Capitalism: A Major Global Problem (2018)

From the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Flint, Michigan, US – a town in the US where long term denial by the authorities caused large numbers of people to be poisoned by excessive amounts of lead in the water system leading to illnesses, malformations of foetuses and deaths. While this scandal was unfolding slowly other studies in other states revealed many more areas where water contamination from lead was even greater than that determined in Flint.

The 'Democratic Republic' of Congo – where living standards for most are critical. In 2012 the Gross National Income per capita was $220 and the Human Development Index had them at the bottom of the list. Circumstances force many into deadly employment in small mining set ups mining coltan, tantalum, tin and gold for use in such products as cameras, laptops and mobile phones in what they describe as their only option to feed their families. This is a practice replicated in many other African countries where resources are mined for a pittance for the enrichment of the wealthy and the satisfaction of consumers abroad.

EU countries – Against popular will, citizens have just been handed over, courtesy of their governments' votes to extend for another five years Monsanto's contract to supply and use glyphosate This is against convincing evidence around the world of the dangers of this chemical for its effects on animal life, including human. The news was greeted with huge protests by citizens demanding their health be protected by those who supposedly represent them.

New York, US – News out this week. 75,000 people, including children, are now homeless and of these about 4,000 (1 in 20) are sleeping rough in New York. Rents are too high and work pay is insufficient. The government claims to have added x thousand jobs this year but there was another hike in homeless numbers apparently equivalent to the great depression in the early twentieth century. And this situation is replicated in 'developed' countries around the globe. For instance there are now 307,000 homeless in the UK, up 34 percent since 2010.

India – Latest figures reveal 300,000 farmer suicides in the previous ten years. The reason? Debt. Trade agreements favouring industrial agriculture leave small holder farmers indebted through lack of capital.  The many links between pressure to buy big companies' seed, fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides and subsequent failed crops as a result of poor weather conditions have led to hangings and pesticide suicides on this massive scale, leaving whole families indebted.

Kenya, Ethiopia and other African and Asian countries – Hundreds of thousands have been forcibly removed from their small parcels of land which had fed them and provided an income, sometimes for generations, to give contracts to big companies, mostly from abroad, to grow flowers, beans and other cash crops in mega greenhouses or mono crops for animal feed or biofuels – seeking big bucks with the former occupants left with neither land, shelter nor employment.

Sao Paulo, Brazil – News out today following steep economic decline that homelessness is rapidly on the rise, squatter tent suburbs growing exponentially from 2, to 5, to 12,000 by the week and this is being replicated around the country. Another bust after an earlier boom.

What do these few random samples do if not reveal the many similarities in circumstances for populations all around the world? Whilst specific differences will most certainly be relevant to and the consequences fully understood by each and every individual victim of their particular circumstances, what perhaps is more important is to recognise the necessity of grasping the threads that connect them all; what the causes are of so many seemingly diverse localised problems, tragedies, everyday living conditions, health care deficiencies, rampant hunger, and on and on.

Are the causes really different and disconnected or can we recognise that these problems are actually all our problems with perhaps different nuances? Our collective problems stem from the one source and that is the major global problem – capitalism.

Capitalism must be overturned         

Capitalism affects every nook and cranny of each of our lives. Who can live a day without being negatively affected one way or another whether at home, at work or at leisure? Difficult circumstances oppress a global majority. We are tied to the system like it or not.

Why so much interest in elections in recent times? Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Spain, United States, France, and also the UK. Media outlets, whether print or broadcast, serve their capitalist paymasters and endeavour to have us believe what they have to say but searching below the surface it's clear to see a different picture. Around the world a great mass of humanity is desperately concerned for the welfare of their families, their communities, their work situation and the state of the planet. How often do you hear individuals expounding about their wonderful conditions at work, the excellent value of their mortgage or rent deal, the cheapness of their monthly travel bill, the fantastic value of their weekly shop, their highly affordable electricity and gas payments, their ever-changing phone, TV and internet contract, their coming brilliant pension deal, and on and on infinitum? Probably the vast majority are focussed on negative aspects most of the time - poverty, disease, unemployment, endless war, decaying infrastructure – bridges, railways, roads, factories, mines, dams, nuclear power stations.

The last decade with a number of dramatic protests around the world has spawned a new phrase – that of the 1 percent, or the 99 percent - of which most are familiar - and everyone knows to which category they belong. In fact it's not the 1 percent at all but something more like the 0.001 percent or even 0.0001 percent which puts the rest of us into an even bigger group, something like 99.99 percent or 99.999 percent.

The tiny group of money-wealthy individuals are in a position to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it. But the great mass has very little choice, few options – or so they believe because this is what they have been 'brainwashed' for so long into believing.

To match the privileged number at the top of the pyramid is another group of individuals, small in number but convinced of their vision that the reason the capitalist system, however warped in its one-sided distribution of 'money wealth', continues to function because that great mass in the middle has fallen for the deception long handed down to them and their ancestors. 

This minority will continue its campaign to reveal the truth in every way possible, presenting the message that capitalism is the problem for the world's majority, strong in the conviction that there are many who will grasp the message, spread the message and speed the day.

Janet Surman

Where Do We Go From Alienation? (1974)

From the January 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years Marxism has taken on a different look. The existence in German of early philosophical writings of Marx was known since before the war. The English publication in the late nineteen-fifties of The Holy Family and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 set loose the theory of alienation which Marx formulated as a young man and echoed in his work nearly fifteen years later. Its appearance at first was gratifying enough; here was Marxism come in from the cold, as it were, and revealed as humanism.

From there, however, it has become an academic industry. Preliminary and marginal Marx is turned over in repetition of the thirties’ nonsense-debate as to What he Really Meant. Then, it was about political economy; now, about Man. It’s a sad reflection that Marx and Engels meant their work to make explicit the struggle of the working class, and the academics have obstructed that happening by making it as esoteric as possible. An Inaugural Lecture at the London School of Economics in November dealt with “some theoretical aspects of Marx’s original work” under the heading “The Fundamental Marxian Theorem”. A feeling, no doubt, that so valuable a property cannot be left to the workers’ mucky hands.

But from this scholarship world where theses are hatched to fly in ever-decreasing circles, influences seep down. There is the case of the Left, with leadership increasingly claimed as of right through comprehension of Marxism’s alleged inner mysteries. And there is alienation as not only the vogue-word of the times but one pronounced as substitute for an analysis of practically anything. What is to be said about capitalism in 1974? Alienation. How is the subject-life of millions to be explained? They are alienated. The cry of “alienation” has rendered Marxism as a vague universal humanitarianism instead of the mechanics of the class struggle.

Words and Men

Of course Marx had a conception of the nature of man. He saw man’s distinctive ability to “make his vital activity into an object of his will and consciousness”: his power to create his own environment, to change it and thereby change himself. He saw how capitalism militated against human fulfilment in those terms — productive activity, the “species-life” of man, was appropriated from him. Using Feuerbach’s word, he proposed that man under capitalism was alienated from the product of his labour and the act of production; from other men; and ultimately, therefore, from his own nature.

What does “alienation” mean? The Shorter Oxford Dictionary gives it as “estrange” or, in legal application, “transferring ownership to another”. The first is a stilted but everyday one. Jane Austen in Persuasion has: "What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals . . .” The second is found in records of changes in the holding of land, as:

   Further alienation occurred in 1636 to Charles Maynard, one of the Auditors of His Majesties Court of Wards and Liverys, who in 1639 became the purchaser of the manor and the whole of its rights and privileges.

(A Calendar of Deeds, pub. 1923)

It is important that these meanings should not be confused. Up to quite recent years legal actions were occasionally brought by husbands for “alienation of the affections” of their wives. What was envisaged was not estrangement — which had obviously taken place anyway — but the loss of the wife’s services and duties: a matter of property.

The German words Marx used for alienation were “Entfremdung”, “Verausserung” and “Entäusserung” They correspond with the English meanings above, the first two referring to property and the last to personal relations. Marx seems to have used them more or less indistinctly. In the Communist Manifesto “entäusserung des menschlichen wesens” is “alienation of humanity”, and in Vol. I of Capital (p.708, Kerr edn.) the word “entfremden” is used in “estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process”.

In his book Marx's Theory of Alienation István Mészáros attempts to explain the difference:

  When the accent is on “externalization’ or “ojectification”, Marx uses the term "Entäusserung” (or terms like “Vergegenständlichung”), whereas “Entfremdung” is used when the author's intention is to emphasize the fact that man is being opposed by a hostile power of his own making, so that he defeats his own purpose.

