“Class-Consciousness” (1906)

From the July 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

No point in the Socialist philosophy arouses such controversy as that of the “class-struggle” and “class-consciousness.”

The confusion prevailing is only intensified by the use of these phrases by those who, while claiming to be Socialists, have altogether failed to grasp the meaning of the term. For example, the Rev. Conrad Noel recently filled the better part of a column in the Daily Chronicle with a criticism of that “over-insistence ” upon the “Marxian Dogma” which has “done the cause of Socialism so much harm.”

This criticism formed part of an article on the S.D.F., and the one thing the Rev. Conrad most objected to was the use of this term “class-consciousness.”

“In the mouths of S.D.F. speakers it always means ‘artizan-consciousness,’” he argued. This may well be—but it only proves, what readers of THE SOCIALIST STANDARD know quite well, that the S.D.F. speakers do not understand the Socialism they profess. The S.D.F. uses Marxian phrases and fails to comprehend them; it employs the words of Revolution and the tactics of Reaction—the language of the proletariat and the deeds of the bourgeoisie.

[And it is as well to note that the Rev. Conrad Noel has since announced his intention of applying to become a member of the S.D.F.—“though not a ‘class-conscious’ one.”]

His objection to the word “class-conscious” is twofold.

Firstly, it is, he thinks, impossible to reconcile the conflicting interests of the various sections of the working-class (clerks, artizans, labourers, &c.) and secondly, that “converts to Socialism from the ranks of the upper and middle-classes are a trifle puzzled—of what class are they to become conscious?”

The point here raised is crucial. Those who hold to the conception of the class-struggle logically deduce therefrom their revolutionary policy; those who deny or (what in practice comes to exactly the same thing) fail to comprehend it must adopt the attitude and policy of Reform and Compromise. What then is the meaning of this term “class-consciousness?”

At a certain stage in the life of every individual he acquires a “consciousness” of personal identity. He becomes aware of his distinctiveness, physically and mentally, from the external conditions which progressively stimulate his susceptibility to impressions, and possessed of a power to recall, combine, and analyse by successive stages of mental presentation these said impressions and emotions.

This sense of individuality, this power of ordered thought (briefly “consciousness”), is the result of the development of the requisite brain-organ; and, as each individual from conception to maturity successively reproduces the stages through which the species as a whole has passed, by comparison we can ascertain the relative degree of development reached by any individual.

When an individual has become “conscious”—has, that is, arrived at that stage of growth at which he perceives both the distinction and relation between himself and the rest of creation—he has acquired a power of reacting upon his environment; a power (limited but real) of “self-determination,” within, of course, the possibilities set by his physical powers and the said environment.

Society is an organism progressing through stages of development.

The present stage is that in which classes have been differentiated within the Social organism: the propertied bourgeoisie and the propertyless proletariat.

Whether they are aware of it or not their interests are conflicting. The workers fulfil the function of production, i.e., their associated labour adapts all natural resources to human use; the Bourgeois or Propertied Class retain ownership of the tool of production, appropriate the products and control the function of distribution.

Hence the social function of production the prime necessity for social existence and development is fettered and hampered by the survival of the obsolete Bourgeois system of exchange—Bourgeois control of the social function of distribution.

Just as the chicken developing within the shell is compelled as a condition of further existence and development to burst the shell which had till then served as a necessary condition of further growth, so the working-class will sooner or later become conscious of this hindrance to their development—become conscious that they are the only useful class and progressive force in Society—conscious that they are potentially, the Society of the Future, and bursting the shell of Bourgeois political control and consequent economic domination, act themselves (and Society) free to commence a new and higher stage of evolution.

In a word: when conditions are ripe the working class will acquire, with the recognition of their place in Society, and of their constraint and that which constrains them, and a perception of the vital organic force impelling them to struggle, their consciousness as a class—their power of “self-determination.”

To make the working class thus “conscious,” it is necessary to make it understand the relation between it and the rest of (i.e., the other classes in) Society.

To achieve this result in the class, an effective of the individuals composing it must acquired the capacity of seeing, behind apparent diversity of interests (as clerks, spinners, hammerers, and diggers) their real community of interest as a class—must have recognised their common subjection to the necessity of selling their abilities in a common labour market; their consequent common exploitation, and their common interest to emancipation as a class.

Such distinction as still survives between “skilled” and “unskilled” labour is being rapidly abolished by the extension of education on the one hand and the introduction of machinery on the other. And few know this better than the “skilled” workmen themselves.

Hence Conrad Noel’s objection concerning the diversity of interests among the working class has no foundation. With regard to the vague use of Marxian terminology by Reformers posing as Revolutionists it must be noted that the stage at which a worker is brought to recognise that he is exploited by his particular employer, or he and his fellow-workers in their particular industry by their particular group of employers, is not the stage of class-consciousness—it is but the stage of class instincts; the rudimentary possibility of subsequent consciousness.

Class-consciousness on the part of any one worker thus entails the recognition by him of his place as a unit in a class, at present politically ruled and economically enslaved, whose historic mission it is to carry Society forward into a higher stage of development: the recognition that the interests and therefore impulses of the individuals composing either ruling or ruled classes respectively are mutual and those of the two classes antagonistic, and consequently that the development of Society more and more produces a class-struggle for the possession of political power as a necessary pre-condition on the one hand for rule and on the other for emancipation.

The working-class-consciousness will express itself in a political organisation for the purpose of accomplishing this emancipation. That worker is class-conscious who has seen the duty of enlisting under the banner of Revolution—in the Political Party of the workers —the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

With regard to the Rev. Conrad Noel’s second objection little need be said. The Capitalist-class will only be converted to Socialism by the Social Revolution; the middle class by the Official Receiver—any isolated individuals from these classes who may enlist under the banner of Social Revolution by so doing desert their own class-standpoint for that of the working-class. They must accomplish the feat of lifting themselves intellectually above their own class-environment to the height from which, comprehending the process of social-development as a whole, they can foresee the inevitable triumph of the despised proletariat—a feat that few have the intellectual power to accomplish.

The middle-class man “converted” to Socialism is generally a source of grave danger to the working-class movement. Fastening upon the cruder manifestations of working-class instinct—he gives this instinct a Bourgeois Reformist turn and so hampers its growth. As “breadth of thought” and “toleration” he conceals the shallowness and superficiality common to his class: under the name of Socialism he preaches State-Capitalism. In place of Revolution he urges Reform. Upon the half-hearted and partially conscious efforts of the workers to organise the political party of their class he fastens as a “leader”—and all development is arrested.

Hence we are not concerned about “middle-class converts” to Socialism.

Socialism is possible when the workers, organised in the Socialist Party, proceed to establish it. When they do that, the whole of the “upper and middle” classes will be powerless to prevent them. Without the workers so consciously organised nothing can be done.

The first thing then is to make the working-men “class-conscious.”

T. A. Jackson

Benn: the heir apparent (1981)

Editorial from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British Left has taken a new hero to its heart. Though born into the English peerage with an inheritance that he did not throw aside with his title, this man is said to represent the true and radical voice of the working class. Though a Minister in a government under which the number of unemployed doubled and Britain's stockpile of nuclear weapons increased enormously, we are told that this man will ban bombs and create jobs if only he gets the chance. Although a professional Christian, our hero is considered to be a Marxist. Having supported the last government's five per cent incomes policy, we are informed that the unions have no truer friend than this man. It is true that the People's Friend served in a government which presided over an increase in the concentration of wealth owned by the richest one per cent, but then, he does stand for a fundamental redistribution of wealth, doesn't he?

