Editorial: A Cut at the S.L.P. (1917)

Editorial from the September 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

The criticism of the Socialist Labour Party which appears in the S.P.G.B. Manifesto to the Proposed International Socialist Congress seems to have met with the disapproval of the people criticised. The people criticised try — we were going to write “to hit back,” but this would not be correct: they do not try to hit back, they simply try to parry the blow.

Of course, they cannot be blamed for confining their efforts to such defensive measures. That they can find no opening in our defence is apparently obvious, even to them. They have done their best with the unpromising material to hand, and it amounts to this:

An effusion of cheap sneers, stale witticisms, and the like as a mask to cover their skedaddling from the real issue ; a vague charge (vague in that it is unsupported by any evidence) of “flagrant dishonesty ” ; a ludicrous and lying attempt to explain away an awkward statement which appeared in their official organ ; and finally a display of fireworks on their own behalf which is as amusing as such things usually are.

Regarding the criticism in our Manifesto to the Proposed Socialist Congress, the S.L.P. state in their organ : “For ourselves we can smile at the weak criticism passed on the S.L.P.” And having thus adopted the policy of “grin and bear it, or take it lying down,” they pass on to the lighter task of finding funny names to fit the signature of our correspondent ”B.B.B.” In such easy ways are victories won in the class struggle!

“B.B.B.” quoted in our July issue the following (described by the “Socialist” of August as “an Editorial note”) from Nov. ’14 “Socialist”:

“That there are differences of opinion in the S.L.P. as in other parties, on the question of the war must have been apparent to most readers of “The Socialist.” Last month I tried to show what the different views were, but I have not been able to find out what support each side has, consequently I cannot say definitely what the official attitude of the Party is.”

And this is how the S.L.P. try to explain away that very curious, not to say damaging, statement :

“This note was quite in order; in accordance with our policy of allowing full expression of different opinions in our columns, letters were published urging a pre-war (? pro-war) policy. A discussion took place in our columns on the attitude of Socialism to the war, but the pro-war correspondents were in every case non-members of the S.L.P.

Some individuals, mislead by the correspondence and discussion, accused the S.L.P. of wavering on internationalism ; but later, when the Party Manifesto was issued and the air cleared, it was seen that the whole membership was solidly anti-war.”

That is enough to go on with. We will now proceed to handle the S.L.P. on the matter contained in this quotation.

First of all let it be noted that our opponents cling desperately to the pronouncement our comrade and contributor “B.B.B.” adduced against them. They had not the courage — or should we say indiscretion? — to reprint it, for it would then at once have provided the answer — complete and crushing — to their miserable attempt to defend it. “This note was quite in order” the S.L.P. champion says. Good.

Now what is the explanation ? “A discussion took place in our columns on the attitude of Socialism to the war, but the pro-war correspondents were in every case non-members of the S.L.P.” But the note which is “quite in order” says that it “must have been apparent to most readers of ‘The Socialist'” that “there are differences in the S.L.P. . . .  on the question of the war.” Nothing there about non-members of the S.L.P. That which MUST have been apparent to readers of “The Socialist” (and therefore necessarily from evidence appearing in that paper), was differences inside the S.L.P., concerning the war, not outside it. Who said “flagrant dishonesty” ?

It is true that in the May 1915 issue of “The Socialist” the following delectable passage occurs (“Impressions of the Conference “) :

“Imagine the surprise of all the delegates present when it was found that the Party was absolutely unanimous against the war, and that the two writers who had created the impression that the S.L.P. was a house divided, were not even members of the Party.”

But who were the two writers referred to ? Were they “M.” and Joseph Andrews, who, addressing the Editor as “Comrade,” were permitted to spread themselves over seven columns in the Jan. 1915 issue and five in the previous November number ? Were they these men, who could write such things as “The maintenance of the balance of power on the Continent is Great Britain’s object and it should be the object of all Socialists” (“M”) and “I propose that . . realising that German militarism is now a menace to the very existence of Europe, we support the Allies in their armed resistance” ? (J. Andrews.) But if these were the two non-members referred to, that still leaves unaccounted for the man who wrote the article “Shall If Fight” in the December 1914 issue of “The Socialist,” the man who penned this : “I cannot understand the stand being taken by some Socialists of refusing to kill,” and this : “I do not regard this question as a test of one’s sincerity as a Socialist,” and this : “So long as the other fellow remains armed and sets out to make mince-meat of me I reserve the right to retaliate,” and a lot more leading up to the position that we should fight. We should be pleased to be assured that this writer was a non-member of the Party; we should be hilariously delighted to “imagine the surprise of all the delegates present when it was found that” besides being the vehicle for the conveyance to the workers of the capitalist case and the capitalist pleadings for drenching the world with working-class blood, the official organ of the S.L.P. was edited by one who was “not even” a member of the Party !