This explanation is less important than the actual translations into English. Why did Moore and Aveling, who translated Vol. I of Capital, choose and Engels as editor approve “estrange” — and, elsewhere, “divorce”? All three knew Marx and were well placed to render what was in his mind. Yet we know for a certainty that any modern scholar would seize on “alienate”, because the intellectual fashion of the time says so. And with it is conveyed a heavy philosophical package.

Changes of Thinking

The theory of alienation appeared initially as Marx’s first view of the capitalist world, an interim enquiry between the Hegelian philosophy of his youth and his major historical and economic analysis. The academicians will have none of that, however. David McLellan in Marx Before Marxism declares:

   Those who claim to find a break between the ‘young’ and the ‘old’ Marx usually maintain that alienation is a concept that was central to Marx’s early thought but which he abandoned later . . . These statements are, however, inaccurate.

For McLellan, the Grundrisse of 1857-8 is the final word:

  The Grundrisse, then, are as Hegelian as the ‘Paris Manuscripts’ and their publication makes it impossible to maintain that only Marx’s early writings are of philosophical interest, and that in the later Marx specialist economic interests have obscured the earlier humanist vision.

Mészáros takes the same standpoint, pouring scorn on those who believe Marx put aside the alienation concept and quoting from The Holy Family, The German Ideology, the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus-Value. But difficulties immediately arise. Except the Grundrisse these are all early works, and both Marx and Engels wrote deprecatingly of them later. A. Voden in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels recalled a conversation in 1893 in which Engels refused to have an interest in “publishing old manuscripts from publicistic work of the forties”; and Marx spoke of The German Ideology as having been meant mainly for “self-clarification”. Indeed, The German Ideology—only two years after the 1844 Manuscripts—makes ironical references to “the self-estrangement of man”. Likewise the Communist Manifesto (1848) ridicules the German academics:

  They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity”.

(SPGB edition, p. 85)

More Reservations

Having claimed that Marx never gave up the alienation theory, Mészáros has to qualify the assertion:

  But once it is conceived in its broadest outlines—in the Manuscripts of 1844— it becomes possible to let the general term “recede” in the presentation . . . This is why it is not at all surprising to find that the works which followed the Manuscripts of 1844, up to about 1856—and written for publication—are far less densely populated with the word “alienation” than the first broad synthesis.

This is “special pleading” with a vengeance, and it does not stand up for a moment. If Marx really thought on those lines, that having stated a theory there was no need to go on reiterating it, he did not act accordingly over the labour theory of value and the materialist conception of history; these, once begun, never “recede” in his work. To look at this another way, Marx’s main works have been extant for generations. In them the words “alienate” and “estrange”, and statements on the condition of man, have been perfectly comprehensible as part of his economic analysis. It is only the early and preparatory works which put them in the context of a philosophical theory belonging, at that, to Marx’s intercourse with the Hegelians and Feuerbach.

But what about Engels? According to both Mészáros and McLellan, Marx was first influenced towards the alienation concept by Engels’s Outline of a Critique of Political Economy (1843-44); and there is Engels’s own work on Feuerbach. Mészáros and McLellan both lay stress on Marx’s unfulfilled intention to produce an enormous work on mankind, of which Capital was the first “brochure”. It should be taken for granted that Engels, as the lifelong collaborator of Marx, would share the pursuit of the alienation theory and seek to complete what Marx allegedly left unfinished. But not only did Engels dismiss their early philosophical work and describe its “semi-Hegelian language” as “not only untranslatable, but has lost the greater part of its meaning even in German” (letter to Mrs. F. K. Wischnewetsky, 1886); the theory is — despite the wide range of his social investigation — entirely absent from his own post-juvenile writings.

A Sterile Concept

It is possible, of course, to brush off Engels on the grounds that he was not Marx. That is what Kamenka. in The Ethical Foundations of Marxism, attempts to do. However, in the Introduction to Marx and Engels : Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Lewis S. Feuer argues and offers evidence that for Marx the alienation theory was a youthful aberration which he shared Engel’s wish to forget. He points out that Marx’s last published writing, A Workers' Enquiry (1880), showed him preoccupied with further economic research “into the deeds and misdeeds of capitalist exploitation” (Marx’s own words):

  It consisted of a hundred questions directed to workers as to their conditions, their treatment by their employers and governmental agencies, their conditions at home, their diet, their children, the frequency and duration of strikes, the workingmen’s societies, and so on.

And in 1881 Marx wrote to a Russian correspondent about his friend Ray Lankester’s essay Degeneration. Of Marx’s interest in it, Feuer says: “Evidently it was related to an even more basic questioning of his philosophical standpoint which he never articulated.”

What then are we left with? A theory which Marx may or may not have retained; which Engels apparently discarded altogether; of uncertain terminology; and in the absence of which, Marxism has existed as a lucid, coherent and not-at-all-deficient body. Its being put in the fore of left-wing Marxism has damaged that coherence, despite claims that it gives “a fuller view”. Bertell Oilman in his book Alienation presents value, appropriation, the money-system etc. as facets of alienation; Mészáros asserts the importance of economics to be as

  a vital link in the programme of gaining mastery over the various causal factors involved, serving the purpose of practically superseding alienation in all spheres of life.

This does not expand the existing view of Marxism: it diminishes it. If a working man understands (in fact, he already does) that he is estranged from life’s potentialities by being exploited, that is proper consciousness. But if he is to be asked to say he is first and foremost alienated, and exploited as part of it, that is futile.

Meaning and Purpose

This brings us to the question: where does the theory of alienation lead? Any theory is going to be reduced in frequent usage to the common-or-garden, and at this level it has already become sheer do-gooding with a highfalutin name. Four years ago a TV programme on political dissent showed a member of a well-known left-wing group expounding alienation: “There — on the other side of that wall — you could die, and nobody would know about it!” Of course there is an appeal in this kind of “theorizing”, and being able to invoke the pre-scientific Marx for it. It is not only more romantic but easier than learning the economics of capitalism.

At the academic level, however, there is not much improvement. Oilman gives a clear and readable account of the alienation theory, but seems conscious at the end of the problem of not knowing what to do with it: his critical summary turns out to be chiefly a criticism of Marx’s economic categories after all. And Mészáros, after attacking the “hot air”, “falsifications” and “grotesque ideas” of misinterpreters of Marx, emerges as a supporter of the regimes in Cuba, China and Eastern Europe and a believer that the critical breakdown of capitalism is almost upon us. Since this is merely the old rubbish of the Left, the alienation theory looks to have been brought forward as a convoluted support for it.

  

Only one conclusion is possible. The Marxian Socialism which makes sense is founded on the economic theory of Marx about which there is no surmise. It does not at all exclude “human” considerations; on the contrary, it has no meaning if it does not begin from indignation at what capitalism does to the great majority of people. But nor can it have meaning unless it is understood to be rooted in the class struggle. The way to Marx’s “human society” is not through contemplating “freedom as essence” (Oilman’s phrase) but by consciousness aimed at abolishing exploitation.

Robert Barltrop

Napoleon on Religion (1924)

From the February 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

    “What is it that makes the poor man think it quite natural that there are fires in my palace while he is dying of cold? That I have ten coats in my wardrobe while he goes naked? That at each of my meals enough is served to feed his family for a week? It is simply religion, which tells him that in another life I shall be only his equal, and that he actually has more chance of feeing happy there than I. Yes, we must see to it that the floors of the churches are open to all, and that it does not cost the poor man much to have prayers said on his tomb.”

“The Life and Times of Count Molé.” Quoted in the Daily News, December 31st, 1923.

On Reading. (1924)

From the January 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

“We read to weigh and to discover. To do this properly there are rules to be followed: . . . The good reader marks his books, writes in the margins, copies out passages that he wants to memorise, and if he is wise makes a precis, not only of the subject matter, but also of his own impressions while he was reading! This helps one to weigh and consider deliberately."

