular sections at particular times—receive as the price of their labour-power little more than enough to keep them alive. This is an integral part of capitalism. Suppose women succeed, as the T.U.C. hope, in obtaining equal wages with men. Are they any the less exploited wage-slaves? By all means let them, in common with all their class, fight against the encroachments of their masters, but let them not be deluded into believing that their principal task. They must realise that these encroachments can be made impossible only by doing away with the private ownership of the means of life, which produced their enemy, the master class.

The Workers a “Depressed” Class

The T.U.C., with penetrating insight into social cause and effect, further disclosed to an astounded world that “the stricken areas owe their lamentable position to the decline in their main industries.” We have heard also that the circular movement of the globe on its axis may be explained as being due to the rotation of the earth. The T.U.C. was full of warm-hearted sympathy about the “shame and pity" of the depressed industries' situation, but spent no time analysing its true causes, or pointing the obvious way out. We state that these areas are “stricken" simply because the capitalists of this country cannot at present envisage making profits from them, owing to foreign competition and to more attractive investing fields elsewhere. Moreover, the whole working class all over the world is ”stricken" and lives in a state of permanent “depression.” The difference between these areas and others which receive less publicity is one of degree, and not of kind. It has been often and authoritatively stated that most workers, whether employed or not, have neither sufficient food, adequate clothing, nor sanitary homes. Such conditions are an integral part of capitalism.

Similarly, the question of hours is one which can never be solved so long as the human race is divided into two opposing camps, one owning the means of life and the other divorced from ownership, the one buying and the other selling labour-power. The buyers and sellers of labour-power have irreconcilable interests, and until private ownership and the buying and selling of labour- power is stopped for good, the haggling and wrangling over its price and time of its use must inevitably continue.

Down with all the War-makers

Finally, the T.U.C. decided to exclude Communists from holding official positions in Trades Councils. At about the same time the Communist Party announced its readiness to affiliate with the Labour Party. The T.U.C. officially stigmatised the Communists as a disruptionist element. Yet on the Abyssinian issue the Communist and T.U.C. policies are identical. So they blow hot and cold and make confusion worse confounded. The S.P.G.B. has indeed every logical reason to claim that it alone, in this maze of capitalist politics, is treading the direct path to Socialism. The Communist Party’s attitude in the Abyssinian crisis must have demonstrated unmistakably to many of its erstwhile supporters how capable that Party is of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Why further the declared policy of a capitalist Government? Why differentiate between national sections of the world capitalist class? To dam up Italian colonial expansion in Africa, which is so attractive to Italian capitalism, is merely to bring a European explosion so much nearer. To defend Abyssinia against Italy is merely to hand it over for capitalist exploitation by the native ruling class in alliance with Britain or France, or to split it up among various Powers. Abyssinia is due to be “civilised” by some capitalist group in any case. But the Communist Party is willing to lead British workers to slaughter Italian workers under the banner “down with Fascism and war." They remind us of Butler’s “Hudibras,” whose

    "Brain 

Outweighed his rage but half a grain, 

Which made some take him for a tool 

That knaves do work with, called a fool.”

Once again we must reiterate that these internecine squabbles, for all the fine phrases used as top dressing, are no concern of the working class. The paramount issue in the world to-day is the struggle for Socialism. The S.P.G.B. calls on the workers throughout the world to realise their class position, and to determine to end class-society and all its evils by organising consciously and politically for the one end, of establishing Socialism.

D. S.

Laundering people: the Catholic work machine (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Irish state has never stopped warehousing women it deems sexually inconvenient. It merely changed the branding.

Feminism as a tool of repression

On the surface Ruhama is a feminist charity helping women affected by sex work and trafficking. Founded in 1989 by the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, Ruhama operates today as a secular organisation with state backing and trades in the language of women’s liberation. These same religious orders are the institutions that operated Ireland’s Magdalene laundries. The continuities between the two systems are not cosmetic. They are structural.

A history of enthralment of women

The Magdalene laundries operated from the eighteenth century until 1996. Women and girls deemed fallen, wayward, or simply poor were confined in institutions that functioned as commercial laundries. They worked without pay, washing linen for hospitals, prisons, churches and hotels. Exhausting work in brutal conditions. The reason? To discipline women’s sexuality through productive exploitation. The state outsourced its moral regulation to the Church, and the Church turned a profit.

