The Sexual Politics of Wilhelm Reich (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

What has prevented the growth of Socialist consciousness amongst the working class even though the material conditions for the immediate establishment of Socialism have been in existence for at least three-quarters of a century? Why, when Socialism is so obviously in their interest, do workers continue to support and maintain capitalism? Why is the political behaviour of the working class so irrational?

For Wilhelm Reich the answer could be summed up in two words: sexual repression. In his view, the restrictions on sexual activity imposed through the father-dominated family structure produced people dependent on authority and incapable of independent thought and action.

Reich was born in Dobrzynica in Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1897, the son of German-speaking Jewish parents. As a medical student in Vienna after the first world war he became interested first in the physiology and then in the psychology of sex. He joined the circle around Freud, the psychoanalyst, and became one of his close disciples.

Instinct and Energy

Freud had been teaching since before the turn of the century that most mental illness was caused by “sexual repression” dating from early childhood; and that every human being was born with a “sexual instinct” which had to be tamed before he could become a fit member of society and that in fact this is what, from the psychological point of view, growing up and becoming socialized meant. “Instinct” is a notoriously vague word, but for Freud it was more than just a description of how people do in fact behave; he speculated that it did have a real physical basis in the human body and that sooner or later science would discover the precise chemical formula for “sexual energy”. For Freud was, in principle, a materialist who believed that men’s thoughts, conscious and “unconscious”, could ultimately be explained in terms of some chemical change in the human body. So when Freud spoke of “sexual energy” he meant the word “energy” to be understood literally. For him sexual repression was not just the psychological process of mentally suppressing sexual ideas but was also a real physical process of suppressing or diverting real bodily energy of some sort.

Or so Freud speculated, though nothing resembling any such “sexual energy” has yet been discovered, a fact which must reflect adversely on his theories generally — and also of course on those derived from them such as Reich’s. Reich was particularly interested in this aspect of Freudian psychology and clinically investigated bodily tensions associated with sex. Later, in 1939, he was to claim — without any scientifically acceptable evidence — to have actually discovered what “sexual energy” really was: apparently it wasn’t chemical after all but electrical!

Communist Party

But it is not the years of Reich’s pathetic decline into a charlatan claiming to be able to cure cancer by means of his “orgone box” (he died in 1957 in an American jail) that are of interest to Socialists. For, while working with Freud in the 1920’s, he came to the conclusion that all the Freudian psychoanalysts were doing was to patch up mentally sick individuals and send them back into the society whose sexual code had originally made them sick. He felt that the real solution to the problem of mental illness caused by sexual misery lay in transforming society. To this end in 1928 he joined the Austrian Communist Party. In 1930 he moved to Berlin and joined the German Communist Party (KPD). At the same time he was active in groups which combined sex education and calls for an end to legal restrictions on sex with anti-capitalist agitation. Not surprisingly really, his views on sex were not always to the liking of the leaders of the KPD, partly because they regarded the struggle for sexual reform as a diversion from their struggle for political power and partly because they themselves probably harboured certain prejudices about sex. Eventually in 1932 Reich was expelled.

Reich was not simply a fellow-travelling Communist Party sympathizer but an active member during a period when the Party was violently denouncing the Social Democrats as “social fascists”. He was, and re­mained for some years after his expulsion, a thorough­ going Leninist firmly believing in the need for a “revo­lutionary leadership” to lead the masses in a violent assault on the capitalist State. His criticism of the German Communist Party for its failure to prevent the rise of Hitler, as expressed in the original version of The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and his pam­phlet What is Class Consciousness? amounts to a charge that because of their attitude to sex they left the way clear for Hitler to exploit the sexual misery of the masses for political ends; whereas, says Reich, this is what the KPD should have been doing and would have been doing if they had followed his advice.

To lead the Masses

It is the same with his explanation for the failure of the Russian revolution given in the later versions of The Sexual Revolution. (It is important to realize that Reich changed successive editions of his works in line with his changing views and that the English translation of this work and of The Mass Psychology of Fascism date from 1945 and so were considerably different from the original German versions of 1930 and 1933 respectively). According to Reich, Russia went off the rails because the Bolshevik government had failed to carry out properly the sexual liberation of the Russian people. As a result the Russian masses remained dependent on authority and incapable of democratic self-management so making a dictatorship inevitable.

This argument still accepts Lenin’s view that under capitalism the workers are incapable of reaching a full Socialist consciousness and so have to be led by a vanguard party and that the task of Socialist education of the majority cannot begin until after the seizure of power by the vanguard party. Reich’s criticism was essentially only that the Bolsheviks failed because they had not carried out their own theories properly — with the implication that if they had Russia would not have “degenerated” into the Stalinist dic­tatorship.

But it was Bolshevik theory itself that was wrong not its application. The vast majority of workers will have to become conscious Socialists before their political party (a mass democratic party rather than a vanguard of would-be leaders, of course) wins power. In the absence of such a Socialist majority, any minority which seizes power, no matter how sincerely they may desire Socialism, cannot but become a new ruling class because they would have no alternative but to run, or as in Russia in 1917 to develop, capitalism. The Bolsheviks’ coup was doomed, even before it was carried out, both by the economic backwardness of Russia and by the lack of Socialist consciousness (as opposed to mere mass discontent with the old order) of the Russian workers. It would not have been saved by a more liberal sex policy.

Change of Mind

Reich’s belief that Leninist tactics (which, after all, involve authoritarian leadership) could lead to a free society in which people would be able to manage their affairs without leaders was a glaring contradiction. For how, on his own theory, could people still psychologically dependent on leaders come to establish a society without leaders? When Reich was in the Communist Party and for some years after he clearly thought that after the revolutionary leaders had power it would be up to them to take steps to the masses’ psychological dependence on them by pursuing a liberal sex policy. In other words, the workers were not to emancipate themselves, but were to he emancipated by their leaders. A view quite in accord with Leninism, but equally quite opposed to Marxism. To be fair, Reich later, when in exile in America, came to see this contradiction. It led him to abandon Leninism (which he imagined to be Marxism) as the way to establish a free society. Instead he came to think that before such a society (which he now called “work-democracy” rather than “socialism”) could be established people must have ceased to be psychologically dependent on leaders and have become capable of the democratic self-management of their own affairs. In fact he even argued that, in the absence of this any attempt to establish a free society would lead rather to state capitalism. This is how he characterised Russia in his 1945 Introduction to the Third, English version of The Mass Psychology of Fascism:

“In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition ‘capitalism’ does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific ‘capitalist mode of production’; that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system con­tinues to exist in Russia. And it will continue to exist as long as the masses of people continue to lack respon­sibility and to crave authority.” (His emphasis).

Repression or Indoctrination ?

By this time Reich had become something of a gradualist, believing that the free society he wished to see would come when sufficient individuals had cone to liberate themselves sexually. This is probably why his ideas are so popular in certain circles today: they provide a seemingly satisfactory ideology for the current rebellion within capitalism against out-dated sexual codes. However, these same people — the sexual rebels — find some of his views on sex itself embarrassing. For, as a Freudian, Reich believed that there was a biologically natural form of sexual behaviour, even though distorted by class society. He labelled homosexuality as “unnatural” (though harm­less) and argued that women needed men in order to experience full sexual pleasure — views highly embarrassing to both gay liberation and women’s liberation.

But it is precisely because Freud’s theories posit a fixed “human nature”, at least in relation to sexual behaviour, that Marxists have been doubtful about their validity. Sexual behaviour is but one kind of social behaviour and, as such, socially not biologically deter­mined. So no one form of sexual behaviour can be said to be more “natural” than any other. Ironically then, it is Marx rather than Freud who provides the better argument for sexual tolerance! But then the Socialist tradition, before even Freud was born, championed sexual freedom and “free love”, i.e., a society in which people would be free to have sex without first having to get a licence from the Church or State. The struggle for Socialism has always been, among other things of course, a struggle for a rational attitude to sex and part of Socialist consciousness is being free from prejudices about sex (the inferiority of women, discrimination against homosexuals, etc).

But what about Reich’s, or rather his followers’, explanation for the irrational behaviour of the working class in keeping capitalism going? Is it really because workers are sexually repressed by the father-dominated families they grew up in? Many uncritically accept that it is, but for this to be true so would Freud’s speculations about the existence of some measurable “sexual energy”. The whole theory of sexual repression stands or falls on the existence of such energy, even more for Reich than for Freud since all his psychological theories depend on it. Yet there is no scientifically acceptable evidence whatsoever for the existence of any such thing, only Reich’s experiments which deceived nobody but himself. Sexual restrictions are bad for people’s health but they cannot be blamed also for the lack of Socialist consciousness any more than they can be blamed for the rise of fascism or the failure of the Russian revolution. Nor is there any reason to suppose that their removal would be in any way incompatible with capitalism. The most that can be said for Reich is that he did argue a good case for a rational attitude to sex; most of his book The Sexual Revolution is well worth reading just for this.