At bus stops up and down the country old ladies are quivering at the thought of the impending Bennish Revolution. Writing in The Sun (4/6/81), Paul Johnson makes it clear that 'unlike any of his rivals, Benn knows exactly what he wants and how he is going to get it. His is not interested in office . . . (Why, of course not. If he were he would have accepted a Ministerial post, wouldn't he?) . . . He wants power—the power to change the nation fundamentally.' So Sun readers be warned. Vote for TB and your nation will be changed fundamentally. Don't bother to ask what that means. Just shake with fear. After all, most of us are so deliriously happy in this best of all possible worlds—with its poverty and bombs and dole queues—that fundamental change is simply not playing cricket. The media loves to have a bogey man to feel threatened by, especially when the threat of real change is a fiction and personified in such a gentlemanly soul as a lapsed Viscount.

Just as some workers are led to fear this imaginary threat, so others are led to regard it as their greatest hope of salvation. Tony has come to redeem the children of Labour from the tyranny of the Right-Footed monster (who used to be a Left-footed monster until he met the pastry chef at Number Ten). The Socialist Workers' Party has announced that a victory for Benn will be progressive. The International Marxist Group has taken the next logical step and urged its members to join the Labour Party and do what must be done for the heir apparent. Followers follow with all of the passion of next week's roast mutton. It is radicalism gone flat, with ears to the keyhole of the NEC taking the place of any thought of self-emancipation.

History is not made by great men. Indeed, there are no great men. Great men are the inventions of politically myopic journalists and indolent historians who cannot be bothered to look for real causes. There are great myths and often men and women are motivated to put great faith in them. One such myth is that leaders can create democracy while those who want it need do no more than cheer from the sidelines and drop mental blank cheques into the ballot box. As if liberation can be achieved while the minds of the liberated are still chained to the illusions of class society. As if the mighty are high for any reason but that the meek are holding them upon their shoulders. A leader cannot lead unless there are followers to follow.

Socialism—which is what Brother Benn claims to stand for—can have nothing to do with following. You cannot be a socialist and have a leader. You cannot be a socialist and be a leader. Socialism means self-emancipation of the working class by the working class. Only when a majority of workers understand and want it will socialism be a practical possibility. It is all a question of consciousness allied with democratic political action.

Good or bad intentions do not enter into it. Maybe Leader A is a nicer bloke—or less of a swine—than Leader B. It is irrelevant. It is possible that Benn will try hard to do what he thinks will be in the interest of 'the people'. Good motives do not stand a chance against the limits of historical possibilities. Capitalism cannot be reformed into Benn-evolent socialism, even if Tony does say his prayers before he goes to bed every night. Similarly, if the press is correct and our gallant hero is a Phony Tony, that is no concern of the working class. Leaders can be good, bad or indifferent, but they will still do the same thing. They were elected to run capitalism for the capitalist class. That is what they will always do for as long as they are allowed to.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has never had time for leaders who aim to come into the working class political movement and get socialism on our behalf, especially when such leaders are jumped-up moralists from the bourgeoisie. In July 1906 The Socialist Standard had the following words to say on the subject:

The middle-class mean 'converted' to Socialism is generally a source of grave danger to the working class movement. Fastening upon the cruder manifestations of working class instinct—he gives this instinct a Bourgeois Reformist turn and so hampers its growth. As 'breadth of thought' and 'toleration'  he conceals the shallowness and superficiality common to his class: under the name of socialism he preaches State-Capitalism. In place of Revolution he urges Reform. Upon the half-hearted and partially conscious efforts of the workers to organise the political party of their class he fastens as a 'leader'—and all development is arrested. Hence we are not concerned about the 'middle-class converts' to Socialism.

Maybe Benn will displace Foot. If he does, it will not take him long to shock his fans and pacify his critics by acting in just the way that every useless Labour Prime Minister has done in the past. Then he too will be rejected as a traitor and another radical hero will emerge to stab him in the back. Opportunist leaders come and go, and while they plot and intrigue and pat themselves on the backs, the followers, on whose backs they have been riding, should be taking a tip from Prince Charles's horse.

Material World: The Bottom Line on Climate Change (2011)

The Material World Column from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

As predicted in January’s Material World about international climate change meetings, more business opportunities have unfolded within the framework of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but when the facts are out there has been no advance in reducing those emissions.

December sees the seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP17) taking place in Durban, South Africa, a city which has had massive coverage from CNN TV, for one, promoting a super-green city with a host of wonderful big green business opportunities in and around it. This view is totally at odds with that of Patrick Bond, South African activist and scholar, writing that the ASSAF report (Academy of Science of South Africa) totally plays down or omits to mention some of the worst of recent decisions and builds in the city. There is also no mention of the 'national context' of the world's third and fourth biggest coal-fired power plants under construction in South Africa but the report is full of “greenwash attempting to disguise high carbon economic policies with pleasing rhetoric.” Lead negotiators for South Africa at the Durban meeting are representatives of Eskon, electricity producers and the country's single largest polluter.

June 2012 will be the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of these meetings and a return to Rio de Janeiro where, in 1992, at the first “Earth Summit” UN members signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which is still the governing treaty. It states that members promise to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions in time “to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change” (but without any specific targets). Who will be there next year to remind them of this broken promise? Perhaps ‘dangerous’ is not a word that can easily be agreed upon explicitly even if ‘anthropogenic’ (originating in human activity) is accepted.

Wasted Years

If you think that too much time has been wasted in those 20 years, consider this: in 1896 a Swedish chemist, later to win a Nobel prize, first calculated that continued burning of fossil fuels would lead to a hotter earth; in 1904 the USA's first solar-powered electrical plant was built in St Louis and the second soon after in the Mohave Desert – the company to be driven out of business a few years later by cheaper coal and gas plants.

COP17 runs from 28 November to 9 December but there are alternative meetings to look out for – African women farmers of La Via Campesina, 30 November to 2 December; a Global Day of Action on 3 December; and a Mobilisation Day for Agroecology and Food Sovereignty in Durban and worldwide on 5 December. Associations such as these of small farmers clearly understand that they, their descendants and the great majority of the world's population are under serious threat from agreements reached (or not) at 20 years of international climate meetings by the very nations which profit most and which produce the largest volumes of harmful emissions on their own soil or outsourced for their own consumption as food, biofuels and products of industrial factories.

How bad is it after 20 years of non-binding, ineffectual, voluntary agreements? Most people will have heard the latest statements following a number of recent scientific studies which are pointing to similar conclusions: that new findings are more than 20 times more likely to show that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected” rather than 'not as bad as previously expected.' Recent reports confirm that from 2009 to 2010 worldwide emissions increased by 6 percent. At a London conference in October over 100 medical and military professionals, including the chairman of the BMA, were signatories to a statement saying that lower carbon use would save vast amounts of health care money and they submitted a list of demands to all governments.

Wars and climate pollution

The Pentagon, the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy, is not subject to any international agreements nor is its total use transparent. The US air force is the world's single largest consumer of jet fuel at 25 percent. The Stratocruiser uses as much fuel in 10 minutes as an average driver in a year. Studies done by Oil Change International looking at the climate pollution of war found that the full cost of the Iraq war would cover all the global investments in renewable power generation needed up to 2030 to reverse global warming trends, and that between 2003 and 2007 this war generated more CO2 equivalent each year than 139 countries release annually. With figures like these it's easy to see how hollow and ironic are the calls for individuals to make green lifestyle changes.

The worldwide industrial food system, change of land use entailing massive deforestation for monocrop production and biofuel plantations, production of crops as commodities rather than food, all cause huge but unnecessary additional emissions. With big investors around the world looking for profitable returns, capitalist politics takes no heed of public opinion on any topic, from Canada's tar sands, Australia's coal, USA/NATO's wars, to misappropriation of indigenous land and common wealth.

The Climate Vulnerability Monitor measures four main impacts of climate change: health, weather, habitation and the economy. The most intransigent states at the last meeting were those least under threat and most committed to strong economic growth. The bottom line to this business as usual with foreknowledge of the chaos, disruption and necessary flight of hordes of homeless and hungry as a result of inundation and drought – impacts caused by continuing stubbornly along this road to ruination – is surely premeditated murder of billions from sheer hypocritical self-interest.