S. P. B. Mais.

Socialism and Ethics. (1924)

From the January 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

   “Pity for poverty, enthusiasm for equality and freedom, recognition of social injustice and a desire to remove it, is not socialism. Condemnation of wealth and respect for poverty, such as we find in Christianity and other religions, is not socialism. The communism of early times, as it was before the existence of private property, and as it has at all times and among all peoples been the elusive dream of some enthusiasts, is not socialism. The forcible equalisation advocated by the followers of Baboeuf, the so-called equalitarians, is not socialism.
   In all these appearances there is lacking the real foundation of capitalist society with its class antagonisms. Modern socialism is the child of capitalist society and its class antagonisms. Without these it could not be. Socialism and ethics are two separate things. This fact must be kept in mind.
   Whoever conceives of socialism in the sense of a sentimental philanthropic striving after human equality, with no idea of the existence of capitalist society, is no socialist in the sense of the class struggle, without which modern socialism is unthinkable . . . Whoever has come to a full consciousness of the nature of capitalist society and the foundation of modern socialism, knows also that a socialist movement that leaves the basis of the class struggle may be anything else, but it is not socialism.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht 

(Page . 34. No Compromise, no Political Trading.)

The Paralysing Past. (1923)

Lytton Strachey relates of Queen Victoria that, after the death of Prince Albert, she became more and more perturbed by the lack of stability and permanence in her surroundings. When she was young she had looked forward with some fear perhaps, but certainly with eagerness, to the future, but as she grew old she found that the friends and advisers of her youth were taken from her one by one, and even the institutions of society and the Empire developed and decayed before her eyes. She was, after all, a quite ordinary old lady of the nineteenth century, and as she had had to adapt herself to the strange situation of being the embodiment of all the pomp and dignity of the leading nation of the age, it was not surprising that with her the desire for security became an obsession. She set herself to the task of petrifying the world as it was, and of suspending the forces of disintegration.

   “She gave orders that nothing should be thrown away—and nothing was. There in drawer after drawer, in wardrobe after wardrobe, reposed the dresses of seventy years. But not only the dresses—the furs and mantles and the subsidiary frills and the muffs and the parasols and the bonnets—all were arranged in chronological order; dated and complete . . . mementoes of the past surrounded her in serried accumulations. In every room the tables were powdered thick with the photographs of relatives; their portraits, revealing them at all ages, covered the walls; their figures, in solid marble, rose up from pedestals, or gleamed from brackets in the form of gold and silver statuettes. . . . And it was not enough that each particle of the past should be given the stability of metal or of marble; the whole collection, in its arrangement, no less than its entity, should be immutably fixed. There might be additions, but there might never be alterations.  . . . Every single article in the Queen’s possession was photographed from several points of view. . . . The fate of every object which had undergone this process was thenceforth irrevocably sealed. The whole multitude once and for all, took up its steadfast station, and Victoria, with a gigantic volume or two of the endless catalogue always beside her, to look through, to ponder upon, to expatiate over, could feel, with a double contentment, that the transitoriness of this world had been arrested by the amplitude of her might. ”

You will smile at the picture, perhaps, at the same time sympathising a little with this exhibition of human weakness. For although we cannot all enjoy the troublesome delights of being Queen Victorias, the hankering after the imagined peacefulness of stagnation, and the desire to peg down the universe, or our little corner of it, are not restricted to old ladies and did not die with the nineteenth century. We are all possessors, in some degree, of the facility for retaining experiences and using them for the formation of habits. If we hadn’t this power, life would be one long round of painful repetitions of error, and, in fact, it is difficult to imagine the continuance of human society at all under such conditions; but the price we have to pay is the disinclination we have for altering our habits when once use has made them natural. Every one of us would, if he could, sit back leisurely and content, and contemplate the blessedness of things as they are. It has chanced, however, that we were born in an age when things are not by any means blessed, and either we must deaden our perceptions by swallowing the illusions of religious and political charlatans or we must set ourselves to find the remedy. Individuals rarely set themselves this task from choice; our preference for the old familiar ways of thought and action leads us first to try every known but fruitless remedy before we will recognise that new problems need new solutions. When therefore one system sinks into decay the energy to conceive and construct a new society must come from those who, despite their efforts to maintain themselves, have been forcibly deprived of status and security and cut off from traditional links with the past. And, again, no such revolutionary purpose can gain wide acceptance until the old conditions have become so unbearable that we cannot tolerate their continued existence.

We have arrived now at a stage of capitalist development in which it is becoming more and more difficult for the problems of the workers to be shelved any longer, and their solution within the system is a sheer impossibility, but as we find in every historical epoch, custom dies hard and new ideas progress but slowly. All the acquired ingenuity of individuals is first directed to stemming the tide of dissolution, and in view of this it is not surprising that old institutions should live on tenaciously long after they have become economically absurd and politically a mere obstruction. Discontent among the workers is fairly general, while among the capitalists there is a growing realisation that unless they can succeed in allaying the discontent they will fall victims to it. It is readily understandable why the latter, who view society from above, should look backwards to find remedies for to-day’s problems, but the so-called leaders of the workers, many of them self-styled revolutionaries, are also in the ranks of the Queen Victorias.

In the war days, when the ruling class were in difficulties and the workers particularly restive, the talk was all of the new world. Now our Trade Union officials and Labour Leaders, the men, “of vision,” can talk of nothing but the necessity of not going below the pre-war standards, and they and the business men are united in casting longing eyes on the supposed happy days of 1914. The prophets, who we are told will show us the way to our earthly paradise, can do nothing better than discuss financial schemes and currency reforms to get us back to 1914 prices. Labour men, Liberals, Conservatives and Communists are all devising plans to win back our pre-war trade. Liberal journalists on Labour’s Daily sigh for a return of the clean and gentlemanly politics that existed before the devil, Mr. Lloyd George, turned the world awry. The agricultural labourer’s wise men can think of only one policy, that of asking the Government to give them back their wages board. The dockers’ officials tremble with fear over the unofficial strike lest it should lead to the destruction of a great mass of those much-sought-after seals on the worker’s slavery, known as wage agreements.

Ramsay MacDonald is forever perturbed lest the ancient usages of our Parliament be departed from. We have, in fact, reached a point where the feeling of unrest is so acute that the very worker’s organisations, existing nominally to hasten the process of change, have become rocks of stability for the ruling class.

The “Industrial Group of the House of Commons,” composed of business men, recently issued a warning to the Government, in which they “viewed with apprehension” the “disruptive force of unemployment on the trade unions, which are a safeguard of industrial peace.” In particular they “feared” that unless the Government did something the Amalgamated Engineering Union would disappear.. (Daily Telegraph, 26/7/1923.)

In fact, like Queen Victoria, these captains of industry, these Labour Leaders, and many of the workers, too, want all the old junk of capitalism photographed, recorded and labelled, so that they, poor bewildered sheep, may rest secure in the knowledge that the capitalist system will be to-morrow to its minutest detail just as it is to-day. Better to rot or starve in the decrepit hovel they know than venture out and risk dying strange deaths out of their beds. The capitalist would rather deal with a certain known and limited evil, the trade unions, than face the terror of the unknown. Think of the dockers’ strike! If the unions were to go, what might there not be underneath? Hell itself. The Labour Leaders would far rather prepare for the next war, while protesting their determination to prevent it, than face up to the situation as it really is and decide to help scrap the social system which makes war.

But all their anxiety will avail them nothing; the conditions of 1850, which made the Amalgamated Engineering Union the “new model” for all the workers, have passed with the challenging of Britain’s world supremacy, and the Engineering Union is now only an example of what the workers ought to avoid.

Sooner or later these leaders must justify themselves by their deeds, and as they cannot remove the cause of discontent, the discontented will some day awake to the necessity of removing the present form of society.

Before they arrive at this recognition a painful and necessarily slow mental process must be gone through, its speed increasing as the pressure of circumstances becomes more insistent. They have got to see that the limits of social development set by private ownership have already been reached, and that the continuing growth of our powers of production can only aggravate the present evils.