We claim that it is a lie that all the pro-war correspondents were non-members of the S.L.P., and if this is not so will the editor of “The Socialist” explain that reference to the differences in the S.L.P. which must have become apparent — who to? — to those who read “The Socialist”?

Mark what the Editor of our contemporary himself says in the August issue concerning the “note” which was “quite in order,” in his vain endeavour to wriggle out of its implications :

“Bold Bad Boy, or Bunkum Balderdash and Blether, or whatever the mysterious initials cover, quotes from an article in the June 1917 “Socialist,” . . . and compares it with an extract from the November 1914 “Socialist,” where an Editorial note calls attention to the differences of opinion on the war expressed in the columns of the “Socialist,” . . . ”  (The italics are ours).

There again our opponents give themselves away. The note itself spoke of differences of opinion in the S.L.P., the Editor’s latest wriggle says that those differences were expressed in the columns of “The Socialist.” Then what becomes of the statement that the pro-war correspondents “were in every case non members of the S.L.P.”? Who said bunkum, balderdash and blether?

“Compare the S.L.P. and the S.P.G.B. in their actions,” says our contemporary. Well, suppose we do. In the first place we freely admit that there have been individuals in our party whose knowledge was not sufficient to keep them sound on the question of the war. We have never claimed that our Declaration of Principles could prevent the entry of undesirable people into our organisation ; but we do claim that when such people reveal themselves, by word or deed, as unfit material for a Socialist organisation, the Declaration of Principles to which they give their signatures on joining is an efficient instrument for dealing with them, and putting them outside. In the few cases where the war has revealed unhealthy elements the Party has promptly purged itself of such.

On the other hand, what have been the actions of the S.L.P. in this connection? The Editor of their official organ himself shows that even the columns of that journal have been used to give publicity to the pro-war views of members of the S.L.P. We do not know what action that party took in the secrecy of their councils, but the columns of their organ have not been used to give publicity to any handling of the pro-war members thereof. When the Editor of “The Socialist” is compelled to write, three months after the war broke out, “Last month I tried to show what those different views were, but I have not been able to find out what support each side has, consequently I cannot say definitely what the official attitude of the Party is “—when such a statement as that, we say, can appear in the official organ of the party, how can the party handle pro-war members ? The official organ, the mouthpiece of the Executive and therefore of the party, does not know, in the face of the controversy on such a vital question as that of the “attitude of Socialism to the war,” what the party position is ; how, then, can individual members be expected to know that position, or be dealt with for not knowing it ?

For years it has been the practice of the S.L.P. to refuse to soldiers admission to their ranks. Foolish as this was under pre-war conditions, the logic of such an attitude left no mistake as to the proper course to be taken on the outbreak of war. Yet this party, who, before the war, could not abide an unfortunate member of the working class whom stress of circumstances had compelled to sell his labour-power to the master class in the only capacity open to him, had no “official position” in relation to the war when it had been in progress three months. Up to that time, at all events, the members were “quite in order” in shouting for the despised and rejected soldier to begin the work for which he was despised and rejected, and by that same token the members were in order in “joining up” and getting on with the butchery themselves. The party was divided on “the attitude of Socialism to the war”; its Press could not “find out what support each side had,” and therefore could not say whether it was the duty of the members to rush off and join the Army, or get themselves incarcerated for opposing the war.

That is how we “compare the S.L.P. and the S.P.G.B. in their actions.”

But we have not done yet: we may as well make a job of it while we are about it. Our opponents try to prove their status as a revolutionary organisation. What is the evidence they offer ? Do they present us revolutionary principles and prove their policy to be consistent therewith ? No. They have a very different standard for judging revolutionary organisations. They judge — by the number of members they have had in prison ! In this respect what a long way they are behind the Suffragettes !

“We have had many of our members on the Clyde imprisoned and deported for revolutionary propaganda,” our contemporary says in course of proving their revolutionary character. “We have Editors, past and present, in gaol or under the shadow of gaol. (A former Editor – A. McManus – was deported and again arrested for working-class activity in the recent strike.”) All of which wears a different complexion when we remember that the S.L.P. “martyrs” to gaol in spite of abject contrition, and that McManus, if reports be true, has taken the chair for Tom Mann, whom the S.L.P. has so roundly denounced upon occasion. “And our Press and organ have been under the ban of the military,” our contemporary goes on, finally asking : “Do these things happen to a party which is pro-war, or anything but a revolutionary organisation?” Such things certainly may, as witness the Suffrage movement. But at all events, we should imagine the Government would have paid pretty heavily for some of the stuff which appeared in “The Socialist” after the outbreak of .the war. It takes rank with Harold Begbie’s ” What do you lack, Sonny?” as a contribution to the confusion which made it possible for the capitalist butchers to drag our fellow workers from their homes to the shambles. Perhaps the S.L.P. can now see how lightly “B.B.B.” let them down.