The explanation is much simpler: the success of the ruling class in directly (as opposed to indirectly via sexual repression) inculcating their ideas into the minds of the workers through the process of learning. The workers’ acceptance of capitalist political and social ideas, like their other ideas, is learned from other people — their parents, their schoolteachers, their workmates, the press, television — and so derived from society and is not a reflection of the suppression of some biologically natural behaviour as Reich claims. It follows therefore that the struggle against capitalist ideology must be a struggle to spread Socialist ideas as such and not a campaign for sexual reform.

Adam Buick

Where Women's Liberation fails (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of this century women had a life expectation of only about 45 years; women passed their prime in reproduction and the main cause of death in the 25-to-35 age group was childbirth. Now marriages tend to start at a younger age and women are able to exercise some choice over the size of their families. The Pill has not led to a postponement of maternity; in fact the tendency is for babies to be born at the beginning of marriage. This means that a mother may now have some forty years in front of her when the youngest child starts school.

Still, for most girls, getting married and having a family is considered sufficient ambition and this is reflected in their education. Three times more girls than boys leave school at the age of 15, and 75 per cent. of all 18-year-old girls do not receive any higher education or training. Household chores are easier now than they were even twenty years ago, even if we do not have all of the latest labour saving gadgets. Whether housework is menial or not may be open to argument but it is certainly not a lifetime's vocation.

Work and Wages

Unfortunately, most wives cannot take advantage of easier housework and less time involved with infants. Those in the Women’s Liberation movement may decide whether or not married women gain some advantage from taking part in socially productive work, but for most of us the discussion is hardly relevant. For despite the myth that women work outside the home in order just to find companionship, or escape from the boredom of housework, in this consumer-orientated society there is no real choice. How else can the family take a holiday, buy that modern home equipment or simply make ends meet? One might also ask just what the "starlight” shift, popular with mothers of young children, does for companionship in the home.

Selma James is among those who have seen through the notion that women gain some kind of liberation by working outside the home as well as in it. However her suggested demand in her pamphlet Women, the Unions and Work for "wages for housework” seems a little naive. Wages are the price for which workers sell their labour power. That price will be generally sufficient to keep a worker, and his family, at a socially accepted standard. Payment made for housework, like family allowances or free transport, would act as a brake on wages. When a wife first takes a job there may be an improvement in the family living standard but her income soon becomes an integral part of the family budget.

Question of Cash

But when it is only the husband’s income which endeavours to meet the family expenses it is hardly surprising that conflicts arise about just how, or by whom, the money should be spent.

"It is a class thing, really, money is power in a husband-wife relationship where there is only one weekly wage packet”: according to Mr. Nicholas Tindall, of the National Marriage Guidance Council. (The Sun, 16.10.72)

In her pamphlet, Selma James makes a comment about a woman earning enough money "to avoid having to degrade herself by asking her husband for money for tights”, which speaks volumes on the blighting effect that money can have on personal relationships. The decision to supplement the family income, or achieve a degree of financial independence, means joining the majority of working women who are used as "little better than cheap labour, doing low-grade repetitive jobs, with rates of pay to match.” (TV Times)

Women are conditioned and, for the most part, educated for stop-gap jobs —to fill in time until getting married — and yet they form 38 per cent. of the work force. More than half of the women who go out to work are married. Many women accept the idea of getting lower pay than men and in the past few of them have joined unions. Out of 9 million working women only two million are union members.

Complaints about the type of work available to women give the impression that all male work is skilled, creative and interesting; that men do not get involved with their children or ever give help (unpaid) in the home. Of course the constant round of childcare and housework can be frustrating but what do most men, and women, get out of their employment? Only the pay packet (or salary cheque)!

Dissatisfaction with women’s rôle in society has led to some discussion of the shortcomings of the social system itself, but what a pity most members of the Women’s Liberation movement seem prepared to settle for so little. The movement, which began in this country in the late sixties, is broadly based and lacks a coherent policy. Emphasis is placed on the continuous development of ideas supposedly by learning through struggle.

Struggle for what? Despite the use of much revolutionary-styled rhetoric, members of the movement essentially seek equality with men in capitalism. When men and women compete for jobs on equal terms and the Equal Pay Act (1970) is fully implemented, plus, of course, the provision of more nursery education and free contraception, their aims will be achieved.

For women to join in one organisation because they are women is about as logical as the idea that all black people have common cause because they are black. The oppression of different groupings within the working class varies in intensity and in form. It is this variation which tends to mask the common factor which applies to all of the groups: women bringing up children alone, immigrants, the homeless, pensioners, etc., etc.

The Working Class

The common denominator which applies to about 90 per cent. of the population is their alienation from the means of production. The only viable definition of the term “working class” includes all those who, because they possess only their ability to work, must sell their mental and physical energies to an employer in return for money (wages or salary). It makes no difference whether the price for their labour and job-status is high or low. The class which owns the factories, land etc. is at an opposite pole. Its members do not need to compete for jobs. Not even for better-paid jobs in management, administration and the professions. Neither will old age or lack of employment throw them on the Social Security scrapheap.

Justification for an autonomous women’s movement is largely based on giving women’s claims priority over the achievement of Socialism, even where it is the alleged aim.

Marx and Engels both saw that when women took a decisive part in large-scale production, and were only occupied by domestic chores to a minor degree, their emancipation became feasible and that furthermore the foundation was laid for “a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes”. They plainly knew that, though the pre-conditions for the emancipation of working-class men and women have been met within capitalism, we cannot in fact be set free without a revolutionary change to Socialism. This revolution the world has yet to see.

True Liberation

What will the position of women be in Socialist society?

When the means for production are the common property of the worldwide community, production for use will have replaced the outmoded system of market production. We will contribute to the well-being of society as free individuals and will, without exception, have free access to those goods and services required to fulfil our own needs. (Wages for housework! Who wants wages?)

Though we cannot know exactly what form the family will take, we can say that the “nuclear” family will no longer be the economic unit of society. Men and women will live together because they mutually wish to do so, the bonds between them and their children being neither legal nor financial. Children will be a social responsibility and even a chance pregnancy will not be cause for alarm.

The working class is already armed I with the only weapon a politically- aware majority will need to abolish capitalism and replace it with Socialism. Whether or not we are in unions, or in employment, we have the vote!

A Single Aim

Women’s Liberation is yet another movement dividing the working class. This time with the absurd notion that female oppression is caused by male domination, while in fact but a special aspect of human oppression under capitalism. Even when the end of capitalism is recognised as the only demand “not co-optable” it is dismissed in favour of a reformist struggle.

The movement is largely anti-capitalist and as such assumes the distortion of everybody’s life and potential today. But such generalities are moral, not political, and though everyone wants liberation for all (men and women) this cannot but be Utopianism unless at this stage, we organise around specific oppressions. (Women’s Estate, by Juliet Mitchell, p. 58)

We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain have but one object because the demand for Socialism is of itself a call to end specific oppressions. The demand for Socialism is of itself a protest against war, against poverty and against the frustration of millions of lives only half lived. But more than that, the demand for Socialism recognizes that we can only solve these problems by ending the social system which causes them.

We will not settle for less.

Pat Deutz

50 Years Ago: On leadership (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The leadership idea has cursed the working class movement from the beginning. At an earlier period those supporting the idea had motives of benevolence, its later supporters have also benevolent motives—but the benevolence is directed towards themselves. They make stepping stones of their followers to reach comfort and security.

★

In France in 1793 Babeuf and his friends sacrificed their fortunes and lives in the attempt to relieve the misery of the mass of oppressed. The method was a sudden attack upon the central seat of power by a courageous and determined minority . . . Babeuf’s intentions were excellent, but his method was rotten at the root. Instead of first getting the mass of the people to understand and desire the new programme, he proposed to force it upon them from without The idea being that the intellectual few knew better what was good for the masses than the masses did themselves. 

★

In 1836, an association of working men was formed in London that blossomed out into the first national movement of wage workers. This association took the name of ‘The London Workingmen’s Association’ and published an address, the concluding words of which put forward a new outlook for the oppressed, telling them to have done with leaders and trust only in themselves:

‘Be assured that the good there is to be must be begun by ourselves’.

Marx has put the case more definitely, as follows:

‘The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working-class itself’.