The capitalist class, having themselves once had to take charge of a similar dangerous situation, successfully developed the required revolutionary energy. They ushered in their social system, brought it to its triumph, and enjoyed the fruits of success. They then allowed their functions of initiating, organising and directing to fall to other hands, those of the workers. They made Socialism possible, but Socialism can be established only when the workers develop the same confidence in their powers, the same self-reliance and determination that characterised the capitalists who threw down the challenge to feudalism. The workers must cut themselves adrift from the old system and the old parties, persons and notions. They must challenge every institution, question every authority, examine critically every creed, every conception, not excluding those which are popularly supposed to be eternal like ideas of right and wrong. They must give up their pathetic belief in the superiority of the ruling class and its institutions and consciously develop their own standards of conduct, remembering that the purpose and the conditions are the only final measure of their usefulness. It may be true, for instance, that in a broad sense the members of the capitalist class owing to their leisure and opportunities of culture have developed qualities very desirable from a social standpoint, but from the nature of the present situation these qualities sink for the workers into insignificance in comparison with the urgent need for self-assertion, the necessary precursor of emancipation. They must realise that there is, and can be, no improvement in the status of the workers, except at the expense of the other class, because it is the ownership of the means of wealth production which is at stake. It follows therefore that every step will be contested fiercely by the present owners, with whom there can be no useful compromise. They must give up trusting to leaders who can do nothing for them, whether well intentioned or otherwise. They must aim at understanding the social system in which they live as a means to controlling the forces which at present overawe them. It may seem easier to follow the method of Queen Victoria, who surrounded herself with a host of odds and ends to hide the unwelcome facts of life, but it has the twofold objection that the forces of change went on working just the same, while Queen Victoria only succeeded in making herself a slave, toiling to perpetuate the myth she had created. 

Edgar Hardcastle

Correspondence. (1922)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editor,—

I read with great interest your article entitled “The Collapse of Capitalism.”

There seems a great difference between "Capitalism in Collapse” and “Capitalism in imminent Collapse.” As the Communist Party of Russia has pointed out—the collapse may be extended over a period of years; Lenin says ten years.

The final stage of collapse will not be caused by production of commodities ceasing, but by the lack of world markets. In fact, production will be on such a large scale internationally that the distribution of the products will cease owing to the small incomes and unemployment of the wage slaves, and lack of markets. The collapse of Capitalism in Europe would bring down Capitalism in the West owing to the internationalism of our modern economic and political systems. Former great wars, such as the Napoleonic wars, form a very bad analogy, as in that war the instruments of production were not nearly so great as to-day, and there were new and coming markets, and less countries so productive as to-day.

Again, your question of Russia seems remarkable, coming from the “S. S.” Russia is relying on Capitalism to a certain extent, because, as the “S. S.” has often pointed out, Russia before the Revolution was not a developed Capitalist Empire. Its wage slaves were not “educated” to mind machines and produce wealth, as the wage slaves of U.S.A., Germany and England. From 1914-1920, wars crushed Russia. There is no need for me to repeat the terrible story to the readers of the "S. S.” Then came the drought. Yes, Comrades, Capitalism is in collapse, but like a candle which is near burning itself out; it flickers and flickers for a very long time, every moment it is expected to “go out,” and yet lingers on. But a time comes when it does die. How like Capitalism it is in collapse—it may last even for ten years, but what is ten years in the history of the world?

Of course, Socialists cannot afford to wait for the system to collapse! As we look at the struggle between Capitalism and International Socialism, we become keener on convincing the worker of the need for the common ownership and control of the instruments of production and the need to organise politically by the vote to take power, and industrially to take economic control. Nor can we afford to remain outside the struggle like the S.P.G.B., merely content to write fine articles.

Every struggle of the workers must be ours, and we must stand by them, even in the smallest of battles.

Yours faithfully;

" S. Warr.”

OUR REPLY.

First our correspondent points to the difference between “collapse” and “imminent collapse.” There is a difference, but it is one of date only, and not, as he suggests, one of form. A process of disintegration spread over a period of years cannot, in my opinion, accurately be described as a collapse. In any event, Palme Dutt did not appear to mean this process, and it would, seem, therefore, that Mr. Warr does not hold his view.

Palme Dutt’s view is, I think, very well expressed by the following extract from Herman Cahn’s “Collapse of Capitalism” : “A new force has grown up which no longer leaves the downfall of capitalism to the vague future, or its earlier ending to the spread of a high intelligence among the real proletariat, but makes the coming of that great event a matter of figures, and entirely independent of even the collective will of men. The war has enormously hastened the development of this force, and the catastrophe is imminent.” (Page 8.)

In writing “the final stage of collapse will not be caused by production of commodities ceasing, but by the lack of world markets,” I gather that Mr. Warr intends to rule out the possibility of a physical collapse, but he does not show how the lack of markets is going to do what he assumes it will.

The restriction of markets is one of the series of difficulties which have arisen out of the contradictions of the system. The endeavour on the part of the capitalists to reconcile these contradictions has always been in evidence in some degree since the rise of capitalist society.

Mr. Warr, however, does not consider that there is an analogy between the present depression and that following the Napoleonic wars, because “the instruments of production were not nearly so great as to-day." He overlooks the important point that the only useful comparison is between the powers of production then and the effective demand then. Relative to this country’s powers of production, there was an acute shrinkage of markets. In the February issue was an extract from the writings of Robert Owen, which dealt with this crisis. He wrote for instance:—“this very superabundance of wealth was the sole cause of existing distress.”

It is true the problems which arise become more numerous, and difficult to meet, and are for the capitalists insoluble: but it must be remembered that they are under no obligation to solve them. 

The suffering falls on the workers, and while the workers are content to leave the ruling class in control, the suffering will remain. Only such minor adaptations are required and will be forthcoming as will allay any acute working class unrest. So long as the workers accept doles there is no unemployment problem which the capitalists are called upon to solve.

Even if the position gets much worse the choice before the workers is still the same; either to accept their condition, or rejecting it, to endeavour to remove the cause by overthrowing the system. To be effective they must, as Mr. Warr says, organise to “take power,”, but I fail to see that he has shown either that the problem is different from what it was 10 or 20 years ago, or that there is any method other than that advocated by the Socialist Party.

If Mr. Warr really believed that the “lack of world markets” would bring Socialism, he would not trouble about “convincing the workers.”

The Bolsheviks are depending on Capitalist enterprise because collapse or no collapse, there is no prospect of revolution in Western Europe. There will be no revolution because there are too few revolutionaries.

If by “struggle” Mr. Warr means strikes, etc.; it is news to me that emancipation would be hastened by our telling the workers that all would be well if only they refuse to work overtime, or insist on their right to wear a union badge in the employer’s factory. I am not aware that membership of this party makes a worker fight any the less vigorously in the day-to-day struggle, and finally as Socialist knowledge is necessary for emancipation, I have yet to be convinced that there is anything the Socialist Party can engage in more useful than propagating Socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Problem of the Labour Leader (1922)

From the August 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Working class organisations have always (but especially during and since the war) suffered from acts of treachery committed by leaders in whom confidence had mistakenly been placed. Hardly a strike or lock-out of considerable size occurs but there is some Trade Union official who, from sincere or other motives, deserts, or counsels action useful only to the other side. Each of these defections raises a little storm of protest and much vowing of “never again” among the active rank and filers; but the storm dies away, the incident is soon forgotten, and “Black Friday" of 1921 is followed as a matter of course by the engineers’ “betrayal” of 1922. On such occasions some band of enthusiasts with its own pet theoretical obsession is sure to offer its explanations and warnings, confident that the workers will this time learn by experience, and that the mistake really will be the last.

If the leader is a “politician,” then the anti-political syndicalists will preach about the demoralising influence of the House of Commons, the futility of the ballot, and the necessity for pure and simple unionism of some brand or another. If he is the official of a Trade Union, then reformist political bodies of all shades will point to the narrow, conservative, unidealistic tendencies of union officialdom, and disappointed seekers after his and other jobs will run campaigns to “sack the lot,” and perhaps try to stir up the desired amount of feeling by urging that it is the excessive salaries paid which cause indifference to the interests of the under dog—the member.

If the leader still has the ear of his members, he remains where he is, and the thing dies a natural death. If he falls, a grateful capitalist Government may make a niche for him in some obscure department where no harm can be done by his probable incompetence. His successful rival will then take his place, on making all the old unfailingly attractive but never to be fulfilled promises, until he, too, makes way for a new idol; just like the usual ins and outs of national politics.

Of course, new times bring new types, and the Victorian "ploughboy who has fought his way upwards” a la Samuel Smiles gives way to the product of some Labour College or to the University-trained son of one of the old successfuls; but the result is the same. The losing shepherds continue to lead, and the sheep to follow, to the slaughter prepared by the butchers of the ruling class.

What is to be done about it? The matter is an important one, and it is worth while examining some of the proposals made by would-be guides of the workers.

A good instance of the kind of argument used against back-sliding union officials is contained in a resolution of the Distributive Group of the Manchester and Salford Trades Council, reproduced in The Communist (10th June, 1922). It urges among other things, that "the salaries paid to whole-time officials should be made to approximate to the average wage or salary obtaining in the industry in which the officials is engaged."