Janet Surman

War Requiem (2014)

Film Review from the August 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Written and Directed by Derek Jarman, Music by Benjamin Britten, Poetry by Wilfred Owen, Production Design by Lucy Morahan, Video editor/montage by John Maybury.

Cast: Nathaniel Parker (Wilfred Owen), Tilda Swinton (Nurse), Laurence Olivier (The Old Soldier),

Patricia Hayes (Mother), Sean Bean (The German Soldier), Owen Teale (The Unknown Soldier)

Derek Jarman's War Requiem is a cinematic representation of Benjamin Britten's oratorio War Requiem, op 66, a non-liturgical setting of the Requiem Mass which had been written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962. The war poetry of Wilfred Owen inspired Britten's music, and Britten included nine of Owen's poems in the oratorio. Jarman had read the 1988 John Stallworthy biography of Wilfred Owen, and referred to his film as 'the three queers War Requiem' (Jarman, Britten, Owen). The film includes a video montage by John Maybury of newsreel of the horrors of twentieth century capitalist wars culminating in the mushroom cloud of the Atomic bomb explosion.

The film is structured as the memories of Olivier's character, the Old Soldier in a wheelchair, attended by his nurse, Tilda Swinton. Olivier recites Owen's Strange Meeting in the film's prologue: 'It seemed that out of battle I escaped, Down some profound dull tunnel.' Immediately the emotion of Britten's music, Owen's words and Olivier looking straight into the camera in close-up, all anguish and aged memories of the horror of the First World War and the prospect of death are overpowering. This would be Olivier's last film, he died in July 1989.

Owen was killed in the last week of the First World War aged 25. He wrote 'My subject is the war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.' Jarman portrays Owen and soldiers' lives sacrificed for wealthy bankers, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class and this is compared to the Abraham and Isaac biblical story, a ram caught in barb wire, Abraham slits Owen's throat. Owen's poem The Parable of the Old Man and the Young: 'Caught in a thicket by its horns, A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one' follows the wording of Genesis 22:1-19 very closely.

Owen believed in an Anglican Evangelical Christianity, and from 1911-13 had an unpaid post as lay assistant and pupil in Dunsden near Reading. During this period his sympathies for 'the underdog' became apparent; he helped the old and the sick, the illiterate, and the poor rural workers enduring an agricultural depression. But his dislike of the narrow evangelicalism practised at Dunsden would prepare Owen for his later indignation at the support which the Churches gave to the First World War.

Jarman employs Christian iconography; the Unknown Soldier with a barb wire crown akin to Christ's crown of thorns at the crucifixion. Jarman wrote 'the immaculate side of Christ's life, nothing to do with the Church, the person who actually went out and brought in all those who were considered unclean in Jewish society, a very fantastic story and a very fantastic achievement, whether or not he is the Son of God.' In the Owen biography, Stallworthy had written 'Christ said 'Love one another' and 'Love your enemies' despite the exhortations of Church and State. Owen perceives that 'Pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.' Owen wrote in At a Calvary near the Ancre: 'bawl allegiance to the state, But they who love the greater love lay down their life: they do not hate' which echoes John 15:13: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.'

A five minutes scene of interpretative acting to Britten's music by Tilda Swinton dressed in a Neo-Classical look à la Canova, plaiting her hair by the mausoleum of Tomb of the Unknown Soldier runs the gamut of emotions from laughter to anger, anguish, despair, and reflection. Swinton was Jarman's muse: 'Woman as sister, nurse, and grieving', making eight films with Jarman.

The final scene of Jarman's film and the climax of Britten's oratorio sees the German Soldier with a wreath of red poppies coming to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier which is now a tableau after Pierro della Francesca 15th century Renaissance painting The Resurrection with Owen Teale in the central position of the tableau. Aldous Huxley called it 'the greatest painting in the world.' The Mother (Hayes) and Sister (Swinton) arrive with a basket of white poppies in a very moving and heart-bursting scene. The use of white poppies was deliberate; Swinton said 'white poppies, a living white flower', and on the AIDS crisis of the time; 'We had many friends being diagnosed, becoming ill and dying. We felt like we were in a war of our own.' The white poppy established by the Peace Pledge Union in 1934 disassociates the memory of war from the militaristic aspects of Remembrance Day. In 1986 there was controversy over the white poppy when it was given approval by the Bishop of Salisbury which caused Thatcher to express her 'deep distaste' for the white poppy in the House of Commons.

Jarman was the son of a RAF Lancaster bomber pilot in the Second World War, and his father's despair and depression is attributed to the high number of fatalities that bomber crews experienced and the killing of civilians in German cities. Swinton herself is from a military family; daughter of a Major-General, and sister to a Lieutenant-Colonel. Tilda joined the Communist Party of Great Britain while at Cambridge in the 1980s but is now a member of the Trotskyist Scottish Socialist Party.

Jarman's War Requiem followed his politically angry The Last of England which re-interprets Ford Madox Brown's pre-Raphaelite painting, and tells of the death of England ravaged by internal decay, capitalist restructuring, greed, AIDS, homophobia and repressive morality. Village Voice described it as 'wrenchingly beautiful, the film is one of the few commanding works of personal cinema in the late 80's, a call to open our eyes to a world violated by greed and repression, to see what irrevocable damage has been wrought on city, countryside and soul, how our skies, our bodies, have turned poisonous.' Jarman himself said 'I was brought up by a generation who fought the war and established the welfare state, and I perceived that everything my parents had fought for was being taken away.' Following War Requiem Jarman would make the political Edward II, seen as a landmark film in the New Queer Cinema.

Steve Clayton

Kautsky’s Work for Socialism (1939)

From the January 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

The passing of Karl Kautsky removes from the International Labour Movement one who, for more than half a century, was one of its most outstanding figures.

He was born eighty-four years ago, in what later became Czechoslovakia, at a time when the clash of growing capitalist rivalries in Central Europe expressed themselves in national struggles, particularly between Austro-Germans and the Czechs. Kautsky came under the influence of these struggles. The Paris Commune of 1871, however, exerted the profoundest influence and induced Kautsky to make a study of the early French Communist writers and social and historical questions. As a result, he joined the Austrian Social Democratic movement, through which he became acquainted with Marx and Engels, who exerted an influence on that movement from London.

His meeting with Marx and Engels in the early ’eighties undoubtedly dictated the course of Kautsky’s interest in social and political questions for the rest of his life. He spent five years in London, studying under their guidance. From then on he was “Marxist”, and when Engels died in 1895, he became literary editor of Marx’s and Engels’ works. He fulfilled this task with prodigious energy. His books and writings covered the whole fields of Marx’s work and thought. As an exponent of Marxian theory he was supreme. His clarity and simplicity of expression were rare. Besides his work as literary executor he was an active journalist and edited Social Democratic newspapers for more than thirty years. His writings include works of an independent kind. Foundations of Christianity, for example, is a classic on the subject. It traces the origin of Christian beliefs to their social and historical roots, and as a Marxian analysis of the question it stands alone.

But it was in the transition from the theoretician to the practical politician that the value of much of Kautsky’s great work was undone. In his work as a practical politician in the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Marxist principle was forsaken for political expediency. When the Social Democratic Party arose in Germany in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, little criticism could be made of Kautsky for his support of it. But when, with the passing of time, it evolved a purely reformist purpose, showed, in fact, that it was fulfilling the need of German capitalism for a reformist party, then Kautsky’s position as a Marxist and as a member of the Social Democratic Party were in flat contradiction.