★

In working out his emancipation, the worker must study the conditions that surround and oppress him. He must look to ‘great principles’ and not to ‘great men’ in the struggles.

From an article “Abandon the Idols” by G. McCIatchie, Socialist Standard, May 1923

Lonelyhearts: A Parody of Living (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The sexiest years of our lives” the News of the World called them, reviewing the changes which have occurred in sexual customs and behaviour during the last twenty-five years. “ ‘Today’s teenagers have burst open the sexual cage. They will never be driven back to the old taboos’, says the Sorensen Report on Adolescent Sexuality” — shouts The Sun. Film-stars boasting that they were not legally married to the fathers of their children. Over a million British women “on the Pill”. Stage productions like Hair and Oh, Calcutta! with completely starkers casts. Every pub, almost, with its Go-Go girls and strippers, and Saturday-night “divorced and separated club” dances. Family planning is free for all, screams the poster on the wall — make sure they are really wanted. The Borough of Camden actually pays taxi fares of girls needing advice urgently.

Forty-five years ago Dr. Marie Stopes (authoress of Married Love and pioneer of the first free birth- control clinic for working-class women in Islington, London) had her book suppressed and a six-month prison sentence which, however, she never served. With all this new-found freedom and frankness, discarding absurd Victorian prudery and hypocrisy, we should all be as happy as sandboys, as free as the air, having it away like rabbits without a care in the world.

But what is the truth? We live in the era of the broken marriage. Divorce and separation have reached staggering proportions, leaving behind them a legacy of grief and anguish hard to visualize. Children become “latch-key kids”, some “juvenile delinquents”. The matrimonial courts are snowed-under with cases, and the jails hard-pressed to cope with the 250,000 maintenance allowance defaulters. The weeklies reap a rich harvest running hundreds of adverts by men seeking women, and women the companionship and sociability of men. This writer remembers well buying a copy of Der Abend in Frankfurt, to find more advertisements by lonely men and women seeking partners in Germany, than in England.

These adverts along with Compat, Duet, and “divorced and separated” clubs are a peep under the lid of a seething cauldron. They are the harrowing heart-cry of the victims of a vicious and depraved society, capitalism, which denies many the exercise of those elementary physical functions which even lower animals enjoy instinctively.

A desperately lonely bachelor seeks an attractive lady.

“Surbiton Surrey’ ’is longing to make somebody happy.

A lonely English bachelor seeks lady for friendship and marriage.

And so on, page after page after page. Neither is it true that the advertizers are merely, or even mainly, interested in sex. Many go out of the way to state their social interests: “dancing”, “walking”, “music” — in fact, "Lonely Teacher” declares himself a “genuine socialist”.

Incidentally, nearly all the males advertized by Marriage Bureaux are “nearly” six feet tall, which doesn’t say much for us shorties who can only muster about five feet eight. Some have not only motor-cars and “good positions”; they are “cultivated”, “travelled”, “intelligent” and “humorous”, they own town and country houses, boats and caravans (one even has his own private plane) — and are still unhappy. One widow advertizes “a good home” for the lucky applicant. Such inducements can only arise in a private-property society where possessions are considered the criterion of contentment. Nevertheless one bright spark announces:

A gentleman, 46, tall, indolent, with no material possessions seeks a lady, whose religion is unimportant.

On the other hand:

A Continental lady with small capital would like to met an understanding gentleman for early marriage.

She probably got a flood of replies asking how small is “small”.

How paradoxically absurd that men and women, who are crammed together like sardines in public transport, homes and employment, have to advertize their frustrations. Hundreds of thousands are milling about like the exploding electrons in an atomic pile, crashing into other marriages and threatening their stability in a social chain-reaction.

Compare the unhappy plight of these “intelligent”, “cultivated”, car-driving bachelors and divorcees, forced to advertize their poverty of companionship, with the joyous freedom of the primitive savage, secure in the knowledge that all the women of the opposite Gens were his lawful, rightful wives, while all the men were the husbands of his Genswomen.

. . . the law enabling the strange Papuan, thousands of miles from home to find frequently, from Tribe to Tribe, women who will without resistance guilelessly surrender to him.

(Engels, Origin of the Family p.54) 

One can hardly restrain a smile at the quaint Victorian terminology still used by even such an iconoclastic pioneer as Engels. The idea that women “surrender” to men is exploded even under capitalism nowadays.

The absorption of women into commerce and industry has made them less economically dependent on men as Engels, Bebel and others predicted. This, and the cheap efficient small car instead of the pram, the washing machine in place of the wash-board, central heating and electrical machinery have partially emancipated women from drudgery in the kitchen and submission in the bedroom. Socialism will continue this process by emancipating women completely.

Lewis Henry Morgan’s great merit lay in his realization that our attitudes change with changing economic conditions, and that the family as a form of social organization evolves. Under slavery, male slaves had no sex life (officially, anyway). All female slaves were automatically the Master’s concubines, if required. Under feudalism sex was confined by the Church, for the lower orders, to the marriage partner for life. To the aristocrat the marriage was to land, not a bride. In this way the Hapsburg dynasty gained control over half of Europe. This form of repression inevitably produced prostitution which, however, never flourished then as under capitalism now, where literally everything is on sale for money.

For primitive man the choice was wide and free. Children were the social responsibility of the whole tribe. The absurdly individualistic private possessive relation to their own children of many proletarian mothers today was unknown. With the extension of knowledge and culture comes the advent of individual sex-love, although Engels held that it was impossible before the Middle Ages:

It goes without saying that personal beauty, harmony of inclinations, intimate intercourse, awakened a longing for sexual intercourse, but from such relations to our sex-love is a long way yet.

(Origin of the Family p.92) 

Sexual relations will be decided after a new generation has come to maturity, a breed of men who have never had occasion to buy the surrender of a woman for money, and women who have never had occasion to surrender to any man for any other reason but love. Once such people are in the world they will not give a moment’s thought to what we, today, believe should be their course.

(ibid., p.100)

Relieved of all economic problems, unsatisfactory unions will be dissoluble immediately on the simple decision of one or both parties. Mental compatibility and mutual achievement will gradually supplant physical satiety as the years pass. The individual family of private-property society will be superseded by the great social family of all humanity.

Hail to our sons and daughters! who, learning from the fumbling blunders of their stupid and clumsy parents, will attain a noble happiness we can never know.

Horatio.

The Lady with the Lamp (1944)

From the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nursing as it is To-day

That nursing is a vocation in the religious sense is an assertion surprisingly still made to-day, as witness the film “The Lamp Still Burns,” about which something will be said later. Nurses, like Nuns, are supposed to take up their work in response to a mysterious call, but many relinquish its mixed joys on closer acquaintance.

In early times, before the dissolution of the monasteries, the care of the sick was in the hands of the religious houses, remnants of which became the first voluntary hospitals. The Elizabethan Poor Law was the basis of what is now the municipal hospital, first under the Parish overseer, then the Board of Guardians, and lastly the Ministry of Health.

Of nurses and nursing in this country we know little before the nineteenth century, and training was unknown. In military hospitals there were no female nurses, and mortality was high. The lack of organisation went unnoticed until a major war occurred nearer the scale of modern war. War to the general public seemed far away when only a standing army was affected.

In the early nineteenth century there were voluntary hospitals and workhouse infirmaries for the sick poor, looked after by nurses who, if for nothing else, were known for their drunkenness. This was excused on the ground that hospital conditions were so terrible that some stimulant was necessary to enable nurses to carry on. Beds were packed close together, fresh air was practically nil, and surgical cases often died of the dreaded hospital gangrene. The rich were cared for in their own homes, by women of whom Dickens’ Sarah Gamp seems to have been a fair prototype; but at least they were not exposed to the infection of a hospital ward. Any poor ignorant woman who was fitted for nothing else could be a nurse. They worked long hours, did all the domestic work, and usually lived in the hospital, often in the wards themselves.

In the mid and late nineteenth century great reforms came about, mainly through the establishment of training centres, notably Florence Nightingale’s school of nursing and St.Thomas’s Hospital in 1860. Florence Nightingale may be called the founder of modern nursing. Though known sentimentally as the “Lady with the Lamp,” she instituted modern hospital planning and hygiene, and spread much knowledge of sanitation. It is interesting to notice a little of her career. Being of the propertied class, her wish to be a nurse was resisted by her parents on the ground that a gentlewoman could not associate on equal terms with working women, often drunken and immoral, and, even if chaste, still working women. After much resistance she obtained what training she could at Kaiserworth in Germany in 1851 and with the Sisters of Charity in Paris in 1853.