In 1993, building work at the former High Park Magdalene laundry in Dublin, previously owned and run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity (sic) revealed the vile nature of those god-botherers when 155 bodies were recovered from an unmarked grave at the site. Most lacked death certificates. Some remain unidentified as they had previously passed through institutions that included Mother and Baby Homes, industrial schools, and psychiatric wards, all devoutly segregating and controlling women and children who violated the Catholic sexual moral code or lacked social power.

The modern rebranding

Ruhama emerged from this same institutional matrix. Its founders were not peripheral figures in the laundry system. They were its operators. It’s argued that historical continuity does not matter because the organisation has since secularised, but institutions survive by adapting their methods, not by abandoning their function. The Magdalene laundries would have you believe their inmates are fallen women in need of moral rescue. Ruhama frames its service users as traumatised victims lacking agency, who have false consciousness or are at risk of exploitation. The vocabulary has been updated. The categorisation of women as problems requiring institutional intervention has not.

Ruhama’s Bridge to Work programme ‘engaged with’ 102 women in 2022, with 37 reportedly gaining job placements. Only five of those placements were paid. Women were once again working without wages, this time under the banner of rehabilitation rather than penance. The institution that emerged from a system of unpaid laundry labour is now placing women in unpaid work placements and calling it empowerment.

Money in the temple

The funding structure reveals where the money goes. In 2024 Ruhama received €2,015,271, with 91.5 percent coming from the state. Of this, 99.64 percent was spent on salaries and administration. Despite taking in €96,945 in donations, the organisation directed €71,799 towards actual service users. A resource distribution model that’s not liberating women from economic precarity. It is a model that sustains an institutional apparatus while keeping its subjects dependent and unpaid.

Ruhama’s own reporting acknowledges that poverty is a primary driver pushing women toward sex work. The logical material response would be substantial direct economic support: rent assistance, debt relief, emergency grants, childcare funding, and guaranteed paid work. Instead, the organisation expands a category called ‘at risk of exploitation’, which is sufficiently elastic to include migrants, single mothers, homeless women, women in informal economies, and young women whose sexual behaviour is considered immoral. This is not targeted intervention against identifiable trafficking. It is preventive institutional capture of a broad population of economically vulnerable women.

Historically, women did not need to have committed a crime or suffered a defined abuse to be confined. Suspicion, poverty, perceived moral danger, or simply being inconvenient to family or state was sufficient. Contemporary anti-trafficking frameworks reproduce this logic but with humanitarian language. ‘At risk of exploitation’ functions as the modern equivalent of fallen or wayward: a classification to justify intervention, surveillance, and unpaid labour regardless of the woman’s own assessment of her situation.

The Magdalene laundries were never abolished. They were incorporated into the state apparatus.

What exists today is an organisation founded under a regime of moral control through unpaid labour, now continuing to place women in unpaid work placements under the promise of moral reform and freedom from sexual exploitation. The women are not being economically liberated. They are being redirected into socially respectable forms of precarity while the institution that processes them absorbs state funding and reproduces the same carceral feminism it claims to oppose.

(Figures on Bridge to Work placements and Ruhama’s 2024 funding and expenditure are taken from research by Grace, Artist and Activist, Ethical Hoes.)

A.T.

Spotlights on Capitalism (1936)

From the July 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

China—Scene of the Next War?

Now that the whole of Africa has been parcelled out, there remain very few areas of the world’s surface which are not subject to the political domination of advanced capitalist countries. China, however, is one of them, and so we find the birds of prey gathered around for the final picking. The one secure source of revenue in China is the Customs, and the Daily Telegraph mentions (May 14th, 1936), that they are the one point of economic security for Chinese loans, which are largely held by British capitalists. The Japs, however, have established a demilitarised zone in the north of China, where Chinese troops are not allowed to penetrate, and set up a local Government, known as the “ Independent East Hopei Anti-Communist Autonomous Council.” As a result of this, they are able to obstruct the Chinese Customs in such a way that goods can be brought across the Great Wall of China, or landed on the coast, either duty-free or on payment of only a quarter of the normal duties. This naturally diverts goods from such ports as Shanghai, where full duties have to be paid, and so the amount of both trade and duties at these ports declines, and the actual loss to the revenue has amounted in one week alone to as much as £120,000. As the interest on the loans has hitherto taken “only” one-fifth of the Customs dues, there is still ample cover for the service of the loans. Nevertheless, the bondholders are very much upset, and so the Governments of both Great Britain and the United States have made strong official representations in Tokio.