At first glance, this sounds both reasonable and very much to be desired, but is, in fact, quite impracticable. It is the product not of thought, but of the feeling of resentment against the individuals supposed to be the cause of failure. Because there does not appear to be any justification for the official in a comparatively secure position receiving many times as much as his members, these enthusiasts suggest equalising the two rates of pay as a remedy. They forget to ask themselves whether it will work; they overlook the fact that they live in a capitalist world.

The question of reasonableness is relatively a minor one, and can soon be disposed of. If it is unreasonable that J. H. Thomas should get £1,000 per annum and his members only £150 or thereabouts, is it any more reasonable that a general secretary of a labourers’ union with membership running into hundreds of thousands should get about 40s. per week, while an official of an organisation of bank employees, for instance, with less arduous work and less responsibility, gets £500 a year or more? The argument is unsound.

Realising that this is the position, one must give up Utopian notions about equal pay, and look elsewhere for a solution of the problem which confronts us. We need not, of course, accept Clynes’s argument in favour of still higher pay, which is that the higher the status of the workers’ representatives the more attention conceded to them by the other side. Mr. Clynes knows well enough that other factors determine the amount of consideration an organisation will get from its opponents; will decide, in fact, whether negotiations shall take place at all. When the devil of necessity compels, the robber aristocracy of allied capital does not refuse the “bloody hand” of the saddler President of Germany or of the Bolsheviks.

Another suggestion to the same end was that “every official should be equipped with a thorough knowledge of Economics and Industrial History from the working class standpoint.” It would obviously be to the good that the servants of the workers should be competent servants, but if thee intended servants are really aiming at being masters, the greater their knowledge the greater their danger. Surely the ambitions of many of the young bloods of the Labour movement, coming barrister Hodges and the products of Fabian training, for instance, are illustrations enough of this.

Where these qualifications already exist the same difficulties are present also. Even the officials of the Communist Party “want watching.” John Clarke, in The Worker (organ of the R.I.L.U., 10th June, 1922) writes of the possible danger of the “mass” party (C.P.G.B.) becoming merely a means of collecting “flats” for ‘‘the ‘communistic’ amateur Horatio to play with and prey upon.”

More than competency is required.

Then there is the talk about demoralising environment, especially of the House of Commons. This is all nonsense. The House of Commons’ smoking-room, or wherever it is the Labour M.P.s get drunk, is from a political point of view no more demoralising than the average Labour Party or Trade Union branch or the 1917 Club, where Labour’s Hampstead “Highbrows” congregate.

It is based on the assumption that these men rise to eminence because they are revolutionary, and that once arrived their revolutionary outlook gets blurred. The assumption is not correct. Whether or not a few, or all of them, at some time accepted the revolutionary position, they rise because they are smooth-tongued and popular; because they give attractive expression to the momentary discontent of their fellows; because they are quick to note and adapt themselves to coming changes of sentiment, thus gaining a reputation for leadership. It may often be that the successful man is a “rebel,” who gains popularity from the prevailing dissatisfaction "by the vigour of his abuse of the capitalist, or of the reactionary officials; but apart from the fact that one does not become a revolutionary by composing hymns of hate about the F.B.I., it is obvious that if the workers who originally elected Mr. Clynes to the House of Commons did so because he was a revolutionary, they would not tolerate him when he ceased to be one.

Only a Socialist electorate would support a candidate who fought on a straight Socialist programme, and only a convinced revolutionary membership would have a revolutionary policy and revolutionary officials. This is at the bottom of the business, and it is of no use complaining about the man. What, after all, is the position of the Labour M.P.?

He is elected with the indispensable financial and organisational backing of a Trade Union or the Labour Party, on that nebulous thing—the Labour Party’s programme. That is to say, he receives the votes of people who variously think that “Mr. Shortt must go” for not saving Jacoby from hanging and thus condemning him to the worse horror of life-long imprisonment; that Winston Churchill is a blackguard; that the cattle embargo should be raised; that the beer tax should be removed; that prohibition is (or is not) desirable; that interest on Government Loans should (or should not) be reduced; that this country ought to disarm, or ought alternatively to arm more to make work at Woolwich Arsenal, etc., etc. He receives the votes of a number of shades of anti-Liberal and anti-Coalitionist but decidedly anti-Socialist electors. He gets his £400, with probably some other pay from a Union and almost certainly quite considerable extras in the shape of expenses from various sources. He has no doubt a better and more comfortable existence than previously, and naturally he doesn’t relish a return to the insecurity of the mine or the factory. How, then, can he; best achieve security? By exposing the rottenness of Labour representation and the futility of Parliamentary bargaining? By offending the powers that be who can offer honours and other more lucrative posts? Not much !

He knows he cannot fight an election on his own, and he knows he must please his electorate and the Labour Party, which can only be done by pretending to fight for the futile reforms on which he was elected, and by supporting new stunts as they become popular. If he doesn’t, what happens? Where would Clynes be at the next election if he seriously opposed and exposed the capitalist system? What will happen to Col. Malone, elected as Coalition Liberal, and now in the Communist Party? (Not that I accuse him of seriously opposing capitalism.)

Labour M.P.s and T.U. officials play for safety, and the mentality of the average worker being what it is, this means playing the capitalist game.

This, of course, runs counter to the Communist notion of leadership. I should have said notions, because there are two. One is that the workers are really advanced, and willing to fight, but are held back by their timid or treacherous leaders; and the other is that the workers as a whole don’t, and won’t ever, understand their own interests, but that a choice band of gallant Communists will wrest control from the present leaders and inaugurate the revolution in a moment of crisis. These words about the moment of crisis serve the same purpose as the indefiniteness of Old Moore’s prophecies —they save the prophets from being called to account. Whenever they promise but fail to produce the revolution, they can point out that the crisis wasn’t critical enough. That, however, is by the way.

The first I really can’t take seriously. The idea of several hundred thousand revolutionary railwaymen, for instance, held in check by J. H. Thomas, only makes me laugh. In the other Communist theory of leadership of the masses we get one of the basic fallacies at the back of the failure of the Labour Movement. Even if it were true that masses of people can be induced to take important action vitally affecting themselves and lasting over a considerable period, merely because they trust certain elected or self-appointed leaders, it still remains to be shown how the Labour Party or the Communists could hope to compete with the older parties, possessing as these do unlimited wealth, long experience, and control of Press and pulpit. Actually, people require sooner or later evidence to convince them that the action they are asked to take is sound for them, although, of course, they may, and often do, for a long while misinterpret the evidence. The extreme foolishness of this case is illustrated by a writer in the Workers' Republic (Communist Party of Ireland, 3rd June, 1922), who, assuming the possibility of a Socialist revolution in Ireland sometime between the Armistice and now, explains its failure to materialise by the detention of Jim Larkin in America! The idea of a great social movement affecting every detail of the lives of the great majority of the members of society waiting the arrival of one man is absurd, and the situations is made more ironical when we realise that his imprisonment depends on the whim of the Capitalist Government of the United States. The picture of "Saint” James Larkin, Saviour of Ireland, is amusing but no more accurate than that of Lloyd George, winner of the war, or Horatio Bottomley, Empire builder and martyr. Socialism cannot be achieved by leaders. As Trotsky wrote to an American critic, Louis Boudin: “Remember, we are not making the revolution; the revolution is making us.” 

As happened in Australia recently, a Labour Government in power could not get even the support of its own employees by promising to resist wage reduction for them and other workers, because of the effectiveness of capitalist Press propaganda in favour of the theory that high wages prevent trade revival. (Melbourne Socialist, 17-2-1922.)

The obstacles presented by the untrustworthiness of leaders arises from the composition of the rank and file. No organisation, industrial or political, can be effective except the members are convinced of the correctness of their aims and the necessity for the policy their organisation has adopted. Only if the members have knowledge can they be immune from betrayal at the hands of self-seeking and unscrupulous leaders.

A further clause in the resolution quoted at the beginning of the article which demands “an enlightened and educated membership” is really, therefore, the one which strikes at the root of the evil. When, by the giving of direct or indirect bribes, the capitalist can secure the co-operation of a Henderson, it is not his brains or ability they want. They were buying his power to dragoon his followers. As Sydney Webb says of the Government positions granted to Labour leaders during the war: “These officials were elected in the main, not on personal grounds, but because they represented the Trade Union Movement.” (“History of Trade Unions,” page 637.) They were the shepherds with fleeces to sell.