In 1853 the Crimean War commenced, and in this major campaign great perturbation was caused by the deaths of the wounded British from negligence. Nearly 50 per cent. died. People became incensed as they learned that preparations and precautions were practically nil. The French ally, by contrast, had reasonably well organised medical services, and had taken 50 Sisters of Charity to act as nurses.

Florence Nightingale was asked by the Government to take a party of nurses to remedy matters. We have seen that the British Army had no female nurses, and this intrusion was energetically resisted by many of the medical officers, who saw in it criticism of themselves. The medical profession to-day likewise resists any apparent encroachment on their privileges. We know by Florence Nightingale’s reorganisation of the hospitals at Scutari and in the Crimea that she did not lack energy and initiative.

Following the Crimean War, strenuous efforts were made to reorganise hospitals in this country, and trainees of Florence Nightingale started nursing schools at many hospitals, and the status of nursing became raised.

Just before the turn of the century, great improvement were made in this and other Western countries. Efforts were made to check infectious diseases by isolating and notifying. Great strides in medicine, such as the technique of antiseptic surgery, introduction of anaesthetics, discoveries of the causes of hitherto baffling diseases were made. County councils with medical officers of health were set up, and sanitation at last received some attention.

Florence Nightingale’s reforms in nursing had their way because all this was in the air. The discoveries in medicine made the more intelligent nursing of the sick essential. It was not something which just happened out of the blue by the goodness of one woman, but because at this time it became necessary to transform the Sarah Gamp into a trained knowledgeable worker in the art of nursing, into a woman who could carry out important observations, and many special treatments—in a word, to change the unskilled into the skilled worker.

In 1902 the Midwives Act was passed—”an Act secure the better training of midwives.” Efforts were made to secure as nurses girls of better education, at least secondary school standard. But the shortage of suitable recruits has usually been acute except at the best teaching hospitals —e.g., the London voluntary Hospitals. Girls of better education have wanted better rewards than nursing can give. The lure of the vocation, the life of satisfying work for suffering humanity, etc., ad nauseum, have all been tried. The bait has never been good conditions, reasonable hours and adequate pay for an efficient worker. But the dope has never been completely successful. The municipal hospitals and smaller voluntary hospitals have had to recruit from the elementary schools. This makes it difficult for the recruit, who has probably left school at 14 years and worked in a shop, office or factory, to go back to school again at 18 years. Particularly is this the case now that many high schools run pre-nursing courses, thus relieving the student nurse of much study in her first difficult year of hospital life.

A student has much to learn of a scientific character, and a knowledge of chemistry and mathematics is a great help to the prospective nurse. As always, the good background of education makes all the difference between taking a job in one’s stride or making it a very hard grind. Many fall by the wayside and never become State registered. They then become the assistant nurses, or, shall we say, the labourers of the present nursing world.

What has been the reward for the hard grind ? Until the Rushcliffe scale of salaries was introduced recently, the best salary paid to a student nurse was £20 in the first year, £30 in the second, and £40 in the third, together with board and lodging. The answer to complaints on this score has always been that training was being given free during this period, whilst other trainees—e.g. doctors, teachers, architects, etc.—have to pay for theirs. Such students, however, do not have to work 10-12 hours day or night, often at an exhausting pace, and then attend lectures afterwards. In the writer's experience of commencing training only 11 years ago night duty commenced at 7.30 p.m. and finished at 8 a.m. Often the entire night was worked without a break even for a meal, and then lectures had to be attended at either 9 a.m. or 6 p.m. At 9 a.m. the lecturer received scant attention. A hard school, indeed, and the one night off per week was often spent in sleeping the clock round. The Horder Committee report on nursing reconstruction, recently published, recommends that the nurse should be a student paying for her training, and not an hospital employee responsible for the work of the hospital. They suggest she should be helped by Government grants.

Conditions, however, are improving, in order to attract recruits of what are termed the better kind. Parents are not willing to allow their daughters to undergo an interesting but vigorous training at the cost of their health. “Hard work never killed anyone,” still say some members of the old school. Perhaps not, but health may be impaired, and vitality and energy for outside interests may be completely sapped. We do not, generally speaking, find nurses interested in political questions and world affairs. Why? Because the hospital is its own little world in which one may work and take no notice of the greater world. This may be thought a good thing. Florence Nightingale would have considered that completely absorbing work in the service of others was so. Facts belie it. A nurse so living becomes narrow and harsh, and finally is quite unable to understand the youngest recruits. Certain hospitals in this country now allow their trained staff to live out. This has, on the whole, been extremely successful, and these hospitals have had less difficulty in obtaining staff.

What are the nurse’s expectations when finally she is trained, passes her exams, and can put those long-coveted letters S.R.N. behind her name? She may remain in a general hospital as a staff nurse to do surgical or medical nursing, and after a few years of experience become a Sister and direct the ward. She may take further training in some other branch of. nursing—e.g., midwifery, fevers, children, district, public health or industrial nursing. Many fields of interest are now open to the trained nurse. The latest of these is that of industrial nursing.

The Government has recommended that factories employ a trained nurse and establish a first-aid and welfare department. This department was not established out of the kindness of the employer’s heart. Absenteeism through sickness is considerably reduced: prompt treatment of accidents saves weeks of disability, and reduces compensation;—the worker with a wound has his dressing done by the factory nurse, thus preventing him taking a day off to visit his local hospital or his panel doctor.

Public health and district work is popular, as here the nurse works with greater freedom than her hospital colleague, and she lives out. These nurses regard their work as important and socially useful; their hours are reasonable, and their scale of salary has just been raised through the recommendations of the Rushcliffe Committee. It is not, however, princely, as the maximum salary for a superintendent of health visitors, a post only reached after years of experience, is £55O per year.

The Rushcliffe yearly salaries for the trained nurse are £90, for the ward sister £130, and for a sister tutor £200 rising to £350. These are exclusive of emoluments. The student nurse is to be paid at the rate of £10 first year. £45 second year, £50 third year, and £60 fourth year. These are mentioned in detail as they were supposed to constitute a wonderful improvement.

Previous to the war nurses who married were expected to leave. Since the war they have been permitted—nay, implored—to remain. Florence Nightingale was harsh with nurses who married; she considered that they should devote their whole lives to their work.

The clock cannot be put back despite frantic efforts to do so. The production at this time of the film “The Lamp Still Burns” shows a desire to do so. The heroine, Hilary, foregoes her private life to serve her calling. Few would be willing to make such an unnatural sacrifice Why should such an anachronism be expected? Under modern conditions the nurse may work, for example, for eight hours efficiently and then leave hospital, district or clinic for her home or her own interests and relaxation. The nurse in training may live in for convenience, but should have her lectures in her “on duty” time.

Reorganisation is required and had to some small extent been carried out in England before the war, but more widely in America. Under better conditions nursing could be a most satisfying kind of work. Indeed, it provides an answer to those who state that workers must have bosses. Many nurses, working without supervision, voluntarily exceed their hours of duty for their patients’ welfare.

Efforts are required by nurses themselves to improve their conditions. Hitherto they have been too exhausted to do much in that direction, plus, of course, the play on the vocational side.

The nurse has now become a skilled worker, but do not whisper this to her, as she is taught to regard herself as belonging to the professional class, whom it would appear are a race apart. This snobbery has been a bar to trade-union activity, which has, generally speaking, been resisted by hospital matrons.

Apart from the apathetic state of nurses, three main obstructions to progress exist : The attitude of the working class, who ignorantly look on her as an angel of mercy or despise her as part of what they regard as the racket of medicine; the medical profession, who wish the nurse to be the Cinderella to their own great glory; lastly, from those who as nurses wish the vocational idea to continue.

Many of the diseases and accidents which can be directly traced to the needless hazards of industry or to the poverty of the workers, as well as the more dramatic casualties of war, will die with the death of capitalism. Only under a form of society in which the health and happiness of people, rather than the production of commodities, is the aim can nursing come into its own, with its infinite possibilities of satisfying work.

W. P.

Editorial: Fabian Fallacies, or the Sorrows of Bernard Shaw (1944)

Editorial from the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fresh from a vain attempt to show that our Transatlantic comrades of the “Western Socialist” do not understand Socialism, Mr. G. B. Shaw has enlivened the columns of the Times (February 1, 1944) with a letter teaching the Chancellor of the Exchequer how not to suck the financial eggs of capitalism, and the Foreign Secretary the A.B.C. of using Quislings to run the new European governments to be set up at the heels of the departing Germans. Though the connection may not be obvious, the two pieces of advice are based on the same old Fabian principle that you cannot destroy an existing system unless you already have experts and machinery to operate a new one.