For nearly a hundred years now, the capitalist powers have been nibbling at China; one of the most notorious occasions was the Opium Wars, fought with the object of forcing the Chinese to buy Indian opium—a harmful drug which they were quite capable of producing themselves. Twice have British troops marched on Pekin, and as long ago as 1860 they burnt the magnificent Imperial Palace, just outside Pekin, to the ground. The French pinched Annam and Tongking—once Chinese provinces, Japan long ago stole Taiwan, and more recently Korea, whilst her present intrigues are setting the teeth of the other capitalist powers on edge. Great Britain holds Hong Kong, whilst land in the vicinity has been obtained for fortification purposes. At every available opportunity the Chinese have been forced to agree to the opening of certain of their ports—called “treaty ports”—to foreign trade, and these even extend to the interior of China up to the limit of navigability of the Yang-tze-Kiang. Modern internal transport is now almost entirely in foreign hands. The majority of the railways are owned by British capitalists, whilst in the latest sphere— that of aviation—a new scramble has commenced. Here the British are behind—due doubtless to the British Government's present embargo on loans to foreign Governments and companies—and so we find the more important towns in this vast country —16 times the size of the British Isles—linked by a network of regular services, the most important being the American (China National Aviation Corporation), whilst the Germans have not been slow and their Eurasia Aviation Corporation flies from Shanghai to Hanchow and from Pekin to Canton. Chinese capitalism is, however, fast developing, and so we find the national South-Western Aviation Corporation operating American machines from Canton to Hangchow and Pakhoi in the southwestern extremity, and even now a dispute has arisen with the French and American lines over the carriage of mails.

Those who watch for the next war may well turn their eyes to China.

#    #    #    #

Beauty in the Stores

F. W. Woolworth & Co., Ltd., who last year made a profit of over £5,000,000, believe in leaving no stone unturned to increase their turnover, and so we find them issuing The New Bond. Unlike Chinese bonds, which produce a revenue for the purchaser, this “Bond" costs twopence and is designed to benefit the seller, rather than the buyer. The buyers are Woolworths' girl slaves, and the purchase of The New Bond is quite optional. We understand, however, that it is a brave girl who would refuse to buy. Like all “house” publications of this nature, the object is to produce a “team spirit” amongst the employees and to make them feel that they are at j one with the firm.

An issue before us contains a beauty chat— . “ Our Beauty Chat ” it is called, and we read— 

“It is the discreet touch of Rouge and Lipstick that makes or mars a face. The lighter shades of Rouge, such as Orange or Cherry, make your skin appear clearer—eyes brighter; but should you have blue-black hair and brown eyes, a slightly darker shade is necessary, such as Rosée.”

Concluding, they say—“ We shall recommend the well-known cosmetics which can be obtained at 'your' Store, so let us vote for a Bigger, Brighter, Beauty Movement!M

And, of course, Bigger and Better dividends. In return the firm will give the employees a paltry Christmas box and a vote of thanks!

  R. M.

Blogger's Note:

Original spelling in the article retained. A year to the day, Japan invaded China in the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Pathfinders: Human factories (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

With cinema takings falling in recent years due to online streaming, Hollywood has resorted to transparent attempts to lure in the lucrative female demographic through ‘girl-boss’ films, which show women in history dramas wielding huge swords and beating up men twice their size, outshining, outsmarting and indeed humiliating them at every turn. This has been widely derided as ‘wokism’, but women are unlikely to be fooled by such patronising efforts to ’empower’ them for the sake of box-office revenue. Unlike media executives spinning fantasies, they know what reality looks like in capitalism, where the pay gap is as wide as ever and domestic violence against women is at epidemic levels.

Late last year a Cornell University study looked at why so few women were found in senior job roles, and suggested that women had two strategies or ‘pathways’, one that gave them status, and the other that gave them power. The study concluded that women achieved status but not power through ‘gender-congruent’ behaviour (ie, being ‘ladylike’ and nice to men), whereas ‘gender-incongruent’ behaviour (ie, being assertive like men, aka ‘pushy’), might achieve power but was less likely to succeed.

Small wonder, perhaps, that writers from Charlotte Perkins Gilman onward have speculated about past or future feminist utopias. Back in October science writer Laura Spinney authored a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Guardian piece entitled ‘Was prehistory a feminist paradise?‘ Predictable answer: no. She discusses the ‘Marxist idea’ that the roots of patriarchy lay in the agricultural revolution, without once mentioning the word ‘property’, and with a hand-wavy vagueness that suggests she’s never read Engels on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, or possibly even heard of it. That might be why the book does not appear in her ‘Further reading’ section.