In 1900 he was responsible for the “Kautsky resolution” at the 1900 International Socialist Congress. That resolution stated that a Socialist could accept a gift of a seat in a capitalist cabinet in a national emergency. This was only a short step from supporting the German capitalist class in 1914, which he did, though certainly without the enthusiasm of the jingo. He apologised for this attitude on the grounds that Socialism is a power for peace, not against war. An apology which prompted the scathing comment from Rosa Luxemburg that the famous appeal of the Communist Manifesto should now read, according to Kautsky’s revision: “Workers of all lands, unite in peace and cut one another’s throats in war!”

When the Russian upheaval occurred, and the issues connected with it were being debated, Kautsky was to the fore in the controversy. His differences with the Bolsheviks he brought out in one book in particular, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, to which Lenin replied with The Proletarian Revolution. In this controversy it was Kautsky the Marxist and theoretician that was in evidence. He took his stand upon the sound Marxist position that Socialism could not be established in a country where the material conditions for its accomplishment did not exist. Those conditions are highly developed means of production, social in character but privately owned by a minority of the population (the capitalist class) and the existence of a large section of the population who are dispossessed of ownership in the means of production and depend upon the sale of their labour-power to the owning-class in order to live. Socialism as a practical question could only arise, therefore, where the workers were the majority of the population, and where the social character of production presented social ownership (Socialism) as a proposition which depended upon the desire by the workers for it. The desire for Socialism could not arise where the population were largely peasants who lived by ownership of small-scale means of production. Kautsky stated the position as follows:

“Every conscious human action presupposes a will: the will to Socialism is the first condition of its accomplishment. This will is created by the great industry . . . small production always creates the will to uphold or to obtain private property in the means of production which are in vogue, not the will to social property, to Socialism”.

Kautsky’s analysis is the sound Socialist position, based on irrefutable logic. Its logical sequence led to unqualified support for democracy and democratic institutions. The “will” to Socialism depending upon the workers being a majority of the population, then only democratic institutions and methods would serve the real interests of the workers. In the absence of large-scale industry which would create the “will” to Socialism, then democracy would foster the growth of that industry; dictatorship would hamper it.

Strange as it may seem to-day, when erstwhile supporters of dictatorships are enthusiastic democrats, Kautsky’s position did not meet with support even among those who were outside the controversy and who called themselves Marxists. It brought out the worst side of Lenin as a controversialist. Kautsky’s reformist political recorded provided some excellent “Aunt Sallies” for Lenin’s abuse, and he certainly made use of them with effect—though they had nothing whatever to do with the merits of the debate. Kautsky’s arguments were answered with epithets. The quotations Kautsky used from Marx to support his arguments were largely evaded. Lenin attempted to interpret an isolated use by Marx of the phrase “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, approval for the Bolshevik dictatorship. Kautsky’s analysis of the Russian question was scholarly and objective. It was never answered by Lenin or his associates. Kautsky gave Lenin credit for being Marxist. In fact, in Lenin’s favour it can be said that Socialism was not introduced in Russia simply because the absence of the material conditions made it a sheer impossibility. Lenin erred in interpreting Socialist theory to fit Russian experience. In doing so he misinterpreted Marx and obscured the meaning of the real place of the Bolshevik Revolution in history. Had Lenin placed the Bolshevik Revolution in its proper perspective as an object-lesson in history he would have contributed in a larger degree to working-class understanding, would have saved many from disappointment and disillusion when the high hopes they had placed in the movement failed to materialise.

Kautsky on the Russian question, as on social and historical questions in general, took his stand upon scientific objective analysis, in sharp contrast to the position he took up as a reformer and politician in the Social Democratic movement in Germany. Inside that movement he was like the scientist in church—he left his scientific weapons outside. It is not idle to speculate that had Kautsky applied the scientific methods to his practical politics, he might have had some influence on the course of recent German history. He might have fought reformism, coalitions and expediency politics. The support he would have received might not have measured well in comparison to the millions behind the Social Democrats, but, quite conceivably, it could have meant a virile, independent and uncompromising Socialist Movement. As it was, the tragic end of the great German Social Democratic Party is eloquent testimony to the unsoundness of a movement which for fifty years based its activities upon reformism, compromise and expediency politics, with which Kautsky was associated.

Kautsky’s life and work might perplex future historians of the working class. Yet, when against all his reformist politics is balanced the enormous work he did in spreading Socialist knowledge, it would lead to false conclusions to judge him on his political record. After Marx and Engels his name will live. His works will guide the class-struggle in the future. He will be read with respect long after the respectable mediocre preachers who masquerade as leaders of the British Labour Movement are forgotten.

Kautsky’s place in history is assured.

Harry Waite

Pathfinders: Nanotechnology: the end of Scarcity? (2005)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Greek philosopher Democritus, doubtless toying with his tea, first imagined cutting up a piece of cake until he arrived at a fundamental piece he couldn't cut (Greek a-tom, uncut). Then, much later, Rutherford tried to cut it anyway. Then Richard Feynman wondered what would happen if, instead of cutting atoms, you simply stuck them together like Leggo. In theory, he mused, you could build anything out of anything. And then a futuristic science writer brought the idea to the public's attention with the 1986 classic Engines of Creation (now downloadable as a complete PDF from here .

And so was born nanotechnology. "Nanotechnology... Technology that operates on the scale of a nanometre, which is a millionth of a millimetre. To give you some idea, your fingernails probably grew about six nanometres in the time it has just taken you to read this paragraph."Independent on Sunday, March 13, 2005.

Five years ago few people had heard of it. But then Prince Charles, with his finger on the pulse as usual, announced his personal fears that nanotechnology might accidentally turn the world into a huge dead swamp of gunk. This idea of runaway replication (the 'grey-goo theory', reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's 'ice-nine' in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle) was first proposed, and then recently rejected by Drexler himself as alarmist (New Scientist, June 12, 04). However, it doesn't take much to start a scare, and the environmentalist lobby have already begun making demands for legislation over this 'Frankenstein' technology,and new laws are on the way (New Scientist Oct 9,2004)

New laws, and the technology is not even in its infancy, it's still a growing foetus. But the worry is that nanoparticles are already cropping up unannounced in consumer products like suntan lotion before anybody's really sure they're good for us. Capitalism is not willing to wait, it wants profits now, any way it can. Nanoparticles are presently only good for filtering, so they go in face creams. But this is nano at its most trivial.

The real achievement is in construction. We already have nanotrees, nanotubes, nanobots and buckyballs, strange 60+ atom molecular cages harder than a diamond. Buckytube compounds are 5 times less dense than steel but 30 times stronger, while bonding them to polymers could lead to a new generation of superlight car and aircraft composites up to 20 times stronger. Drexler envisages such aircraft with engine trouble gently parachuting to earth instead of crashing. Meanwhile costs are plummeting. In 2002 nanotubes cost €300 per gram, while in 2004 it was €30 (New Scientist Sept 18, 04).

Even this is nothing but an hors d'oevre. The main course, and the cause of Charles Windsor's sleepless nights, is replication. If nanomachines can self replicate, they could in theory eat the world if they got out of control. But then, thinks Drexler, why would we design them to do that? What we want is constructive replication - houses, cars, machinery, clothes, even food - grown in vats, silently, unaided, without fuss and without waste. The ability to replicate any material means the end of material scarcity for the planet.

Drexler is well worth reading, even now. But in amongst his infectious enthusiasm there was a big hole waiting for the question that he didn't ask. What would capitalism do with this technology? Free food? Free houses? Free everything? Hardly! Markets would collapse, and power elites with them.

Nanotechnology would instigate a social revolution whether anyone wanted it or not. So perhaps it's just as well that replicating nanobots are still a long way from losing their virginity. 'Nanotechnology: small science, big deal' is at the Science Museum, London SW7 (0870 870 4868) to 31 August.

How would socialism deal with the impending energy crisis?