Mr. Shaw has raised the flag of revolt on behalf of the downtrodden dukes of England, the impoverished millionaires, and the payers of Excess Profit Tax. He and other rich men are being ruined by excessive taxation. So he implores the Chancellor to exempt from surtax “all legitimately earned incomes exceeding £20,000,” re-introduce the income tax three-years average system to meet the hard case of “the wretch who makes £21,000 in one year, and a bare subsistence in the years preceding and following,” and “abolish the Excess Profits Tax root and branch.” So long as we have pampered rich, he says, “we must pamper them for all they are worth, and far from crying that nobody must profit commercially by war, make war the most profitable of all businesses until it ends in victory.”

A paragraph from Mr. Shaw’s letter will make his argument clear, especially if read in conjunction with a statement made by him in a further letter to the Evening Standard : —

“It may be finally desirable to get, rid of landlordism; but while we have landlords let us have rich ones, and encourage them to be richer, rather than poor and persecuted ones. And what applies to private farming enterprise applies to all enterprises.” (Times, February 1).

“The question at issue is whether private factories are to be closed and private farmers evicted before the Government is ready to carry on the work they are doing without a day’s intermission. I say no.” (Evening Standard, February 10).

His advice to the Foreign Secretary is based on the same principle, that when governments are overthrown on the Continent new ones will not be able to function unless they retain the services of the trained functionaries who have served the previous German-controlled governments. Shaw has in mind men like the late Admiral Darlan, “the citizen who will obey and faithfully serve the established government of his country, no matter how often it changes.”

It is not our concern to enter into discussion about Shaw’s advice to the Cabinet—probably they appreciate the force of his arguments as well as he does. What we are concerned with is a deeper issue, one that Shaw ignores.

On the surface, the Fabian Society has been a superb success. Its ideas moulded the Labour Party and I.L.P., and some of its leading men reached high office and wielded great influence in the Labour Party and in Liberal and Labour Governments. It has claimed that those who rejected Fabian theories have never made any headway. What, then, were the theories .of the Fabian Society? They are well stated in “The History of the Fabian Society,” by Mr. E. R. Pease, its secretary for 25 years (published in 1916 by A. C. Fifield). Professing Socialism as its aim, the Fabians rejected the view “Make Socialists and you will make Socialism” (the view held by the S.P.G.B.), and declared instead that Socialism was a principle already in part embodied in the constitution of capitalist society. As Fabians and Fabian ideas permeated other parties, this Socialist principle would, they said, gradually be extended. Mr. H. G. Wells, who quarrelled with them over this, defined their attitude fairly enough when he said that they believed “the world may be manoeuvred into Socialism without knowing it” and that “society is to keep like it is … and yet Socialism will be soaking through it all, changing without a sign.”

Mr. Pease says in his “History,” “The work of the Fabian Society has been not to make Socialists, but to make Socialism” (p. 255).

Then the Fabians believed in government by the expert —”what it demanded was partly, indeed, a more efficient and expert central government . . . but primarily an expert local civil service in close touch with and under the control of a really democratic municipal government” (p. 248). Critics of the Society used to charge their largely civil service membership with being concerned with creating careers for themselves. As one leading member once said, “The government of the future will be by experts, and we, naturally, want to be the experts” (Mr. H. Snell, quoted in the Socialist Standard, February, 1907).

It will be noticed that Mr. Shaw is still worried about having somebody, the experts, to carry on in place of factory owners, landlords, farmers and government officials, and this brings us to the utter failure of 60 years of Fabianism. They were going to smooth the road to complete Socialism. Writing in 1889, Mr. Shaw declared that the transfer of private property to the nation had already been in progress for 15 years (“Fabian Essays,” p. 180), yet now, after a further 55 years, making a round century in all, we are told in effect that we are helpless to do anything because the propertied men in control are still indispensable. Shaw’s slogan now is “Dukes are better landlords than needy freeholders” (Times, February 1, 1944).

The Fabian experts half a century ago, like their Labour Party imitators afterwards, had a vision of municipal and state enterprises extending everywhere under their guiding hand and driving private concerns out of business. Wages of workers in the nationalised undertakings would rise, and landlords and capitalists would disappear. Mr. Shaw airily rounded it off thus in his “Transition” (Fabian Essays, 1889, p. 199) : —

“It is not necessary to go further into the economic detail of the process of the extinction of private property. Much of that process as sketched here may he anticipated by sections of the proprietary class successively capitulating, as the net closes about their special interests, on such terms as they may be able to stand out for before their power is entirely broken.”

We shall not be accused of exaggeration if we say that something seems to have gone wrong with the time-table. This has not escaped the notice of the Fabians, and Mr. Pease and Mr. Shaw have both had their say about the actual results of Fabianism. Mr. Pease wrote, in 1916 : “It must be confessed that we have made but little progress along the main road of Socialism. Private ownership of capital and land flourishes almost as vigorously as it did 30 years ago. Its grosser cruelties have been checked, but the thing itself has barely been touched” (p. 241).

That is as true now as it was in 1916, and note, too, that whereas in 1889 it was the Fabians who were very cleverly—as they thought—permeating the Liberal and Radical parties with their reform programmes, now the boot is on the other foot, and it is the Liberal Sir William Beveridge who is permeating the Labour Party with his scheme for removing a new batch of grosser cruelties in the campaign to make the world safe for capitalism.

Mr. Shaw lias been just as frank as Mr. Pease. In reply to the question whether Socialism had made progress during his lifetime, he replied to the News-Chronicle (January 6, 1936) : —

“Yes; but it is the capitalists who exploit it for their own profit everywhere except in Russia . . . The Socialists here broke down the old capitalist policy of laissez-faire, and showed that State help was indispensable in modern industry. Accordingly, the capitalists now will not build a Queen Mary unless the State helps them out; and mines are registered as Public Utility Societies instead of private ventures. Excellent Socialism for capitalists; but the sailors and miners get nothing out of it.”

So after half a century of building “Socialism for capitalists” but without making Socialists, we find that things are very much as they were. Vital change is still impossible because there is something lacking. We must, says Mr. Shaw, bolster up our dukes and landlords, pamper the rich, and depend on Continental Quislings to keep capitalism going. There is something lacking; Socialists are lacking. The Fabians never held with making Socialists, yet it is surely obvious that if the enormous effort devoted to advising the capitalists how to adapt their system to the changing circumstances of the past half-century had been devoted to making Socialists here and abroad, Mr. Shaw’s twin problem would be non-existent and his advice superfluous.

The early Fabians, the I.L.P. and the Labour Party were wrong, and the S.P.G.B. was right. The problem was not, and is not, one of extending state and municipal capitalism—(incidentally the present drift is towards monopolistic public utility corporations under some sort of state supervision, not towards state operated enterprises)—-nor is it one of finding experts and superior brains. There is no lack of able and experienced workers in industry, farming and the civil service to carry on, nor was there 60 years ago. All that is lacking is a Socialist working class to give orders to its delegates in Parliament and on the local councils for the ending of the private property basis of society. Socialism is still not here, but that is only because the workers are still not Socialists. What society needs now, as when the Fabians began their slow march to nowhere, is not Fabian experts to show the capitalists what changes are necessary to keep capitalism going, but a majority who understand Socialism and are determined to achieve it, through gaining control of the machinery of government.

Letter: Marx’s Economic Theories (1944)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasgow

Editorial Committee, the Socialist Standard.

Dear Sirs,

In thanking you for your courtesy in publishing my letter on Marx, I would ask your permission to make the following answer to “H.’s” reply.

My critic states : (1) that the authorities I quoted are, with one exception, not economists, and (2) that they do not always agree with one another.

In reply to this I would say that they are all men who have devoted a lifetime to the study of political and economic questions, and that no one can expect them to agree with one another on every point.

In what branch of science are all the authorities agreed on everything?

As for the statement that they are not “political economists,” if by this term is meant those who are professors of the subject in our universities, I would ask what professor of political economy in any university in the world to-day, outside Russia, does endorse Marx’s theory of value? I have never been able to find the name of anyone who does, though I have questioned many of my Marxian friends on the subject. And it will not do to say that they refrain from doing so from fear of victimisation by the university authorities. In this revolutionary age anyone who came forward as an open champion of Marx would probably make a fortune from the sale of his books. The Dean of Canterbury was not put out of the Church for championing Russia, and his uncritical works (so thoroughly exposed in the Socialist Standard) are circulated by the million.

Moreover, the fact that one authority builds upon the theory of another (another point made by your contributor) does not invalidate his testimony. Sir Arthur Keith stood upon the shoulders of Darwin, but his testimony to the truth of evolution is no less valuable for that. Even Marx was indebted to his predecessors.