One book that does appear, however, is The Patriarchs, by Angela Saini (2023) reviewed last January. This author clearly has read Engels, though initially she seems oddly dismissive. Some property-based communities in India and China, she points out, are known up to comparatively modern times to have been matrilineal (inheritance via the female line) and matrilocal (brides staying at home, husbands relocating). In these communities, women knew each other whereas the men didn’t, giving women the greater collective influence, and girls tended to be taller than in patrilocal groups, suggesting they were better fed. Given these examples, Saini proposes that Engels overstated the crucial importance of the property mechanism in bringing about the ‘world historic defeat of the female sex’. Essentially, she says, it was never that fast or that simple.

It becomes clear, in the second half of the book, that far from dismissing Engels, she is seeking to further develop the implicit consequences of his argument. Property may have provided the mechanism for this historic defeat, she says, but it wasn’t initially decisive. What was decisive was the growth of the ‘state machine’. Power, she argues, relies on a big army, and this in turn depends on population size. To increase the one, you need to increase the other. How to achieve this? Ruthlessly enforce strict gender roles, as either soldier or mother. Use disposable males for farm labour and the military, and turn women into baby factories and stay-at-home textile workers. Ancient wars, Saini says, were as much about grabbing extra women as extra land. Women were the first known slaves in Mesopotamia, and obedience to men was baked into ancient cultures and religious texts, including the Bible and Koran.

There is a contemporary resonance. Population size today may not equate to military might as it once did, but it’s still important to capitalist states. More workers, potentially, equal more productivity and more profits, properly staffed infrastructures, healthy tax-funded governments, thriving towns and small businesses, high house prices and high demand for construction, transport systems, energy use, and so on.

Globally, the opposite is happening. Almost everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa, birth rates are well below replacement levels and falling. While voters in many countries are hypnotised by the populist fever-dream of the ‘immigration problem’, the better-informed know the truth. Capitalism is facing a demographic crisis. When population falls below a certain critical mass, things start to fall apart. Profits shrink, offices are deserted, whole towns are abandoned. Pension and health costs rise inexorably with the median age, paid from a shrinking tax fund and understaffed via a shrinking workforce. The European Commission predicts that by 2070 there will be barely two working-age people for every one person over 65 (Economist). China is thought to be massaging its official figures to disguise a catastrophic population decline. The reasons for all this are well known, to do with better education and access to contraception, and the rising costs of living, housing and parenthood. And states have begun to fight back.

The USSR in 1920 was the first country in the world to legalise abortion, but Stalin reversed the ruling just sixteen years later, when birth rates started falling. Now pressure is being applied to women in many countries to have more children. The right wing is morphing in sinister and cult-like pro-natalist and Christian trad-wife directions. In 2022 the US Supreme Court reversed the Roe vs Wade ruling, effectively banning abortion in many states. In 2024, US republicans voted against contraception as a federal right. China’s president Xi Jinping ‘told a meeting of the All-China Women’s Federation in 2023 that women should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and child-bearing”’.

If Saini’s historical analysis is right, the global outlook for women is not encouraging. Capitalist states need more babies, and never mind what women want. And never mind what men want either. The market system makes everyone suffer. For socialists, there’s really only one way to permanently destroy the forces that make us all into human factories, of one kind or another, for the benefit of the rich. And that’s by joining forces to bring down, not just glass ceilings, but ruling class power.

Paddy Shannon

Blogger's Note:

Laura Spinney replied to this article on the SPGB website.

Revolution’s Reply to Reform. (Part 5) (1910)

From the April 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The answer to “Arms for the Workers: A Defence of the Programme of the Social-Democratic Party.” (E. C. Fairchild, Lon. Organiser, S.D.P.)

(Continued from previous issue)

On the Generosity of Capitalists.

We will lump several of Mr. Fairchild’s sections together under this heading, partly because in some of them there is no very definite argument, and partly on account of exigency of space.

Our opponent says it is often argued that a Socialist party need not ask for measures to alleviate poverty. “The assertion that improvement in the workers’ conditions under capitalism is impossible,” he says, is “changed into an admission that good housing, maintenance of the children or the public provision of employment, are of benefit to the people, but we are told that it is unnecessary for us to ask for legislation dealing with these matters, because the governing class will give concessions of their own free will.”

It is difficult to know who Mr. Fairchild is girding at. The only persons claiming to be Socialists who still believe in that hoary old supertition, “free will,” are (as might be expected) just those who believe in asking the capitalists to make “public provision of employment” and the rest, “of their own free will.”