At present, if socialism had to guarantee an average western standard of living to everyone on the planet, global energy needs would approximately quadruple. Although there are many ways in which capitalism wastes huge amounts of energy, socialist society would still be looking for effective carbon-free sources, and one of these is, inevitably, the nuclear option. While the implications of this option under capitalism gives no cause for confidence, it may be that an advanced nuclear programme, uninfected by the profit motive, could be viable.

Capitalism's problem, apart from the tendency to skimp safety and disposal costs, is the threat of uranium being enriched and used as a weapon. Consequently, two new ideas on the drawing board will probably not go any further, but in money and war-free socialism they might well find a new lease of life.

Nuclear Power to take away (from New Scientist)

Small sealed reactors that can be delivered to anywhere in the world are being developed buy the US Department of Energy. The idea behind the small, sealed, autonomous reactor (SSTAR) is that conventional nuclear stations produce about a gigawatt of electricity, making them unsuited for remote locations which have neither the technological infrastructure to refuel or maintain them or the national grid to distribute that much power.

"In a SSTAR the nuclear fuel, liquid lead coolant and a steam generator is sealed inside the housing, along with steam pipes ready to be hooked up to an external generator turbine. A version producing 100 megawatts would be 15 metres tall, 3 metres in diameter and weigh 500 tonnes.  A 10-megawatt version is likely to weigh less than 200 tonnes." When the fuel is exhausted after 30 years, the unit would be collected for recycling.

To make it work, the uranium has to recycle itself into plutonium 239, effectively making the reactor a fastbreeder. In this circumstance, reliability is a crucial factor, and if any faults develop alerts can be sent over satellite radio channels to the D of E or to an international agency overseeing the reactors. Despite the 'forest of alarms' built into the unit, there is no real guarantee that a rogue state couldn't break in and steal the plutonium. The D of E hopes to have a working prototype by 2015. This column expects to see that ambition firmly spiked.

Who would do the dirty work in socialism?

While conventional socialist views on cooperation and division of voluntary labour deal quite well with this question, there is no need for people to do the unpleasant work if a machine could do it instead, and a new development presents an intriguing possibility.  Step forward - at 10 cms per hour - the insect-munching Ecobot.

While there is nothing very new about robot technology, their dependence on a power supply means  there always has to be a human somewhere in the system to feed it. But now a new generation of release and forget robots may be possible, powered by the common housefly, whose exoskeleton can be broken down into sugars used to produce electricity.

Although Ecobot is at present astonishingly slow, and its method of trapping the flies (using large  amounts of human dung as bait) decidedly unattractive, it can last an impressive five days on just eight large flies.

Uses would include any type of routine maintenance, perhaps most appropriately in the sphere of agriculture, potentially releasing humans from many of the most tedious tasks.

Paddy Shannon

Editorial: The Real Crimes of the Mass Media (2011)

Editorial from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Very many disgusting crimes have been exposed in the phone-hacking scandal that eventually brought down the News of the World newspaper. But what really turns socialist stomachs is not so much the illegal excesses, vile as they are, but the bog-standard journalism that has as a result been defended and praised with such sanctimony in the other papers. It is well known, to anyone paying attention, that the press passes over the vastly more serious crimes of state power with silence. And the silence is a lie.

To be a truly effective liar, it is essential that you come to believe your own bullshit. So we have had the spectacle of NotW journalists defending themselves on the basis that it is necessary to peddle propaganda, lies and gossip to fund the truly great investigative journalism that also goes on. David Aaronovitch, writing for the Times (7 July), also swallows this argument in the name of accepting ‘reality’, as all grown-ups must of course do. In other words, truth-telling heroes, and Aaronovitch modestly includes himself among their number, must save their souls by supporting efforts to rein in the excesses, whilst apologetically defending the general principle of business as usual.

The truth is that the main job of tabloid newspapers is not to report the facts to a concerned, democratic citizenry, but to make profits. The working class generally has little interest in state policy decisions because they feel that they have no real say over it anyway. And they feel that not because they’re stupid but because it’s true. To make profits, therefore, the tabloids have to appeal to something the working class in general is interested in: sex, say, or football. 

The same general principle applies to the liberal, so-called ‘serious’ newspapers, except they have to deal with a different audience: ‘middle-class’ types who believe that their careers and what they think is of some consequence. Of course, in a democracy, it is of some consequence: they have to be educated to accept capitalism and profit-making and ruling class power as an inevitable part of ‘reality’. That’s where Aaronovitch and his ilk do such an impressive job.

If you want something approaching the truth, turn instead to the newspapers addressed to the ruling class. These are better sources because the ruling class needs reliable information about the world so it can make suitable investment decisions. So, Martin Wolf for example, writing on the Financial Times website (14 July), blandly takes to be a matter of fact and plain common sense what the Aaronovitches and tabloid hacks of this world are obliged to dismiss as paranoid conspiracy theory. And this is that the media are businesses whose job is not just to make profits, but to mould public opinion. But it is intolerable for business in general if any one dictator should come to wield decisive influence. Wolf gives the example of Murdoch’s Fox network in America, which has “distorted” public opinion so much as to give credence to “rightwing populism” – which threatens to put state power in the hands of ideology rather than true business interests. 

Of course, from our point of view, it was equally intolerable that Murdoch should so influence public opinion as to build support for wars, from the Falklands to Afghanistan, and opposition to the class struggle, from the 1980s miners’ strike to the most recent teachers’ strike. But on these issues, the loud clamour over hacked phones in the mass media returns once again to a respectful silence.

Smile for the Camera (2014)

Book Review from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Smile for the Camera, A Double Life of Cyril Smith' by Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker

This book tells the career of Smith, who was the face of the Liberal Party in the 70s and 80s, and their star performer. The book shows the rise of Smith from an illegitimate child, in the 30s, through members of the Young Liberals, to Liberal agent, then as a Labour councillor and alderman, to Mayor of Rochdale, when after an argument over rent rises, he resigned from the Labour Party to form his own party which predictably went nowhere, and in 1968 he re-joined the Liberal Party, displacing the prospective candidate for the 1970 General Election, which he lost. In 1972 the Labour MP for Rochdale died.

During Smith’s time on Rochdale Council he had built up a coterie of various contacts, and had a deserved reputation as a hardworking councillor and a Mr Fixit. Smith was friendly with a leader of the Pakistani community, Karim Dad, who was the Godfather-like Mr Big in the community. Virtually the whole Pakistani community backed Smith, who was elected MP. Karim Dad was arrested the following year for personation (electoral fraud) and fled the country before his trial. Smith continued to rise in the Liberal Party, playing the part of the bluff, plain speaking Northerner. Behind the façade, however, was a darker side, that of a predatory child molester.

In the early 60s, Smith was the backer of Cambridge House, a home for young men 11-18 year-olds, providing cheap lodging. I now write from personal knowledge. I first met Cyril Smith in 1958 when, at the age of 16, I joined the Labour Party Youth Section. I then resigned from the Labour Party in 1960, after attending the 1960 conference in Scarborough, joining the Young Communist League.

I trained as an SRN, and in 1963 while selling the magazine Challenge, I was approached by a couple of lads from Cambridge House, who told me how Smith had both physically and sexually assaulted them.

They told me how Smith had spanked their bare backsides, fondled their testicles, pulled back their foreskins, for hygienic examinations. I got the lads to make sworn, notarised statements, which I personally presented to Rochdale Chief Constable, Ross. Ross I'm sure dismissed it as a Commie plot to discredit Smith. Copies, however, were given to the Labour Agent Josh Hughes, which is probably why funding was withdrawn from Cambridge House.

I left Rochdale in 1974, not returning until the late 80s, by which time Smith’s career had bloomed, and the list of his sex crimes increased.

In many ways, Smith was a superb politician, building networks of protectors, and fellow offenders, giving protection to each other. The Rochdale grooming scandal of the enforced prostitution of dozens of young girls though, brought everything to a head.