I scarcely think it necessary to dwell on Shaw’s remarks on Mallock. As a humorist, Shaw is at times superb, at others just a little tiresome. But surely no one takes him seriously on economic science. His criticism of Mallock is typical-—a man whose shoes, intellectually speaking, he was, in my opinion, never fit to clean.

The authorities I quoted gave reasons for their belief that Marx was wrong, but “H.” has not refuted them. In my opinion, their arguments cannot be disproved.

In his second article your contributor says, “Our critic obviously misunderstands the Marxian theory of value.” If this is so, I err in good company. After a careful, analysis of Marx’s teaching, Prof. Hearnshaw says : “The absurdity of the labour theory of value, stated thus succinctly, is so patent and so appalling that Marx himself was compelled to conceal its naked monstrosity by clouds of Hegelian vapour. He plays upon the word ‘commodity’ until it loses all recognisable features. He juggles with the word ‘labour’—abstract labour, concrete labour, skilled labour, unskilled labour, manual labour, mental labour, human labour, homogeneous labour, socially necessary labour, average labour, general labour, and so on indefinitely—-until the most devoted and most diligent Marxians (e.g,, Kautsky and Trotsky) tear one another to pieces in contradictory assertions as to what Marx means. ‘It is possible,’ said one despairing Socialist—and probably many more than one—’to prove anything from Marx.’ ”

I think my illustration of the fishing boat was quite appropriate, for if the Marxian teaching that rent, interest, and profit are three forms of robbery is true, it should apply not in certain cases but in all cases. The fact that modern industry is run on the joint stock principle does not alter the fact that capital so contributed is as necessary as labour in the production of wealth, and is entitled to an adequate (though not an excessive) return.

The way in which I see the matter is this : A ship requires £10,000 to build. I, as a worker, earn £200 per year—that is to say, I produce £200 worth of consumable goods and receive tickets in the form of money entitling me to draw upon the common store to that extent. I choose to spend only £100, however (that is to say, I draw upon the common store to the extent of only half of my contribution to it). The other half I hand to the directors or promoters of a joint stock company. This they pay, at least to the greater extent, in wages, which entitle the workers who receive them to draw upon, or consume, that half of the consumable goods I have produced but have refrained from claiming. The energy in these goods is converted into the energy of human labour, and the energy of human labour is converted eventually into a ship, since I am but one of 300 investors who act in a similar manner. My investment and the investment of my fellow-shareholders was as necessary as any other factor to the result. If we claim a share of the ship’s earnings (it may, to simplify the illustration, be regarded as a trawler), in what respect are we “robbing the workers?” It will not do to say that all transactions are not on such a clear cut basis. If the Marxian view is sound—if, as your contributor implied in his original article, labour is the only factor in production entitled to reward, it must be shown why this is so. And, as I have already said, this argument, should apply, not in one case, but in every ease.

My illustration of one book selling five times better than another—(I accept the amended version of your contributor, which puts the matter in an even clearer light)—I still consider valid, but considerations of space prevent my entering into a lengthy discussion of this. The example, however, serves to illustrate a further point brought out by almost every critic of Marx—namely, his disregard of demand as a determinant of value.

In conclusion; may I say just this : Quite by chance I came across a modern book by a political economist. “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,” by J. A. Schumpeter, Professor of Economics in Harvard University (published by Allen & Unwin). Mindful of your contributor’s reproach that my authorities were not political economists (though some have spent as long as Marx in study of the subject), I looked up Professor Schumpeter’s view of the matter under discussion, and here it is : “Everybody knows that this theory of value is unsatisfactory” (page 23); “In any case it is dead and buried” (page 25).

But the theory forms the very cornerstone of the Marxian attack on capitalism. Without it, Marxism itself is dead !

Yours faithfully,

H. W. Henderson.

Reply.

(Our critic’s first letter and our reply appeared in the November and December issues.)

The point has already been made that a dispute about economic theory cannot be settled by an appeal to authorities: if it could, Marx’s own statements are more weighty than those of his critics. The real test is that of experience. Our critic asks what professor of political economy in any university outside Russia endorses Marx’s theory of value. The arbitrary exclusion of Russian economists gives away our critic’s whole case. If economic authorities as such can decide the issue, then the Russian have as much authority as any others. It is a tacit admission by our critic that professors are liable to be influenced by those who control the universities and by the environment in which they make their living. Abundant evidence of this is given in Upton Sinclair’s ‘Goose-step,’ a study of the suppression of opinion in American universities. A typical incident among many is that of the professor who declined an invitation to address a student’s club on Marxian theories—he wanted to keep his job (p. 211). Incidentally, Sinclair quotes Laski on the way pressure makes university professors adopt reactionary ideas in order to get promotion, or makes them keep silent (p. 391). Quite recently (Daily Express, November 28, 1942) it was related how the late Sir Arnold Wilson found himself up against a conspiracy of silence at the universities about the ramifications of the insurance companies. Beveridge explained to him why the London School of Economics, “on grounds of expediency,” ignored the subject.

In addition to pressure, there are other reasons why economists reject Marx. One is that they pick up biased and incorrect views of what Marx’s theories actually are during their own training at universities. Another is that the atmosphere of social snobbery makes them reluctant to accept a theory which identifies their own “intellectual” labour with that of the working class.

Our critic, earlier quoted Laski against Marx. Since 1927, when Laski made that criticism, he has been moving more and more towards accepting Marx’s views, and in Reynolds News (March 7, 1943) he wrote:

“It is important to add that Marxism has never been more living than to-day; as the eminent American economist, Thorstein Veblen, said, his is the only socialism that really matters.”

Our critic says there is no branch of science in which all the authorities are agreed about everything. This may be true, but it follows that where they are disagreed the dispute cannot be settled by an appeal to authorities.

He quotes Sir Arthur Keith as one authority who builds upon the theory of another (Darwin). This has no bearing on our point about various anti-Marxian historians and others who simply passed on, parrot fashion, each other’s opinions about Marxian economics. Keith is himself an independent authority who claims that his anatomical experience and his original studies confirm Darwin’s main conclusions.

Our critic quotes Hearnshaw to show that if he errs he does so in good company. This may bring comfort to our critic, but if he persists in thinking that Marx claimed all labour as value-creating, despite Marx’s repeated statement that he was only referring to “socially necessary labour.” then fifty Hearnshaws won’t make it any different.

On the question of the operation of capitalist undertakings, our critic gives another example of what he thinks happens. We are asked to consider a worker who earns £200 a year (in return for his work which produces £200 worth of consumable goods), and who could draw the whole £200 from the common store, but actually saves £100 and invests it. In support of Ins claim that “capital … is as necessary as labour in the production of wealth,” our critic says, “If we claim a share of the ship’s earnings … in what respect are we robbing the workers?”

Here in a nutshell is the fallacy of the whole argument. Labour and capital are claimed to be equally necessary, yet on the basis of this principle of equal treatment our critic claims that the worker who puts in £200 (through his work) is entitled to draw out £200 and no more; while the investor who puts in £100 is entitled, not only to continue owning his £100 investment, but in addition is to receive “an adequate return.”

It may be asked, too, whence comes the “adequate return,” since, according to our critic, the workers get back as wages all that they producer As the investor, as such, produces nothing but merely allows the workers to use the means of production, and as inanimate capital itself obviously cannot add more than its own value to the product, our critic is asking us to accept the theory that there is no surplus value, yet out of this non-existent surplus the investor receives his profit. Actually it can only come from the unpaid labour of the workers. The workers are working, say, half their time to produce their own cost of subsistence (the value of their labour power, their wages), and the rest of the time to produce the surplus value the capitalist takes.

It should be added that under capitalism as it really is the great bulk of existing capital is not the result of current savings, most of it being inherited; still less is it the result of savings by workers. All their savings together do not and could not amount to more than a trifling part of the whole capital.

The capitalists as such are not producers, nor are they “savers” except in the technical sense that their income is greatly in excess of what they need to spend, and can spend, on their own consumption. They are monopolists who, through their control of the machinery of government, are able to exact toll in the form of surplus value on the wealth produced by the workers who operate the capitalist-owned means of production.

As a late after-thought, our critic charges Marx with disregarding demand as a determinant of value. It is quite unnecessary to go into that charge here, for it will be noticed that our critic likewise disregarded demand. When he explained that a worker produces value by his labour (“£200 worth of consumable goods”), he did so without mentioning this after-thought that not the worker but the demand produced the value.