When anti-Socialist organisations make such use of Mrs. Snowden’s remark that Socialism is “no solution for the unemployed problem” (Daily Herald, 31st January, 1922), it is her influence and her reputation which makes the incident harmful. Workers understanding Socialism would not be misled by Henderson, and would never have put Mrs. Snowden in a position of eminence, and their defection, if it took place, would harm no one except those who paid and made a bad bargain.

Class conscious workers would elect M.P.s on a Socialist programme and with a Socialist electorate behind him the man could, and would have to, work for Socialism. If he went over to the ruling class he would lose his seat. The strength of Parliamentary representation is in the knowledge and determination of the electors.

There is one Labour candidate who recognises this, and in so doing makes the most effective charge against the Labour Party. Fred Henderson, in his "Labour’s Case,” says : "If the Labour Party is not returned to power with the full strength of a public mandate for the constructive work of bringing in the co-operative Commonwealth, it had better not be returned at all . . .  a Labour Government placed in power by any merely reformist impulse of the electors of the country, and therefore without any real power or authority for anything beyond social reformist purposes, would be in a position of hopeless impotence.” (Page 19.)

Only those organisations can effectively wage war on capitalism which are composed of members who recognise the class struggle is fundamental; who realise that Socialism is the only hope of the workers, and who know the lines of their struggle, and the result to be achieved by their activities.

Edgar Hardcastle

Some Shoddy Thoughts of a Superficial Mind (1922)

From the July 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is G. K. Chesterton’s opinion that Mr. A. J. Penty is “one of the two or three truly original minds of the modern world.” When therefore Penty applies himself to criticism of Marx one expects something brilliant. It turns out however to be as shallow as any of the stuff written by numbers of critics who make no claim to genius, and the original mind appears to be just like an ordinary one.

Writing on “Christian Communists” in the “Crusader” (26 May, 1922) he begins well with the confident assertion that “there is nothing in common between the Communism of Christianity and the Communism of Marx but a name which conceals differences that are fundamental.” This is a refreshing change from the attitude of the discontented religionists who “sympathise with the Labour movement ” on the one hand, and from the fogginess of the half-converted Communists on the other. The former fancy they see in the working class movement a blind groping heavenwards, and encourage the view, very useful to the capitalist class, that a little more soulfulness and a little less grasping after material things will right all wrongs, and incidentally make the movement fit for Christians to live on.

Just as the churches are learning that it does not pay to drive away its congregation by too forcible opposition to trade unionism, and safe enough to give benediction to sane Labour Leaders, so also may self-styled Communists recognise the advisability of turning a blind eye on the implications of "their own teaching when applied to religious superstitions. Thus we have the “Workers Dreadnought” (4th June, 1921) agreeing with the Rev. Conrad Noel that the true interpretation of “the teaching of the Nazarene is Communism ” and that Christ, if he really did exist, “was a Communist without doubt.” Again, Francis Meynell, as Editor of the “Communist,” while admitting in a letter to an enquirer (2nd June, 1921) that the “ materialist conception of History . .  . cannot be reconciled with any form of supernatural belief” had to excuse the unsound and illogical attitude of the Communist Party with the evasive remark that the logical proletarian “is even more rare than a white blackbird”; the specious apology of every purveyor of quack nostrums. If the public doesn’t know and doesn’t like what is good then give them what they like even though it is bad. If the workers don’t like the correct attitude toward religion, suppress it; if they don’t like Communism give them something else. In what other way can a “mass” party be built up?

But although Penty recognises the impossibility of reconciling Christianity with Marxism, he soon shows that his knowledge of the latter is hardly sufficient to support the emphatic opinion he expresses.

He says of Marxians that “in practice, as the Bolshevik regime demonstrated, they are Industrial Conscriptionists; for there is no avoiding the conclusion that Marxism leads as inevitably to the servile state as Fabianism.” He assumes that his conclusion is so obvious as not to need proof: but is it? If the Bolsheviks made the mistake of thinking that Russian conditions would permit the establishment of Socialism, does this make Marxists responsible for policies imposed on the Bolsheviks by economic necessity? If the Bolshevik Government, acting at the outset with insufficient knowledge of the world situation, were compelled by the failure of their hopes and the critical position in which they found themselves to adopt emergency measures, does this make Marxists Industrial Conscriptionists?

To hold Marxists responsible for the Russian Government’s actions is absurd: the Bolsheviks themselves are hardly responsible. They are only taking Hobson’s choice.

Penty goes on in similar strain to accuse Marxists of objecting not to capitalism but to the “private ownership” of capital. For proof he refers to, but does not quote, Lenin’s speeches. That Marx advocated state ownership is untrue and the suggestion from one who could so easily find out what he did advocate somewhat childish. It is doubtful too, whether Penty could produce evidence from Lenin’s speeches. That Lenin states as a fact that Russia cannot escape the capitalist stage of development is not a sufficient reason for the assumption that he desires nothing else.

It may be said in his defence by those who have high opinions of Mr. Penty that the “original mind” does not have to trouble about evidence for charges made, but those who don’t know Mr. Penty will only notice that this particular controversial trick is played by so many ordinary people—dishonest people.

I would certainly like to know one thing from Mr. Penty: that is, from what source he learned that Marx “did not propose to abolish capitalism but to superimpose communism over it.”

Mr. Penty evidently extends his originality to his use of the King’s English, for we are told that Marxians “do not quarrel with modernism as a conception of life, but only with the fact that it is limited to the few.” I can only speak for myself but I cannot imagine Marxists quarreling with anybody because “Modernism as a conception of life ” is “limited to the few.” I don’t know what it means but I should be prepared to take the risk and let the few keep it and wish them jolly good luck as well.

Mr. Penty next tells us that Marxians quarrel with the implications of materialism, but not with materialism itself. He omits however to say what the implications are and again leaves me in the dark as to his meaning.

He attempts to state the Marxian theory of social revolution and succeeds well enough while closely following the original, but once he leaves the book and begins to comment, his failure to understand becomes apparent.

He says that “if the forms of social organisation were nothing more than the reflex action of the forces of production, then the millenium ought to arrive by an automatic process without any conscious effort on the part of man.” I don’t know how “the forms of social organisation” can be the “reflex action” of anything, but assuming Mr. Penty meant something else, I am at a loss to understand where he obtained this notion of Marxism. He then pretends that this difficulty of his own creation was likewise discovered by Marx. “But Marx felt instinctively that such could not be the case.” This is another quite common trick..

Penty foists on Marx something he did not say and then argues that because Marx really did say something different that he was either contradicting himself or had changed his mind.

Now having initially misrepresented Marx and started him out on a course which has existence only in Penty’s fertile brain, this has somehow or other to be sustained.

He pretends that Marx had to find some driving force, and having cut out love, “he was driven to make use of the power of hatred. Hence the advocacy of the Class War by which he hoped to generate a force capable of overthrowing the existing order of society."

This is sheer nonsense. Marx did not and Marxists do not “advocate class war.” Marx from a careful study of the capitalist organisation of society made certain generalisations as to its structure and the lines of its growth and decay. He gave the explanation of its origin and of its position in the chain of social systems, and it is the aim of Marxists to spread this knowledge among the workers in order that it may be the means of hastening the overthrow of capitalist domination. Foremost in this is the recognition of the fact that capitalist society takes its form from the fundamental division into the owners of the means of production, and the wage earners who work but do not own. The Socialist no more advocates class war than does a doctor spread disease who asks that its existence shall be recognised and its nature studied as a prelude to its removal. While disease, physical and mental, was regarded as a punishment for sins, no headway could be expected in the treatment of lunacy or epidemics; while the criminal is regarded as a conscious and deliberate enemy of society instead of a product of the system no headway will be made in the removal of crime. While the class nature of capitalism is unrecognised by the workers, its abolition cannot be hoped for.

Those who endeavour to gain recognition for the fact that class struggle exists, are accused by Penty of fermenting hatred just as those who urged the development of medical and sanitary sciencies were accused of encouraging immorality, and those who urged the study of criminology, of fostering crime.

Those who have knowledge of the structure of capitalism based as it is on exploitation, and of the possibility of its replacement by a society in which class divisions shall no longer hamper the use by all of the natural resources and the highly developed means of wealth production, have no need of hatred as a motive force. Knowledge is a much more potent weapon in the hands of the organised working class.