The attitude we take up is the proper and logical attitude of those who deny the whole theory of “free will.” Moreover, it is the proper and logical attitude of those who assert the preponderating influence of economic forces upon the human will. How obscure our author’s ideas in this connection are is shown by his assertion (p. 13) that the feudal baron was “surrounded by an atmosphere which contained the elements of magnanimity, but there is nothing generous in the nature of the man who introduces a mechanical time recorder to check the entry of his employees and when they leave.” What rubbish ! Had Mr. Fairchild said that the man who introduces a mechanical time recorder is “surrounded by an atmosphere” that contains no element of magnanimity, environed by economic forces which tend to thwart, restrict and penalise every generous impulse of employer toward employed, he would have been right. But to declare that the capitalist can have no spark of generosity in his composition is not only folly, but is peculiarly grotesque on the lips of one who charges his opponents with regarding “the capitalist in business as devoid of all sentiment and deaf to human appeal.” It is capitalism that has no heart, not the capitalist.

But to get back to the argument, no one in his senses would deny that some improvement in the workers’ condition is possible, even under Capitalism. Capitalism itself may conceivably demand such an improvement, and then it will take place. This, however, is no confession that it is possible for the “palliator” and his “palliatives” to improve the workers’ conditions. Of course we must confess that “good housing, maintenance of the children or public provision of employment, are of benefit to the people,”—if other things remain constant. But other things have a knack of changing. Thus it is significant that the Board of Trade reports that during the first year of operation of the Old Age Pension “palliative,” the total wage income of that section of the workers covered by its returns decreased by £3,599,024, and this in a year when the slight decrease of unemployment might have tended to a rise of wages, and the abnormally high price of necessaries in no way encouraged a fall. Again, it has been shown that any attempt to relieve the congested labour market, such as by the public provision of employment, lessens the relative redundancy of labour-power, hence tends to raise wages, and hence again encourages the adoption of more economical machinery, which in turn displaces further workers, and refills the depleted ranks of the “palliated” unemployed.

Now let us turn to the question of the “maintenance of the children.” Capitalism provides wages for one object only—the production of labour power. Capitalism, moreover, never ceases its efforts to reduce to the lowest possible limits the cost of producing that labour-power. In this direction, indeed, capitalism abhors waste. Yet, from capitalism’s viewpoint, the production of labour-power, at least in respect of the raising of children for the continuance of the supply, is proceeded with in a very wasteful manner. For instance, there is no way of distinguishing in the labour market between the man who is bringing up a dozen children for future exploitation, and the man who has only himself to keep, hence the wages of the latter include a margin which to Capitalism is a lamentable waste. Of course it may be argued that the single or childless man having smaller needs, is an instrument in lowering wages, but on the other hand, having less responsibility, and having moreover a margin in times of employment his power of resistance is greater.

Then under the present system of “parental responsibility,” mothers are largely prevented from entering the labour market by the fact that they have children to look after. Nor does it end here. Since the support of these children’s attendants must, broadly speaking, be included in the fathers’ wages, and as the childless married man cannot be distinguished in the labour market, he is generally able to keep his wife at home. This is a further leakage. Again, the single man, whom Capitalism was forced to credit with a certain share of “parental responsibility,” is not only the gainer in as much as he has no children to keep, but also in that he has not to support a wife to look after them.

Now assuming that the S.D.P. attain their pet and chief “palliative”—State Maintenance of Children—in all its “stupendous magnitude” and gaudy magnificence, what happens ? In the first place, parents having been relieved of the cost of maintaining their children, their wages will suffer equivalent depreciation by competition. In the second place the childless married men, standing now on the same footing as the fathers of families, share in the wage reduction without being relieved of any burden. In the third place the mothers are freed for and forced into the labour market, to accentuate the competition there. Fourthly wives who are not mothers, being now in no favoured position, are also forced into the struggle for work. Fifthly the male workers, released now from the necessity of supporting their women-kind, being, indeed compelled to compete with them for the means of subsistence, quickly find their wages reduced accordingly, so that Capitalism gets the labour-power of the women as well as of the men, for the sustenance of the two sexes, instead of only the labour-power of the men. Sixthly the advantage of the single men, who have no wives or children to keep, vanishes. 

As regards the children, it is argued that they would be better looked after and more of them would survive. As for the first argument, and better conditions after birth might be more than outweighed by the less favourable prenatal environment due to their parents' increased struggle for subsistence. As for the second argument, it is an insane sentiment of humanity that would preserve children for the labour market conditions that would arise from launching the whole body of working-class women into the industrial arena. A word as to the effect upon the working-class movement. It is fatuous to argue that the measure would strengthen the workers' hands in case of strike. The children would be returned to them in order to smash the strike. Nor could the workers prevent this unless they had strength to end capitalist domination for ever. Then when we hand our children over to the capitalists for maintenance, we hand their education entirely over to the priest and the capitalist moralist, who would blur the class line, teach them to lick the hand that fed them, and so place mountainous obstacles in the way of the growth of class-consciousness. 