The book also charts Smith’s involvement in the cover-up of the dangers of asbestos, becoming a paid lobbyist for Turner Newall (the world’s largest asbestos producer). I must confess to a personal interest. My late wife died in 2004 from asbestosis. The site of Turner’s is now a derelict ruin, on a highly contaminated site, and for years there has been a  campaign for the safe development and remedial control of the area.

Ultimately, the book shows how the system of capitalism corrupts and destroys both life and human relationships.

Roger Chadwick

The Irish question in history. (1916)

From the August 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since the general election of 1885 when, according to R. Barry O’Brien, the genius of Parnell compelled Gladstone to propagate the Irish question in England, the English Liberals have assumed an attitude of pity and commiseration towards Ireland. That country is an unfortunate sister nation—cartooned in picturesque rags with a broken-stringed harp—riven with internal discords and steeped in poverty. Her sons, we are told, emigrate in streams because they are denied the right of self-government. It were, perhaps, more true to say that Gladstone and the Liberals generally have recognised the value of Home Rule as a shibboleth to lure workers of both countries into the frothy whirlpool of capitalist politics.

The great mass of the Irish workers live out their lives troubling themselves about Home Rule no more than the ordinary English worker concerns himself about Liberalism. Still less would they interest themselves were it not for the campaign of lies, threats, and gloomy prophecies continually waged by the Irish ruling class and their agents, for it is among that class that discord reigns, and the sympathy of the English Liberals is for their brother capitalists in Ireland, who carry their political differences to such an extremity that capitalist class law and order are threatened and the workers themselves are being supplied with precedents and weapons for an organised movement along the line of physical force.

There is no essential difference between the capitalists of England and Ireland. Both are characterised by the same greed for gold, the same ambition for power, the same hypocrisy and corruption. When the capitalists of Ireland in the 18^th century, handicapped by the restrictions placed on their trade by the English Government pleaded, as a part of the British Empire, equal trade rights with the manufacturers of England, the latter, with their usual bigotry and selfishness, utilised all the machinery at their disposal—chambers of commerce and political organisations—to maintain their monopoly of the world’s markets and exclude Irish capitalists from successful competition with them. Nor is discord common to the Irish ruling class alone. The struggle for power between the landed aristocracy and the trading section in England has more than once reached a stage of bitterness equal to anything that has been seen in Ireland.

If the workers of Ireland would but dip into the history of their masters’ country, their faith in Home Rule as a panacea for their troubles would quickly vanish. The leaders they now so patiently tolerate would be suspects and criminals. For like Lloyd George, who swore that three years of Liberal rule would wipe poverty from out the land, the Irish Nationalists bait their ambitious schemes with fair promises of prosperity for the working class.

When the workers of Ireland, grown desperate with poverty and excessive toil, have fought their masters for a slight improvement in wages and conditions, have the Nationalists extended help or sympathy? On the contrary, they have always been on the side of the oppressors. Right through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the political leaders of Ireland were engrossed in the question of their rights and powers to govern Ireland. Every hostile movement by sections of the people—though admittedly the outcome of poverty and injustice—was met with brutality and oppression. The Irish Parliament in the eighteenth century frequently solicited England for aid to put down the armed risings of famished peasants.

Arthur Young, Fitzgibbon, and many others depict in eloquent language the dire poverty of the agricultural labourers—a favourite pastime with the well-to-do, even to-day—at the mercy of the numerous gangs of middlemen who rented lands from absentee owners, and sublet them again and again, till the labourer had to work out the rent of his plot at fivepence a day. Even then his exploitation was not complete, for out of his product he still had to fatten the lying and treacherous priests with tithes.

Politicians, absentees, middlemen and priests were all Irish—the usual patriots; their love of country measured by their opportunities to filch wealth and snatch positions. The same motley crowd we are acquainted with to-day; money changers, exploiters, and kidnappers. Seats in the House of Commons or in the House of Lords were bought and sold like cheese and pork. Bribery and corruption were nearly as rampant as to-day.

Though the Irish working class were ruled by their own countrymen, though they had a parliament and a House of Lords all to themselves, they were goaded to desperation and lawlessness by the poverty and oppression they suffered at the hands of their rulers. And those rulers, like their descendants held them in the loftiest contempt. The working class were often described by Irish legislators as “ignorant savages”, and Grattan, with a candour that would be impolitic to-day, summarised the attitude of the master class of his time towards the workers in the following crude sentences:

“The best method of securing the Parliamentary constitution is to embody in its support the mass of the property, which generally will be found to include the mass of all talents. For if you transfer the power of the State to those who have nothing in the country, they will afterwards transfer the property”.

The class that owned “the mass of the property” in Ireland exercised, during the last twelve years of the eighteenth century, absolute control over the political machinery; yet through all the fluctuations of trade the poverty of the workers increased and all their efforts—chiefly taking the form of the boycott—were suppressed with fury by their countrymen, who took no steps to alleviate their misery or redress their grievances. Exactly how much the representatives of property cared for their country or its independence was shown in their final act of betrayal. Grattan, who was in a position to know the facts, stated that not more than seven of those who voted for the Union were unbribed. This was the culminating treachery of rulers who had preached the perfidy of England, and demanded the fullest measure of self-government as the only means by which the wrongs of the Irish people could be redressed. Twelve years after their demands were conceded, they, for personal bribes, handed their country over to the enemy.

The intervening years have not changed the position unless it is for the worse. The working class are still held in the same contempt by their rulers. Corruption and bribery have increased, though constant practice in deception and fraud have qualified our rulers to conceal their crimes by sophistries and an affectation of dignity and rectitude. Here and there in the history of the Irish movement, since the Union, a man has stood out from the rest, honest in his beliefs and implacable in his hatred towards the enemies of his country, but the majority have been sordid place-hunters and cared nothing whether they sat at Westminster or Dublin. Their ambition, like that of the labour leader, is to sit on the governing assembly, share the power, and take any additions to their fortunes that might come their way as a result.

But if Ireland has been a hunting-ground for ambitious politicians, it has also been the home of ignorant and superstitious leaders. Catholic priests and Protestant clergy have used their influence and authority to foment religious strife, which had no existence till after the Union. The Catholic priests were so deeply involved in the political game that they helped to collect the forty thousand pounds that Parnell squandered on himself and Mrs O’Shea. Everyone knows the methods of the Protestant clergy; how the orthodox Church bolsters the Tories and the Non-conformists buttress the Liberals, and both assist to rope in the workers to the support and sanction of capitalist government.

At the first mention of a Franchise Bill in Ireland the Protestants declared against its extension to the “ignorant Catholics”, and the same attitude is apparent to-day in the objection of Irish Protestants to Home Rule, on the grounds that it would give the Catholics political control. Whence comes this opposition if it is not the result of conspiracy between clergy and politicians?

The Irish movements of the eighteenth century, the “white boys”, the “oak boys”, etc, were movements of the workers. Sometimes they were directed against the middlemen and sometimes against the tithe system, though not often the latter. They were secret organisations and the Government found it extremely difficult to deal with them. But when they developed into an open volunteer movement, widely extended, and holding congresses at Dublin and elsewhere, the Government quickly permeated it with their tools and agents and subverted it to their own uses, finally incorporating it in the regular Army. Since that time the working class of Ireland have never succeeded in organising for anything without the help or interference of capitalist tools or agents. The Fenians were nobbled by Isaac Butt and outwitted by Parnell. All their organisations from the “Land League” to the “Ulster Volunteers” or the “Molly Malones”, have been composed of workers bluffed and cajoled by political prostitutes and adventurers.

The main fact that claims our attention is that Ireland has been subjected, from the commencement of the capitalist period, to various forms of government—government by undertakers appointed by the British Cabinet, self government, partial and complete, and government by representation in the British House of Commons. But under none of these forms, nor in the changing of them, can it be claimed that the working class were affected. It is true that poverty has become more general and acute over the entire period, but that is due to the development of the system, and is common to every capitalist country.