Since therefore Marx did not advocate class war and did not expect that he through class hatred would generate a force capable of “overthrowing the existing social order” (by the way Mr. Penty has just told us that Marx did not aim at overthrowing capitalism) it is hard to see how Marxians could be disappointed because “it does not work out as expected.” Again, “working class solidarity ” has never been a reality and could not therefore, owing to the alleged instruction of the workers in suspicion have become a “myth.”

It would finally be interesting to know the identity of the “middle class socialists” who, through suspicion of their genuineness, have been lost to the working class movement to the latter’s detriment. I know of none. I have heard of people who have made the workers stepping stones to their own advancement, and then to conceal their own meanness when they deserted those who had provided means to their ascent, had to make pretence of being martyrs to suspicion. Penty may mean these, but their value is open to doubt anyway. Their contempt for the workers appears to have been developed more or less consciously, but Penty’s judging by the careless and misleading views he gives to his Crusader readers seems to be real; doubtless another attribute of the original mind.

In view of Penty’s rather miserable show it would be helpful if G. K. Chesterton would give us the identity of the third original mind so that we may know his calibre too.

Chesterton we know. He finds his vocation in writing excellent drinking songs; Penty, with his fine vein of imagination, and his lofty disregard for mere commonplace accuracy should transfer his talent to new fields. He might try Romantic Ballads on other historical figures, preferably those legendary ones about whom no awkward records exist. Anyway he might leave Marx alone.

Edgar Hardcastle

Has Trade Unionism Failed? (1922)

From the June 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the "Penny Pictorial” (4th March), Lord Askwith gives his answer to this question. He writes as an "expert"; for, as chief Industrial Commissioner, 1911—1919, he negotiated in more than 100 trade disputes, and whatever his knowledge of Trade Unionism, he must know a great deal about the Trade Unions. Nevertheless, his answer does not add to the discussion much that is likely to be useful or illuminating to the many workers, who, while equally interested, lack his special experience.

It is really not surprising that Lord Askwith’s statement is unsatisfactory, because he never troubles to explain the object of Trade Unionism, and without that in mind, how can it be decided whether or not there has been a failure?

It is remarkable that such an omission is made, for it must be clear, after a moment’s consideration, that unless there is an accepted basis of judgment, in this instance the aim which brought the trade union movement into being, there can be no useful discussion, and the only criterion possible is Lord Askwith’s own view of what Trade Unionism ought to have done. For instance, if a number of people joined together to bring the heathen to abstain from cannibalism, Lord Askwith might examine the evidence and make the charge of failure if, after years of preaching, the heathen were still eating missionaries; he could not, however, allege failure merely because they killed the missionaries, although he personally and many of the members (the missionaries included) objected equally strongly to murder.

The only measure of the success or failure of trade unionism is the progress made towards its goal, whatever that may be.

Lord Askwith points to the following, which appear to him to be signs of failure: Recent falling membership, exhaustion of funds, the hampering of trade by working restrictions, unemployment, direct action, lack of co-ordination, strikes instead of conciliation, and the consequent raising of prices, and lastly, in his eyes doubtless the most serious, the failure of some unions to "lead the way” to lower wages! On the other hand, he notes with approval the more orderly conduct of strikes, fewer strikes, amalgamations, and better informed members.

Now on examination, we find that this is not so much the success attained for trade unionism, but the methods particular unions have adopted, and the difficulties of maintaining effective organisation, with which Lord Askwith concerns himself. These might be causes of failure, if there has been failure, but they are certainly not evidence that there has been failure.

While the organisation of the workers is a necessary activity for trade unions, it is not an end in itself, and loss of members, while it may reflect on the wisdom of certain policies, is not a proof of the failure of trade unionism. It may, for example, be caused by general trade depression. It may be remarked here that had the trade unions not lost in membership, there might as a consequence have been more strikes and greater resistance to wage reductions, yet Lord Askwith classes together loss of members and too many strikes as signs of failure.

Again, it is doubtful if even the most anti-working class of the trade union officials would proclaim wage reducing as an object of organisation.

As for the few things which meet with his approval, even if good in themselves, Lord Askwith does not show them to be the conscious product of trade unionism.

In short, he does not seem to be able to help us much, and we must go elsewhere for information.

First, what are trade unions, and why do they exist? Sidney Webb defines a trade union as “a continuous association of wage earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the condition of their working lives.” To understand their origin, it is necessary to have a clear idea of the conditions from which they spring. They are found to grow up wherever and whenever the capitalist system of society comes into being. Capitalism has not always been, and is, in fact, of only recent development in human society, and the rise of the trade unions coincides nearly enough with the industrial revolution which marked the change from individual handicraft to large scale factory production. As Capitalism extends its area over the hitherto undeveloped countries, Japan, India, and China, for instance, so do the workers, whose status is more or less violently upset by the changing economic conditions, combine to form trade unions.

The outstanding features of the capitalist system are these: The ownership by a class small in numbers of the bulk of the means of producing wealth, the land, the railways, mines and factories; and the total absence of property from the hands of the remaining members of society, the great majority. The wealth by which both classes live is produced by the larger class only, by the workers; but the latter may not use the means of producing wealth except by permission of the capitalists who own them. The condition of such use is that the capitalists who produce nothing own the whole of the product. Of this they return a relatively small part in the form of wages. The capitalists are able to live on the wealth which they do not produce, because they own the machinery of production, while the workers, being propertyless, must sell their bodily energies for wages.

We have here a dominant and a slave class, the gulf between them being no less marked than that between chattel slave and slave owner. The main difference is that the wage worker faces the employing class apparently as an equal, because he has the political status of a citizen. He, the seller of his labour power, and the employer, the buyer of his labour power, dispute about the price of sale as do buyers and sellers of other commodities, but with important differences. He, the worker, must sell his commodity week by week or month by month, or he will starve, whereas the merchant who sells goods can usually wait his time without being subjected to the pressure of dire necessity. He can diminish or stop production if the market is unfavourable, but the worker cannot stave off the pangs of hunger until a more fitting opportunity.

Now, just as boot manufacturers combine to keep their prices up, instead of competing with each other, so workers organise to raise or maintain the level of their wages. Where one man is helpless, a body of men may succeed in enforcing certain demands on their employers.

These organisations are trade unions. They are the product of capitalism, and are to be found wherever capitalism is. They could not arise nor continue except where the capitalist organisation of society prevails.

Now “maintaining and improving the condition of working lives” covers a wide field indeed. It has included raising wages, shortening hours, bettering workshop and factory conditions, obtaining more holidays, and, shortsightedly enough, preserving restrictions which are held to protect certain skilled crafts. Perhaps that which loomed largest in the minds of the early trade unionists was simply the desire for a shield against the ruthless exploitation to which they were subjected in capitalism’s early days. Now, has trade unionism done these things? A brief examination of the facts will show to what extent it can be said to have failed. It is only needful to give a few illustrations, which, however, are typical of the position all over the capitalist world.

Take this country first. Real wages, that is, the amount of food, clothing, etc., that money wages will buy, have fallen during the war, and are now generally less than in 1914, which again showed a decline on the closing years of the nineteenth century. While shorter hours have been won during the war, an attack seems to be brewing to bring about an increase again, and in many industries concessions have already had to be made. It is frankly admitted by Sidney Webb, in his “History of Trade Unionism,” that trade union restrictions lost during the war were not regained in anything like their entirety afterwards; as he tersely puts it, the workers were “done.” There is at the same time a constant endeavour by employers to remove protective machinery set up by Act of Parliament to deal with wages and conditions of labour. The Factory Acts themselves are in undoubted danger. Skilled craftsmanship is now rapidly ceasing to give a guarantee of comfort and security, a tendency hastened, no doubt, by the experiences of the war period in the employment of labourers on tasks hitherto regarded as the province of trained men only. The A.E.U., in its October, 1921, Report, admits that during the war, ‘‘the average time rate of the skilled fitter and turner never kept pace with nor equalled the increased cost of living.” (‘‘Industrial News,” March, 1922), and the Boilermakers’ report for September of the same year contains this: ‘‘It took us six years to get 100 per cent. on wages, with the cost of living on an average of 133 per cent, up over the whole period.” Again in 1851, the A.S.E. (now the A.E.U.) was demanding : (1) The abolition of piecework; (2) the abolition of overtime, and (3) the discharge of labourers on self-acting machines, while in 1922, 71 years after, the officials of that union are recommending their members “ to accept an agreement recognising the unlimited right of the bosses to control overtime. The operating of machines by ‘semi-skilled' labour is involved, so also are the piece-work prices for such operating ” (“Industrial News,” March, 1922).