And now my space is exhausted, and I can only say in conclusion

FOR THE WORKERS THERE IS NO PALLIATION, BUT ONLY SOCIALISM.

A. E. Jacomb

.

Concluded.

Pot Pourri. (1910)

From the December 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

I did not go to the Business Exhibition, but I have done the next best thing — read the newspaper puffs of it. One needs not to be a master of deductive philosophy to read the lesson writ large over the pages of booming devoted to it. The features of this year consist of calculating machines for eliminating clerks ; a machine (the Dictaphone) for doubling one’s output ; another that addresses envelopes at the rate of 2,000 an hour, and so on. Competitions for speed and accuracy are again a leading item, marked this year by the large number of women who have entered for the first time. One firm will teach you (for a consideration) how to develope your powers, how to manage men, increase efficiency and such like.

* * *

The Dictaphone is best described in the maker’s advertisements : “enabling one person to do the work of two, saving 50% time and labour in any office. The work of the principal is simplified, the output of the typist doubled.” Wages, we understand, will remain stationary. When the envelope addresser and the Dictaphone get thoroughly going, throwing half the clerical workers on the streets, making the unfortunate remainder work doubly hard, I suppose the Tariff Reformer will still have no difficulty in proving to them that a tax on Dutch cheese and a preferential tariff in favour of Colonial sardines will solve the problem. The Free Trader, doubtless, will glibly assure the beaten competitors of the Dictaphone and the mechanical calculator that as soon as the Budget has had a chance, and when the 99 year leases fall in, and when the great schemes that the Liberal party has up its sleeve (at present only darkly hinted at) get in full swing, “then !” he’ll say, “then !—” Ah ‘then !

To the clerk, as to every other labourer for hire, it should be clear that the good things of life are not for him whilst the present system of “managing men” is the vogue. If you believe in a step at a time (most of them backwards), join the Liberal party, or its adjuncts, the I.L.P. or S.D.P., and work for State Christmas Trees for your great-grandchildren and municipal ice-cream barrows. If you want freedom now, not in 99 years, join the S.P.G.B.

* * *

I would like to say just here that we Socialists don’t ask for any license, poetical, political, or of any other variety. When we say the I.L.P., Labour Party, S.D.P., Fabian Society, etc. are capitalist agencies, please don’t assume that pique or arrogance actuate us. Just to show you what is meant, here is an instance.

* * *

The Railway Clerks’ Association has recently affiliated to the Labour Party. The latter, of course, accepted it on the usual terms. The character of the.R.C.A. is succinctly outlined in. the October No. of their official organ, p. 202 : “The policy of the R.C.A. is not only to secure justice for its members, but also to urge and assist them to make themselves worth more to their employer.” Of such is the kingdom of Henderson & Co.

* * *

Whilst we are on the subject I may have a jab at the Fabians. Now look at this !

“I came to the conclusion that just as it is in the interests of Capital to keep the rolling stock and the permanent way in good repair, so it must be to the interest of Capital to be constantly raising the standard of living for the men in order that the human factor may be improved.”

Who said that? None other than Mrs, Sidney Webb, at the opening of the new A.S.R.S. offices. That’s the sort of fool’s errand the Fabians are on. Don’t join them.

* * *

A few lines from a poem by Mr. James Stephens are worth repeating.

"For I’ve sat my life away with pen and rule,

        On a stool,

Totting little lines of figures, and so will

        Tho’ the chill

And the langour of gray hairs on my brow

        Mock me now.

And sometimes while I work I lift my eyes

        To the skies,

To the foot or two of heaven which I trace

        In the space

That a grimy window grudges to the spot

         Where I tot.

And I ask the God who made me and the sun

          What I’ve done

To be buried in this dark and dreary cave

           Like a grave,

While the world laughs in scorn now and then

          At my pen."

You see, that’s just where he is silly, asking God anything. You can sit on a stool asking conundrums of space and gather nothing but a harvest of wasted years and a heap of worn-out trousers. It may be easy, but it is quite profitless. Get off your stool and get to work on your slave-irons. Gazing through a couple of feet of smoky window-glass wont help you any. If you have any spare brain your employer has not a lien on, we’ll tell you what to do with it. Come in.