The latest blunder of the Irish working class is in the support given to the Sinn Fein movement, which seeks to establish a republic, with the examples of France and the United States before them proving conclusively the futility of such an experiment to abate their ever-growing poverty.

The form of government makes no difference to the workers. Government implies subjects, and under the capitalist system of society the actual governmental machinery, Parliament, councils and judiciary, etc., are representative of the capitalist class—the necessary machinery for ruling a subject class composed of wage-slaves.

The boasted equality of modern society is thus seen to be a fraud. For if there existed a real equality there could be no governing class or government, but only administrative assemblies charged with the administration of things in accordance with the wishes of the majority. But capitalism being a system wherein one class governs another, where one class is idle yet wealthy, and the other class producing wealth yet always poor, neither equality nor democracy can exist, the latter only being possible when the former is present.

Private ownership in the means of wealth production is the dominant feature of capitalism, and distinguishes the capitalist from the proletarian. Society is divided into classes: those who own the means of wealth production, and those who own nothing but their labour-power. The latter is the governed class, the compulsory sale of their labour-power to the capitalist is the capitalistic form of slavery, and imposes on the workers the entire labour of producing wealth which is never theirs. That wealth is continually piled up in a superabundance, owned by the ruling class, proving conclusively that they govern to a purpose, and that capitalist government is a deliberately organised and maintained form of robbery and oppression, as governments have always been. Capitalism everywhere tends to reduce the workers to a minimum standard of subsistence, and steadily encroaches on their paltry rights and liberties.

The slavery of the Irish worker is no better and no worse, in this respect, than that of other workers in other lands, and under different forms of government. The Irish capitalist is a fair example of his class the world over.

It is a false notion of the Sinn Feiners and Nationalists that the Irish workers must struggle for national independence before they can tackle the problem of poverty. But the working class everywhere is under one capitalist government or another. To split territories, set up new governments, or to re-establish old ones will not help them nor even simplify the problem. Their only hope lies in the speedy establishment of Socialism. They must join hands with the workers of the world, and make common cause against the ruling class. They must make ready for the last war—the war of classes, in which classes must be abolished and a real equality established on the basis of “common ownership and democratic control of all the means of life”.

F. Foan

Brutal Attack on A Speaker. (1931)

From the August 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

We learn from the "One Big Union Bulletin" (Winnipeg) that repeated brutal attacks have been made by Communists in that city on speakers of the newly re-formed Socialist Party of Canada.

We have recently experienced similar tactics in Glasgow, not, be it noted, from Communists, but—or so it is believed—from certain religious fanatics.

On Monday, June 29th, after a meeting at Clydebank our speaker, A. Shaw, was attacked by four individuals, one of whom finally knocked him unconscious with a piece of lead pipe. Comrade Shaw was badly shaken up by the assault, and it was some days before he fully recovered.

The gratifying feature is that listeners, whatever their political or religious views, do not usually sympathise with such methods, and further very successful meetings have been held at Clydebank.

We do not often have cause to complain of attempts to interfere with our meetings. Except at times of high feeling, such as the war years, when outdoor socialist meetings were often made impossible by the joint efforts of the authorities and the patriots, we find audiences ready to give us a hearing. Our great advantage over the other political parties is that we allow our opponents to state their case on our platform. Audiences, knowing this to be our practice, are less willing to tolerate obstructive methods from our opponents. If other political parties extended the same liberty to opponents they would have less trouble than they sometimes get.

There are, of course, exceptional cases. Those who deliberately set out to smash up meetings or to attack socialist speakers can contrive to seize opportunities for so doing. As explained by Mr. Harry Pollitt in the "Daily Worker" (29th January, 1930); it is the deliberate policy of the Communist Party to smash up its opponents meetings by force. If that policy has not been attended by any success the explanation can be no doubt be found in the smallness of the Communist Party membership, which makes it a very risky proceeding for the would-be smashers.

Two Penguins (1951)

Book Reviews from the November 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

For those who have yet to take an annual holiday there are two books that will slip easily into the haversack, the saddle bag, the pannier bag, the suitcase or the pocket, and which are well worth reading. Both of them were written a few years ago but in their more expensive editions they have probably not found their way onto working class bookshelves. Now they are available in the comparatively cheap "Penguin" series.

The first is "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck, first published in 1939. This is a story that has as its theme the proletarianising of the small farmers of Oklahoma and other central states of the U.S.A., and their early experiences as wage workers. Turned off their small holdings by the finance and large farming corporations who intended to introduce the more profitable mechanical farming methods, these poverty stricken families trek all the way to California where they are led to believe there is a fertile land and comfortable living. There is fertile land alright, but not for them. The ingenuity of man has devised fertilisers, pest destroyers, grafting and selective breeding of the many varieties of fruit grown in California. The crops are so bountiful that the market price is lower than the cost of picking and the fruit is allowed to rot. Into this state comes the army of newly created wage workers bewildered by the land of plenty in which they watch their children starve. Capital has them in its clutches. It breaks up the families, it makes men unscrupulous and unsociable, it drives them all into a cut-throat low wage competition. The poverty is extreme; and the period is the 1930's.

Steinbeck tells of all this through the medium of the adventures of the Joad family—Grandpa and Grandma, Pa and Ma, Noah, Tom, Winfield, Al, Ruth and Rosaharn together with Rosaharn's husband, Connie and a wandering preacher, Casy. Steinbeck is a story teller of the first order. he can bring a lump to the throat or a smile to the lips in the space of a page. The book has a social significance and is wonderfully well done and the author, at the end of his story, delivers the reader a resounding kick in the belly that will make him remember it for years to come.

The second book is George Orwell's "Animal Farm." This is a good and amusing satire on the process that has taken place in Russia since 1917 up to the time of writing, 1945. Orwell portrays the 1917 Revolution by a rebellion of the animals on a farm in which they turn out the human owner and take over the farm themselves. The pigs take on the leadership of the new order and the old boar, Comrade Napoleon, by astute manoeuvering called "tactics" becomes the great chief. The process of hoodwinking the working animals whilst steering the rebellion away from its original course until the animals are dumbfounded to find that they are working harder and are poorer fed than in pre-rebellion days and that in all other respects the system is the same as ever, is well described.

"Comrade Napoleon" is, of course, a caricature of Stalin, whilst ex-comrade Snowball, represents Trotsky. Other characters are easily identified. There is the horse, Boxer, who has a cure for all problems by working harder and whose motto is "Comrade Napoleon is always right." He finally works himself to a weak and useless condition, and the pigs send him off to the knacker's yard.

In the space of a couple of hours reading, George Orwell has described by his satire what other writers have failed to describe as adequately in hundreds of stodgy pages. His animal characters are often wise but funny, instance the donkey, Benjamin, who has lived for many years and who, when told that God had given him his tail to whisk away the flies, replied that he could well do without the tail and the flies. Good for the holiday, both of them. Just as good if you have had the holiday or even if you do not get one.

W. Waters

Hours, Wages and Profits (2006)

From the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The struggle to reduce the length of the working day is the embodiment of class struggle in capitalism. Although class struggle in pre-capitalist society took on different forms, class conflict between those who monopolised the means of producing wealth and those who laboured to produce surplus product was a constant feature. In these societies the producers were openly compelled not only to provide the means of their own subsistence but also that of the owner of the means of production. This expropriated labour took on different appearances in different societies. In slave society the slave master owned the slaves entire day and maintained the slave in much the same way as the prudent factory owner might look after his machinery. In feudal society the serf was tied to plots of land, which were cultivated in return for unpaid work or surplus product.

Capitalism turned human labour power into a commodity something bought and sold. As feudalism gave way to the wage labour of early capitalism, the surplus product so obvious in feudal society became hidden by the apparent freedom of the workers to sell their labour power to an employer who would pay the highest wages. But while this arrangement has the appearance of a fair days work for a fair days pay it actually hides worker exploitation that is the source of alienation.