Lastly, there are 2,000,000 workers out of regular employment, and the fear of dismissal is an ever present nightmare in every trade. It is this prevalence of unemployment which is at the same time the terror of the worker, the goad which makes him organise, and the immediate cause of the weakness of his organisation. No trade union can successfully fight unemployment. The latter is a necessary feature of the system inside which trade unions function, and it marks the limit of their usefulness.

In America, the standard of living in 15 chief industries has been declining since 1896; between 1896 and 1907, by 6 per cent. and over the whole 24 years to 1920 by nearly 25 per cent. (“American Economic Review,” Sept., 1921). America, too, has its 6,000,000 unemployed. This is, in fact, a common experience in the victorious as well as the defeated and neutral nations, in spite of the fact that in 1920 the number of workers organised in trade unions reached a record figure, and represented a much higher percentage than ever before of the total number of wage earners.

Wages are still rapidly falling, without hope of a break, and even the most solidly established unions cannot hope to resist effectively. The engineers are crippled by unemployment, the miners shattered by unsuccessful strikes and the decline of the coal trade; the railwaymen forced to accept merely with protest dismissals and wage reductions. The unskilled and agricultural unions, and others who had artificial growth stimulated by the war-time labour shortage, and by the setting up of Wages Boards, Trades Boards, etc., by the Government, have to face disastrous withdrawal of members, discouraged because unable to understand the failure of their officials to prevent wage reductions. The position is desperate, and, owing to lack of real knowledge of the system of society, some of the effects of which they are organising to counteract, the workers as a whole are apathetic and despairing, of the future.

Can we then agree that because the workers' position is wretched, that trade unionism has failed? By no means. The wretchedness is the outcome of the exploitation to which the workers are subjected inside the capitalist system, and it can with truth be said, therefore, that trade unionism has not touched the root causes of the evils which it fought. As against that, however, the workers' position could and undoubtedly would have been much worse than it is if they had not had what protection their trade unions did provide. Furthermore, it would indeed be suicidal to discard the existing weapon while the need for it continues.

Yet the fact remains that the workers are still wage-earners without comfort or security or hope of advancement.

What is the cause and the remedy?

We may first reject most of Lord Askwith's brilliant notions. A recognition of the class division in society shows them to be untrue and often simply ridiculous.

The capitalists as a class do no useful work in the social production of wealth, but by virtue of their being owners of property they draw revenue from the mass of wealth produced.

The more they receive, the less there remains for the workers, and vice-versa, at any given moment.

The relative amounts will depend on the amount of pressure each side can apply in the constant struggle.

Unemployment is a necessity for the continued existence of the capitalist system, for the removal of its cause would mean the cessation of the production on a capitalist —that is, a profit-making—basis.

The advocacy of conciliation instead of strikes is based on the foolish idea that there can be an ideal basis of negotiation between Capital and Labour, between robber and robbed. Each is, in fact, entitled to what it can get, and as external circumstances, trade prosperity, and the condition of the labour market change, so must the quantity of force at the disposal of each of the combatants change. Permanent equilibrium is therefore impossible, and perpetually recurring disputes inevitable.

Lastly, prices are dependent on factors which are not directly altered by variations in wages, as is implied by Lord Askwith. A seller will ask as much as the market will stand, and the condition of the market is not directly affected by the payment of an increased wage to his operatives. For instance, according to the Royal Commission on Grain Markets (Saskatchewan, 1913), the average cost of producing wheat in Canada in 1909 was 48 cents per bushel and the selling price 81 cents. Both cost of production and prices showed a steady alteration during the four following years, and in 1913, while cost had risen to 55 cents, the price had fallen to 66 cents. 

Again, it does not even follow that the cost to the manufacturer is increased by the raising of wages, as the increased wage per head of the employees may be balanced by a reduction in the number employed, while at the same time the introduction of improved machinery correspondingly raises the output of each worker. If the cost does rise, then the employer’s profits suffer.

There are other explanations offered. The form of organisation is attacked, and industrial unionism and workshop committees, etc., are held out as remedies. Now while it is agreed that the present unions have not made the most effective use of their power during or since the war, no change of form can solve the problem of unemployment. No industrial organisation can hope to meet with success the state forces at the disposal of the employers, or wring appreciable concessions at a time when there is a great excess of workers over the number the employers are prepared to engage, or when trade is so bad as to make it more economical to a considerable section of capitalists to close down altogether, or severely to restrict production. Solidarity alone is not an effective defence against the weapon of starvation.

Then it is alleged that many officials are traitors to their members, but the treachery of certain labour leaders cannot disguise the fact that the pressure of the overstocked labour market so far affected the masses of organised workers that they did and still do loyally follow these betrayers, accepting as correct the necessity for their actions and the reasonableness of their explanations. Treachery in leaders is itself an effect, and not an important cause of failure. J. H. Thomas is a wolf because his members are sheep he is also a particularly bold wolf, because he knows his members have a powerful liking for his howl. J. H. Thomas is a defender of the capitalist system, and its mascot the monarchy, because he knows his members are also defenders of the capitalist system. He attends court functions because his members are still more interested in the wedding of “our Princess ” than in the starvation and humiliation which wage slavery means for them and their daughters. Leaders are followed because they say and do those things of which members in the main approve. The members approve because the capitalist press approves, and the press is their chief source of information. Does anyone believe that the workers would follow a lead in an opposite direction against their present inclinations, and in face of opposition from all the organs of capitalist propaganda? No, not if Thomas himself led them. While leaders have jobs to consider, they will play for safety; that is, as long as there are workers who, lacking knowledge, wish to be led.

In workers organisations, as in modern states, only those actions and policies are in the last resort possible which meet with the active approval or at least the acquiescence of the rank and file. The moonshine of the theory of leading the masses to revolution is sufficiently exposed by its adherents, Eden and Cedar Paul, in the “Communist Review,” March, 1922, where they write of Russia in these words :—

   “Despite the dictatorship of the proletariat, her policy is in a large measure dictated by the peasantry—a reactionary class constituting four-fifths of the population.”

The dictators are dictated to!

The trade unions have not aimed at overthrowing capitalism. They endeavoured to make capitalism tolerable for the workers; a hopeless endeavour, because there can be no salvation for the workers inside the system. The continual existence of the exploitation of the one class pre-supposes, as well, as their robbery, also their subordination to another class. The condition of the workers could not even improve relative to its previous state, because the tendency— too obvious to be ignored—of capitalist development is in the direction of simplification of labour from skilled to unskilled, and the replacing of the craftsman by the factory hand, and the trained specialist by the routine worker, the replacing of the man by the machine, on which he becomes increasingly dependent.

To maintain and improve the standard of living or to increase security in face of this would have necessitated power greater than that of the capitalist class, the use of which power must have revolutionised society. The trade unions had no such power, and what is more would not have been prepared to use it if they had. The workers have not wanted and do not want to abolish capitalism. When they wish to do so, the power is at hand for their use, but before they have the will to abolish capitalism, the workers have first to understand what capitalism is, and that its replacement is an immediate possibility.

The workers are kept in subjection by all the forces and institutions of the state, and these in turn are at the disposal of the capitalists because the workers permit them to be. The state power of the capitalist class is derived from the representative assemblies elected for the most part by the votes of the workers. The workers do not organise on the economic field in order to overthrow the capitalist system, nor do they take part in elections for such a purpose. Even if they had the will to face the issue out to its logical conclusion, and recognised that their fight must be against the organised might of the capitalist state, they would yet be doomed to failure if they did not understand the working of the machinery of government; if, like the South African miners, they pitted the puny strength of a few men armed with sporting rifles, and a few more “armed” with pick-axes against well-equipped, numerous and adequately supported troops. That the workers mentioned did lack understanding, even of their class position, is evidenced by their attempt to exclude the unorganised black workers, and by their inviting alliance from the Nationalists; an alliance, that is, which would have put control of the forces which defeated them into the hands of another section of the capitalist class.

When the workers understand the social system, their exploitation, and their relation to the capitalist class, they will organise for the specific purpose of capturing the machinery of government from the capitalist class, in order that they may build a new social system based on the common ownership of the means of wealth production, under the protection it will afford.

The workers have the remedy for their sufferings in their hands; only when they are class conscious will they use it. 

Edgar Hardcastle