Wilfred.

From the front. (1912)

From the December 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in dealing with the “labour unrest” at the Church Congress, suggested that in order to achieve industrial peace, the employers should get in personal touch with their men, see the conditions of their work and of their home lives with their own eyes. Also that the workmen should try and understand the conditions under which business in these days of international competition has to be carried on. But why not an actual change of places ? The worker would then understand the real function of the capitalist—luxurious loafing—while the capitalist would be able to enjoy the benefits that are said to be inseparable from “honest toil.” Both suggestions are equally practical—and nonsensical.

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Referring to the attitude of the Church towards “labour unrest,” his Grace said: “There is above all the disputes and passions of men, a will of ‘God’—that conscience knows it, and that obedience to it is, and keeps all things, right.”

Conscience knows it—God’s instructions are so unmistakable—yet the Archbishop says the Church “has no commission from its master to take sides, or to invest any particular scheme or policy with his authority.” And this in spite of the fact that, in his own words, “capital is responsible for the condition of the labour it employs—in railways and factories at home, or in rubber plantations abroad,” and that “even now multitudes of children are born into an environment where the only chances are downward.” And the Church still claims to be on the side of the oppressed.

How pitiful these high humbugs appear in their futile endeavours to reconcile their interested attitude with their creed !

* * *

Bernard Shaw has at last told why he “left off lecturing on Socialism.” He says : “Nine-tenths of the art of popular oratory lies in sympathising with the grievances of your hearers.” When his audiences were no longer of the working class he changed his tune.

The lesson is clear. Shawism is for the shirkers, while Socialism is for the workers.

Bernard Shaw is not by any means the only one to adapt his principles and bend the truth to suit his audience. Prominent Labour men have said more than once that “those who pay the piper call the tune.” As this is said in tones of reproach, because the workers do not pay, we can only infer that all “Labour” men are capitalist agents.

The Welsh Messiah, too, subscribes to the Shavian creed. When advocating social reform—greater economy in administration—he tells his audience that “seven per cent. of the people in the great cities live in a state of chronic destitution. Thirty per cent., or nearly one third, live on or below the poverty line.” Or: “There is something wrong—where the labourer, working hard from morning till night in spring, summer, autumn and winter, in rain and sunshine, only to receive his eleven shillings a week in vast areas in England—in a country where you give thousands of pounds to men who do not labour at all.”

These are extracts from his speeches, called to mind by their publication in “Better Times.”

When the question is one of taxation, however, he claims that all sections profit equally by good government, and all should, therefore, contribute.

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For downright contradiction the above is hard to beat ; but the same gent goes one better than his previous best. His “good government,” on another occasion, becomes a class government guilty of legislating in their own interests. He says : “There are about six million electors in this country at the present day, and yet the government is in the hands of one class. It does not matter up to the present which party is in power, you have practically the same class governing the country.”

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Women’s Suffrage is the cry of the Pethicks and the Pankhursts, who want votes for propertied women. In their efforts to enlist the sympathy and support of working class women they tell them that their wages are lower than men’s because they have no political power. With political power, they say, women would become a force to be reckoned with, and would be able to demand higher wages and better conditions.

This bait, however, will not do for the women in the hosiery trade. They are actually afraid of higher wages. According to the secretary of the Hosiery Union, Leicestershire, “women are paid a lower rate than men in every branch of the trade. We want them to demand the same as the men, but they insist on the difference and say : ‘Oh, no, in that case we shall not be wanted.'”

Sir Alexander King, Secretary of the Post Office, has threatened to discharge women and employ men if the demand for the same wages is conceded. Women engaged in many occupations are in the same unhappy position. They dare not demand high wages, even when they do the same work as men, because they would be sacked and men would do the work. Men, however, demand higher wages and sometimes get them, only to find themselves, sooner or later, in the same position as the women, because machinery has been introduced.

Truly, almost every move of the workers on the industrial field is trumped by the masters.

* * *

Mr. Ramsay MacDonald has discovered in a New Zealand Government report, striking confirmation of his own views on Tariff Reform. According to this instructive report the cost of living has risen because of Tariff Reform, 16 per cent. On this statement he builds up a case against Protection—a case which collapses like a house of cards when one remembers that the rise in the prices of the necessaries of life in Free Trade England, over the same period, is according to Professor Ashley, 24 per cent. Pity the blind!