When capitalists buy a workers labour they buy the workers capacity to work for a full day. Wages are set, however, like every other commodity, by the value of labour-power needed to reproduce them, which in the case of labour is the value of food, clothing, etc. needed to keep the worker in a fit condition to work. But the value of labour power is different from the value created by the workers labour and this difference, called surplus value, belongs to the capitalist.

The working day under capitalism therefore divides into two parts; necessary labour when the workers actually earns what they are paid in wages, and surplus labour which is the time spent producing surplus value for the capitalist employer. Naturally, it is in the interest of the worker to earn a wage sufficient to purchase the necessities of life in the shortest possible time. Conversely, once the workers wages have been paid, it is in the interest of the employer, the purchaser of labour power, to make the worker work as long as possible. Accordingly, in early capitalist society the owner always looked to expand working hours and keep the worker working to the limits of human endurance.

Where the length of the working day is reduced the natural tendency of the capitalist is to increase the intensity of the working day. The capitalists endeavours to get more work from the workers in order to maintain or increase the level of surplus value which is the source of their profit. Accordingly, in many cases the reduction in working hours over the last 200 years has been achieved by intensifying work and making the employee work harder to earn their wage.

Factory Laws

The factory system transformed the way people worked. Under a system of wage labour workers were forced to submit to the regimentation of factory life where the division of labour and pace of work were set by power-driven machinery with fixed hours, six days a week. Improvements in machinery encouraged the substitution of women and children for men to reduce the price of labour power, and by 1816 a working day of 16 or 18 hours, regardless of age or gender, was common in conditions that were cramped, airless, deafening and dangerous. Parliament, representing the interests of the ruling class, was naturally attached to the doctrines of a laissez-faire political economy where social problems were instinctively ignored.

As early as 1810, Robert Owen, the philanthropist industrialist, raised the demand for a ten-hour working day, which was instituted on his enterprise at New Lanark. By 1817 he was calling for an eight-hour day under the slogan Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest. His demands came to nothing and it wasnt until the 1830s and 1840s that a movement for shorter working hours developed into agitation for the ten-hour working day for children who were often taken by mill owners from parish workhouses in batches and treated as slave labour. The short time movement coalesced around the Leeds Tory evangelical, Richard Oastler, who headed the Yorkshire Factory Movement that organised public meetings and mass marches, including that in York on Easter Sunday 1832. It also delivered a petition to parliament where another evangelical, Michael Sadler, gathered parliamentary support for the reduction of child working hours.

The movement faced bitter opposition. Radicals, many of them factory owners, citing the laissez-faire doctrines of Jeremy Bentham, justified opposition to a reduction in the working day by asserting that state intervention was inappropriate because it interfered with the natural workings of the market. Mill owners were hostile to the Ten Hour Movement because a shorter working day for children would inevitably result in a restriction on adult working hours. Cheap child labour, they argued, maintained adult workers productivity and if working hours were restricted it would reduce profits and make it uneconomic to keep the workplace open beyond 10 hours simply to employ adult labour. As well as reducing profits a reduction in working hours would lead to unemployment, they claimed, because better working conditions and shorter working hours would raise production costs and make goods less competitive on foreign markets.

This reasoning was supported by eminent economists, notably Nassau Senior, the Oxford professor of Political Economy, who made the claim, ridiculed by Marx (and by what happened when working hours were reduced), that the entire profit from industry was generated in the last hours work each day and therefore any reduction in the working day would eliminate profit altogether. Other apologists for child exploitation claimed that the employment of child labour for long hours was acceptable because it had occurred in agriculture for centuries and even suggested that long working hours occupied otherwise idle children and kept them from becoming a social nuisance. Too much leisure time for the poor was seen as a dangerous and undesirable development.

Set against this background it is hardly surprising that early legislation to restrict child labour, including the Factory Acts of 1819, 1831 and 1833, was weak and ineffective. Despite the commitment in the Factory Act of 1833 (piloted by Lord Ashley, later Earl of Shaftesbury) to reducing child working hours to 8 hours for 9-13 year-olds and 12 hours for young people of 14-18, it was never effectively enforced and applied only to cotton mills. The Act appointed four inspectors to supervise the Act but mill owners responded by introducing the relay system of child labour so that factories could still remain open from 5.30am to 8.30pm. The 1833 Act was also passed at the expense of the short-time movement that advocated shorter working hours for all workers.

Further legislation followed but it wasnt until 1847 that the reformer and Chartist sympathiser John Fielden introduced a parliamentary bill to limit the working day to ten hours for all women and young persons up to the age of 18. It was accompanied by massive demonstrations and marches throughout the north of England and passed through parliament without amendment. This Act was a consequence of an alliance between the Chartist movement and the representatives of the landed aristocracy, the Tories, against the rising industrial bourgeoisie, who in 1846 had succeeded in the repeal of the Corn Laws. Although the textile industry was suffering a trade depression and most factories were already on a ten-hour day, manufacturers hindered the implementation of the 1847 Act by cutting wages in order to encourage opposition to the legislation on the grounds that workers needed to work the longer hours.

Three years later, the Factory Act of 1850 reduced factory opening to 12 hours each day, with the provision that factories must close at 2pm on a Saturday. The Act also reduced the working day for women and young persons to ten and a half hours, which in practice meant that male working hours also started to be restricted. As the reduction in working hours was introduced, the intensity of work increased, which meant that in many cases the anticipated fall in production did not occur and output actually increased. But the regulations only applied to textile mills and the next struggle was to extending the coverage of the Act across industry, finally achieved in 1867.

In the next decade, the 1874 Factory Act reduced the working day to ten hours for women and young persons. Almost immediately agitation for the Nine Hours Movement began and won a reduction of hours in the engineering and building industries. Trade Unions, which received full legal recognition in 1876, joined the struggle for a reduction in working hours through collective bargaining and strikes, especially in the north east of England. By the 1880s the movement began to gather around the demand for an eight-hour day.

Reversal of improvements

But the defeat of the New Unionism (the organisation of the unskilled) in the 1890s gave new leverage to the employers and further reductions in working hours were halted and sometimes reversed. In 1906 the factory working week still averaged 54 hours and by the 1920s had only reduced to 47 hours. Not until the late 1960s did a 40-hour working week became the accepted standard. The 8-hour day was accompanied by a real increase in holidays and pensions, achieved largely, however, by increasing the intensity of work.

Since the 1970s the struggle to reduce working hours has disappeared and improvements in working conditions have gradually been reversed. The weakening of national constraints on the movement of capital from country to country has meant that investment focuses on short-term profit through share prices rather than on long-term dividends. This has increased pressure on employers to make more profit and intensify the working conditions of their employees. Jobs have similarly moved from country to country in search of lower costs and new technologies begun to make it cheaper to invest in machines instead of people.

The security of life-long employment has been abandoned and replaced by short term relationships, where workers are expected to periodically migrate from job to job and undergo regularly retraining. The correlation between economic growth and improving social welfare has been cut and part-time working, which often denies bargaining power or employment benefits, has been expanded. Part-time working has also released capitalism from the need to provide a living wage, forcing working people to rely on multiple incomes from a variety of jobs. Unpaid overtime has become widespread and pensions and the retirement age are under attack.

In capitalism, struggle to defend and where possible improve working conditions, as generations of workers did to reduce the length of the working day, is important. But no amount of reform will eliminate the irreconcilable clash of interest between the capitalist and the working class, even if the working day were to reduce to an absolute minimum. It is only in a society of common ownership where production is for use not profit and where exchange, labour as a commodity and the wages system have been abolished that work will become a creative and rewarding experience. In such a society the distinction between work and leisure will disappear and because work will be voluntary, freed from the alienation of wage labour, the concept of working hours will cease to have meaning.

Steve Trott