Last of all, our critic asks us to consider Schumpeter’s opinion that “everybody knows that this theory of value is unsatisfactory,” and that “in any case, it is dead and buried.” They both protest too much. If it is dead and buried, and everybody knows it is unsatisfactory, why are Schumpeter and our critic so anxious to kill it again?

Edgar Hardcastle

Why Bother About the Burma Road ? (1944)

From the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

There has been quite a bit in the papers, one way and another, about getting supplies through to the Chinese. At one time it was simply a question of whether the British Government should open or close the Burma Road, but when the Japanese solved this problem by taking over the route themselves, plans were laid for the rapid building of a great new road from North India to “Free” China. We heard a great deal about the urgency and importance of the task of sending China the materials needed for the fight of the sorely beleagured Chinese troops in their effort to restore their country to freedom from the oppressing occupation of the War Lords of the Rising Sun. The Japanese had raped and pillaged, looted and burnt in the Chinese territory they occupied. The cruellest of soldiers, the most sadistic of foes, they had swept right into the very heart of China over a period of twelve years. Never had a people suffered so long and so much in modern times under the iron heel of the conqueror.

In view of what we have been told, therefore, it is surprising to read the following report in the Manchester Guardian Weekly (December 17th, 1943): —

“Trade between Japanese occupied and Free China has recently taken on larger proportions on account of the Chinese Government’s endeavour to attract useful goods from enemy territory and the accelerated fall or the Japanese puppet currencies in terms of Chinese national dollars.

“Value of the known imports from occupied areas to Free China during the last six months, according to a Government spokesman, was £1,250,000 sterling on Government account, and £25,000,000 through commercial channels.”

So why bother about building new roads or reopening old ones? It seems that British supplies might be shipped to Chunking via Tokio so long as the label was correctly addressed. Nobody would be a bit less happy surely—unless it were the Chinese soldiers if it turned out that British raw materials did not furnish such good weapons to kill the Japs with as Japanese produced supplies.

N. S.

Provincial Organisers’ Fund (1944)

Party News from the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the September issue of the Socialist Standard we outlined our plans for the future development of propaganda and organisation in the Provinces. In asking our readers to contribute to a special fund for this important work, we said : —

“It remains for those who wish to see our movement progress to help us with contributions towards this end. If you want a life different from the slavery of the factory, the office and the farm, here is the opportunity to help forward the change. It is a change that will bring into existence a social system in which all men and women, on a footing of social equality, will be able to control their own destinies and make their existence on earth something worth living for.”

In many parts of the country there are small groups of workers who desire this change and are prepared to work for it. but they lack experienced speakers and organisers, without which their task is made much more difficult. At the present time we lack the funds to help them over this difficulty, and that is where we look to you to play your part. The urgency of the task before us will not be questioned by those who wish to see our movement progress, and we make no apology for asking you to make even greater efforts to give us the financial support we need.

Up to mid-December the amount received for the fund was £173. This is quite a good start, but before we can go ahead with our, plans we shall need several times that amount. It’s up to you to see that our work is not handicapped by lack of funds. Send along that donation NOW. Don’t put it off until to-morrow, don’t leave it to the other sympathisers, and remember, no amount is too big ! !

Donations should be sent to J. Butler, 298, Halley Road, Manor Park, London, E.12, and it must be stated clearly that they are intended for the Provincial Organiser’s Fund. P.O.s, cheques, etc., must be crossed and made payable to the S.P.G.B.

Sensitive Content Warning . . .

Help me out here. 

Just stumbled across the following 'warning' that concerns the April 2015 Voice From The Back column, which appeared on the blog in March 2019:

The warning from blogger did not pop up at the time. It's obviously something that been flagged in recent months. Is it the passing reference to Russia's predatory 'interest' in Eastern Ukraine? Is it about gender inequality in Saudi Arabia or is it about the lack of basic sanitation for tens of millions of people in Pakistan? Blogger doesn't tell me. It's a real head scratcher.

Looking forward to future 'Sensitive Content Warnings'.

Fatalism and Historic Necessity. A Vindication of the Socialist Position. (1911)

From the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Perverted Vision.

The opponents of our method and theory – bourgeois scientists, and Syndicalist or Anarchist doctrinaires – are in accord in urging against Marxism the accusation which men like Guyot, of vulgar political economy, levelled of old against Socialism in general: they say we are guilty of an attack upon the individual, of an attempt upon liberty.

It is not the capitalist system which sacrifices the liberty of the many to the greater liberty of the privileged few; it is we who do so. It is not the regime of capitalist property which makes the “free” will of the immense majority of the population obey the hard law of labour for another; it is Socialism!

From the Frenchman De Molinari to the Prussian Eugene Richter, from the Englishman Herbert Spencer to the Italian Syndicalist Arturo Labriola, from the extreme right of the political horizon to the extreme left of “Socialist” opportunism, we hear vituperation against “the Socialist tyranny”, against “the future slavery”, and, above all, against the “suppression of individual liberty” – of capitalists!

But among our opponent there are, it seems, men of good faith who sincerely imagine that Marxism replaces "liberty" with the "fatalism" of immutable economic laws.

Note, in the first place, that the same accusation of fatalism has been made against all modern philosophers who proclaim the subordination of so-called moral phenomena to natural law. When Hippolyte Taine, the author of L’Intelligence, wrote that vice and virtue are as necessary products of certain conditions “as are vitriol and sugar”, he was stupidly accused of recommending the replacing of the consumption of sugar by that of vitriol. The minds of many moderns are so degraded by centuries of theological and metaphysical education that they take plain statements of fact for approvals or condemnations. They resemble the capricious woman who broke her mirror because it revealed the decline of her beauty.

This accusation of fatalism is somewhat comprehensible, and even excusable, when applied to those theories which subordinate human history to the influence of climate or the geographical environment. The climate, within certain limits, is practically invariable. The sky of Greece and of France has varied little from the most remote times; but how many revolutions have occurred under the same sun!

Man Makes History.

Thomas Buckle has been reproached for his climatic fatalism; but hardly with justice, because the celebration author of The History of Civilisation proved that as men developed they emancipated themselves from the influence of the geographical and climatic factors, and began to dominate nature.

But, I repeat, the geographical interpretation of history may well give rise to a fatalistic tendency. The semi-invariable nature of the geographical factor lends itself easily to this. One may say the same of all historic theories which subordinate history to external nature.

Such is not the case with the Marxian theory. Nothing is more human or more varied than the mode of production. To produce, said Marx in his Capital, man needs a plan, a consciousness of the work to be done. He know what he is doing. He thinks his work. After Vico,  Marx affirmed that history is made by man. Revolutions in the method of production which generate political and social revolutions are due to the great and small “inventions” – that is to say, to the products of human talents and genius.

Therefore Marx has not excluded man from history. He did not consider individuals as mannequins launching “new modes of production”, like modes of another kind are “launched” – that of the harem skirt, for example.

That is not all; it is the “dogmatic”, “sectarian”, and “orthodox” Marxians who have insisted, against Bernstein and his more or less idealistic school, on the necessity of affirming and propagating the “final aim” of Socialism.

Marxists alone are Constant.

It is they, and they alone, who have, in the great crisis of International Socialism (which is far from being terminated) remained unshakeably faithful to the Socialist ideal – without stupidly repeating the word – while opportunists of every order, or even of disorder, have allowed themselves to drift at the mercy of the political events of the day, along with the blind and fatal forces of the system which knows only the inexorable struggle of appetites and interests.

But the dialectical method is the enemy of all that is arbitrary. It does not place history in an aeroplane at the mercy of the winds of “His Majesty, Chance”. The movement of history is nothing like the zig-zag of a drunken man. It is governed by necessities. Humanity is not free to renounce its physical and intellectual needs. As it is not suicidally disposed, it submits, in order to live, to the necessities of production. Production gives rise to and determines the social system. To a given social system there correspond definite ideas and conceptions; religion, morality, philosophy, science.

It requires all the interested blindness, all the brutal selfishness, of the capitalist to say to the worker: You are free to cease to work. Absolute liberty is death.

A society is not transformed by the force of The Word, nor by strokes of will. It is necessary that all the forces of the past and present collaborate therein. Already Saint Simon, the true precursor of Marx, had clearly shown that the elements of the new system accumulate during centuries, and prepare themselves within the framework of ancient systems. according to him, the capitalist class has taken seven or eight centuries to become the dominant force in society.

Evolution Includes Revolution.