* * *

The quarrel between Liberals and Tories over Banbury’s amendment, although not likely to make them forget their mutual interests and their opposition to the workers, nevertheless revealed the hooligan nature that is always one of the characteristics of those who live by plunder. As far as it went it should teach the workers that the so-called respectable and cultured class can be as vicious and vulgar as Parisian bandits. It is on record that Mr. Will Crooks did much to ease the situation by a timely rendering of “Auld Lang Syne,” while Mr. Barnes told an interviewer that the Labour Party would do their best to preserve the Parliamentary machine. Labour Members render yeomen service. They are especially good at dispute settling in the interest of the class that employs them at £400 per year—for Auld Lang Syne.

* * *

A censor of cinematograph films is the latest precaution taken by the representatives of the master class. Pictures that show the way “not to successfully burgle” are to be taboo, presumably because they excite the spirit of emulation in the minds of ambitious youngsters. By the manner in which such freaks are magnified, the worker is almost encouraged to believe that there is no such thing as unemployment and poverty leaving thousands only the choice between starvation, crime, or the workhouse.

* * *

But not only must property be protected—capitalist morals have to be safeguarded. The respect and veneration with which the workers have been taught to regard their rulers must be preserved. With that object in view pictures are to be excluded that represent royalty, aristocracy, judges or other State dignitaries in ludicrous or undignified positions. Yet with all their care, discontent becomes greater, and Socialism—the end of all things capitalistic—makes steady progress.

F. Foan

At Random. (1908)

From the December 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Keel is an organ devoted to the exposition of “Tyneside Socialism.”

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As thus : “Social Reform is inoperative. We want to change the basis of society.” (Oct. ’08.)

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As a means to the end which the Keel vainly imagines it is working for, it warmly supported the candidature of Hartley at Newcastle.

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Hartley, in his election address, declares himself “first, last, and all the time, a Socialist.” As evidence in support of this assertion he trots out six “questions,” every one singly, or all in their entirety, of which are exploited by Liberal or Radical politicians. These he considers to be of primary importance.

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Every one of the six “questions” is concerned with a policy of more or less—chiefly less—effective patching of the vile garment which is doing duty to hide the obscenity of the Body Politic.

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Clearly the Keel has lost its compass “Social Reform is inoperative.” Hartley’s “programme” is Reform, Reform, and yet again, Reform. Therefore we support Hartley. Shades of Q. E. D. !

* * *

A member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain recently expressed the opinion that a few millstones, the deep blue sea, and labour “leaders”—the ingredients duly and well approximated—were among the first essentials of the Social Revolution.

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Recent utterances of the labour “leader” surely justify the opinion. Place for Philip Snowden ! Room for Gentle Jesusism and the Brotherhood of Capital and Labour !! Make way for Cant; strew the dead hopes of the deluded worker in the path of oily Sham and baleful Ignorance.

* * *

“He did not propose to rob the millowners of their property. No ; they would compensate them for their mills as they would compensate the landowners and railway companies. That was sound political doctrine.”

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Instead of which a Manchester comrade writes “Seeing that the workers only receive one-third of their product (and have to spend this third in buying the necessaries of life) how can they buy out the capitalist class ? If the workers acquired political power—thereby robbing that power of the sting it has hitherto possessed, the power, namely, of the oppression of a class, they would not need to “compensate.”

* * *

While that power is not possessed the capitalist class would refuse to be “bought out,” even it the miracle of producing the purchase money were to be performed, since, if every avenue of investment were closed to them the said purchase money would be useless.

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Compensate ? Listen !

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“I once heard a manufacturer ask an overlooker ‘Is so-and-so not back yet’ ‘No.’ How long since she was confined ?’ ‘A week.’ ‘She might easily have been back long ago. That one over there only stays three days.’ ”

(Official Report on Mills, 1844.)

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Again: “I have seen a girl of eleven years who was not only a fully developed woman, but pregnant, and it is by no means rare in Manchester for women (!) to be confined at fifteen years of age.”—(Dr. Robertson, 1844.)

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Once more—this is YOUR SHOW, brothers of the working class, ye whose sisters were at the mercy of every millowner, ye who NOW provide the prostitute for the class to be “compensated”—”In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirling of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action. They slept by turns and in relays, in filthy beds that were never cool. Many died and were buried secretly at night in some desolate spot, and many committed suicide.”

(“Industrial History of England,” p. 180.)

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Compensate ? In the name of the oppressed of all time, in the name of the maimed and the scrapped, the outraged woman and the joyless child, by the suffering and agony and the bloody sweat of OUR CLASS, who prates of compensation ?

* * *

THEY SLEPT BY TURNS IN BEDS THAT WERE NEVER COOL.

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Compensate !

SNOGGY.