Isolated men, or small minorities, may, from time to time, indulge their gentle fantasies. They may dream of transformations in the twinkling of an eye. In the name of the “right of abortion” they may apply the forceps of “direct action” to the body social in order to bring the new society into the world before its time. But society as a whole – an entire class – only gives itself such aims as are in the domain of the realisable and possible. And when the time comes it shrinks from no necessary means. Evolution does not exclude revolution, any more than the gradual transformation of the earth excludes cataclysms. Births occur in blood, and are associated with cries and painful rendering. But only monsters come into the world before the normal hour.

A ship is launched. Does it deprive its captain of liberty to give him a nautical chart, prepared with scientific accuracy, and a compass? Would he be more free if he drifted at the will of the waves? The dialectic method, as used by Marx and Engels, provides us with chart and compass to determine the movement of history. It does not fetter us. It simply shows the way. In helping us toward the desired goal, it emancipates us from blind forces, from the fatality of chance. It is, therefore, an influence of freedom – not of slavery.

Primitive man is the slave of Nature. He is literally terrorised by natural phenomena. He seeks by cruel human sacrifices to obtain a mitigation of his lot. Natural science emancipates him. From being the slave of Nature he becomes master. Modern society is still at the mercy of blind, semi-natural forces. We are, in relation to society, what primitive man was in relation to nature. It is necessary to conquer our liberty. We must emancipate ourselves from the blind social forces which bind and oppress us. Society must become our thing, as the great forces of nature have become. We must become masters of society, just as we have become, more or less, the masters of our natural environment.

Science is Liberty.

But how have we conquered nature? By studying it; by learning its laws and making them serve our ends. It is the same with social laws. We shall only vanquish social oppression when we have discovered the laws of the working of society. Science is liberty. And the dialectical method, which powerfully aids toward that discovery, toward the edification of social science, is the tool of liberty, the instrument of precision of our emancipation.

The dialectical method is therefore quite the contrary of fatalism. In making us cognisant of historical necessities, it makes us able to effectively combat the fatalist decree of capitalist ignorance that there always have been poor, and always will be!

No, replies the dialectical method. Capitalist poverty is an “historical category”, which will disappear with the historical conditions which create and nourish it.

The dialectical method of Socialism is the method of science and of liberty.

[Ch. Rappoport in Le Socialisme. Translated by F. C. Watts.]

Capitalist “Humanity”. (1911)

From the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Socialist is almost always, yet, in most cases, without conscious hypocrisy, a non-Socialist in his own private life. On all sides of his character, indeed, the average Socialist shows the absence of that feeling for humanity which his creed inculcates.”—Witness (Ontario).

Ignoring the obvious contradiction that “the Socialist” is “nearly always a non-Socialist,” the truth of the above depends upon the writer’s interpretation of the words.

If the term Socialist is intended to mean one who endeavours to practice Socialism, then none can be other than non Socialist—unless our critic would expect the aspirant to the name to start a co-operative commonwealth, as a hobby, after knocking off work.

Let me elucidate. Socialism is a name given to a system of society wherein the present anachronism : social production—private ownership, shall find no place; a system wherein classes with opposing interests shall give place to a community with a common interest.

A Socialist is one who recognises that private ownership must give place to social control in order that society shall progress ; one who sees that the evils attendant upon mankind are due to the clashing interests of producer and owner, and who works for the society of harmonious material interests that must result from the abolition of class domination.

That is a Socialist, both public and private ; and the piebald individual with Socialistic principles in spots is ruled out.

The “feeling for humanity which his [Socialist] creed inculcates” is, evidently, conspicuously absent in the pro-capitalist, for, be it noted, our Socialist in parts “shows its absence” on his non-Socialist side. Certainly such feelings are not rapidly generated in the hothouse of capitalism. It does not pay ; but capitalism is never at a loss. If the real thing cannot be produced at a profit, nevertheless, quite an overdose of shoddy goods of this character has been dumped upon an unsuspecting proletariat in this enlightened country.

The humanity made so much of by the pro-capitalist does not appeal to the Socialist, who is more concerned with preventing the evils than sympathising with the unfortunate victims thereof.

What does capitalist humanity amount to ? Human beings are maimed and crippled in the scramble for dividends. Commerce demands such sacrifice. Production for profit ignores humanity, and after each day of modern industry hundreds are left by the wayside, maimed and bleeding.

The humanitarian here steps in and calls upon his brothers to assist in the holy work of rescue. How awful it is for the “image of the Creator” to expire in the gutter ! To tend the sick and to comfort the weary should be the work of the more fortunate ones.

To be sure. And, apart from the usefulness of such work, it may be very dangerous to allow the carcass to rot. Germs from the body may travel even into the homes of those more fortunate brethren. So, while supporting the system which maims and kills, they erect hospitals and poor-houses to receive the wreckage from the capitalist workshops.

Year by year the mass of that wreckage increases, and, of course, with the growth in the number of those who have fallen among thieves and got broken, the “good Samaritan” business expands also. To quote a writer in the Daily Chronicle, “they are awaiting the half starved children and consumptive sempstresses who will never get well until they have had enough to eat, and for the mothers who cannot feed their babes because they have no food for themselves.”

Describing a visit to the “House of Horror” (the London Hospital) the same writer says :

“Throughout the length and breadth of a building covering a space of eight acres, men and women were busy with the great and ceaseless fight with death. Always the great city casts up its human wreckage, its broken bodies, its scum of disease. The supply is inexhaustible from the torture chamber of life. . . I saw the vision of life’s cruelty in a great city. I saw sharp knives in whirling machines of great factories chopping off the fingers of working men and slicing off their limbs. I saw great ladders falling and smashing the bodies of men. I saw starvation weakening the fibre of the people of mean streets, and the microbes of disease grow fat in the filth. I saw vice eating up the bone and blood of men and breeding children of despair. For here around me in the London Hospital were the victims of all the seething cruelty of a great city in a civilised world.”

The modern hospital resembles nothing so much as the repairing department of a large factory. The human machine is received broken and worn ; the broken parts are patched and the worn parts rebuilt, and then it is returned to be rebroken and again repaired, until at last it is thrown on the industrial scrap-heap as utterly useless.

At present parsons, labour leaders, and others engaged in the dissemination of the “feeling for humanity” are busy denouncing the horrors of war and calling for “international arbitrament of national quarrels,” heedless of the fact that wars are necessary factors in the expansion of markets, and that standing armies are required to subdue a subject class.

Great though the loss of life by warfare is, it pales into insignificance beside the myriads needlessly slaughtered in factory and mine.

“Where is the Socialist’s humanity ?” “Where is he who practices Socialism in ‘private life’?” “Where are your Socialist hospitals ?” “What has Socialism done for the workers?” Such are the questions of the unthinking. Ask rather “What does that ‘humanity’ amount to which waits until the damage is done and then applies the sticking plaster; which calmly stands by while the limb is broken, and then hastens to supply a splint ?”

Look for the humane instinct in a system which is based upon the robbery and murder of the useful in the interest of the useless. Enquire into and discover what capitalism has done for the toiler.

Dr. Newman, chief medical officer of the Board of Education, reports that of the 6 millions of children attending elementary schools, approximately 50 per cent. require medical treatment.

The chief registrar of births and deaths, in his report for 1909, states that 20 per cent. of the deaths in that year occurred in the workhouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, and prisons.

In London 1 in 7 and in Glasgow 1 in 2 live in overcrowded conditions, while in both cities thousands of houses are unoccupied, and there are thousands upon thousands of acres of unused land in both England and Scotland.

We are told that in Great Britain “there are a million men unemployed ; that one third of the population are on the verge of hunger.”

The total wages paid are ever decreasing, it being estimated that the wages now paid to the workers of this country are less by 6 millions than they were 8 years ago, and further, that the number of paupers in the United Kingdom has increased by 118,000 since 1901.

T. S. Chouston, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S.E., in a recent work, says : “In the report of a Royal Commission it is estimated that there are at least 350,000 persons representing the mentally helpless, dependent, and diseased element in the body politic. I should add another 50,000 and be well within the mark. Those have as first cousins an army of defectives of another kind. . . . It comes to this, that a large part of our ‘submerged tenth’ lacks brain-grit to cope with the conditions of modern life, especially in large cities.”

These are a few of the good things capitalism has done for the workers. The mechanism to cope with this enormous poverty, disease, and crime, necessary for the maintenance and upkeep of present society, springs, we are told, from a “feeling for humanity.” The Socialist wants none of it.

Just as every vice alleged against Socialism is found to actually exist to-day, so every pretended virtue of capitalist society shows its inherent rottenness.

No greater condemnation of the existing order can be given than the fact that it creates the necessity for these vast “humane” institutions to deal with the worst of its flotsam and jetsam, to provide, for decency sake, a screen for awful spectacle of its wreckage.

T. W. Lobb