A world of waste. (1917)

From the September 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

Perhaps the chief characteristic of the present regime is the production of colossal wealth by the workers of the world. In no period has the earth been so ransacked for its potential riches; in no age have the forces of nature, and scientific knowledge, been so utilised to extract wealth as during the last fifty years. In the domain of earth, sea, and air, man exerts wonderful power. Ultimately he may even prevent earthquakes from being a menace, make plagues impossible, and turn the uncontrolled force in the lightning stroke, and the energies of the sea and the sunlight, to the common good.

Man, alas ! has assisted in his own enslavement. The wealth he has shaped has diverted him from the destiny that should be his. With all his great heritage, wielding untold potency through science, he should be happier far than those of ages gone. Health and real happiness, knowledge and power, should be his in excelsis were he but the real possessor of his own productions, the disposer of his own powers.

But a blight has settled over Society—the blight of capitalism ! That which blossoms and promises abundance for all is turned to foulness, and the fruit it bears is bitter.

And so we see the saddest spectacle of the ages—the vast masses of the people, who are the wealth producers, surrounded by gigantic wealth yet themselves in stint and wretchedness.

Poverty, ceaseless toil, disease, and misery are theirs. Slaves without knowing it are most of them, contented with their chains. Without hope and bereft of ideals, their lives sunless and shorn of imagination by this system that exploits and finally “scaps” them, they exist only as beasts of burden. The epitaph of millions might justly be : “In the grip of the capitalist system they were compelled to waste their very lives.” For capitalism, with all its Midas-like power, produces, from its very nature, the most terrible waste imaginable. It is, indeed, in the final and real sense, the essence of wastefulness and misdirected energy.

Let us consider now some aspects in which this is presented.

The children of the workers suffer from malnutrition—due to the inability of their exploited parents to supply them with the necessary food. Often they come into the world the offspring of ill-nourished parents, thus being handicapped from the start. They grow up puny, and continue to be ill-fed, and the most important fundamental is missing from Society : healthy, strong children. The wastage of potential citizens and wealth producers through capitalism is enormous.

Then they are educated. And what an education it is ! What efforts are made to develop them physically, to make them sturdy, robust, so that existence becomes enjoyable ? Their own innate tendencies are but rarely encouraged ; their talents are rarely discovered and developed. Individuality is crushed out of them by the system of education, and the imaginative faculty is looked upon as something to be eradicated ! A smattering of this and that is given them, and many of the most valuable kinds of knowledge are denied them altogether.

Thus they are turned out of the schools, half-baked products of capitalistic instruction, with minds impaired by narrow national prejudices, designated “patriotism.” They are given only enough “education” to make them docile and industrious wage-slaves. All knowledge that would be dangerous to the present system, and all history of the struggles of the workers in the past to gain freedom, are glossed over, lied about, or hidden from them.

Now consider the hap-hazard employment of children under the system, and their development into full-grown wage-slaves.

Few of the workers can exercise a choice worth calling such in the profession or trade of their children. They take what presents itself. The medical, legal, and scientific professions are excluded by lack of opportunities. Money paves the way. The one idea is to so place them that they may “make a living.” The consequence is that the potential artist, scientist, author or architect becomes a mere drudge.

The world will never know what a wealth of intellect and power is thus dissipated and lost.

Socialism, with its utilisation of human ability for the world’s Commonwealth, alone is the remedy. It alone presents the opportunities.

The youthful workers become inured to the system, and generally everything that is is taken as a matter of course. The workers’ lives are spent in creating wealth. Their very lives are not their own. They become mere drudges. A fatalism is engendered that makes many end their slave existence as they began it—by blindly accepting it. Others may understand their trade interests and become trade unionists, yet never possess the key to emancipation—class-consciousness.

One final word on the gigantic waste manifesting itself in a thousand ways. Through their hellish system the masters are compelled to maintain huge fighting forces to conserve their interests. Intetests of rival groups of capitalists clash and war is precipitated, and air, sea and land become the scenes of hideous waste—waste of life and wealth.

Millions have been slaughtered, millions maimed for life. Desolation, ruin, and famine cover the earth. War has created a wilderness of untold waste.

Workers, the one remedy that lies in your hands is Socialism. Organise for the establishment of that system in order that human energy and ability shall no longer be run to waste, in order, instead, that you may reap the fruits of your labours and peace and prosperity be yours. So shall you become masters of your own destiny ; so shall man come into his own and realise his infinite capacity to make this globe worth living on ; so shall be established, as never before, happiness and liberty for the multitudes of all nations, founded upon the wealth that flows like water from their concerted efforts.

“Isn’t this worth fighting for” think you?

G.

Jottings. (1917)

The Jottings Column from the September 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the debate on the War vote in the House of Commons on July 24th, a member ventured to voice his apprehension regarding the attitude of the workers. He pointed out that revolution was being fostered by a certain section of leaders of the people who ought to know better. He met workers who asked “are you prepared for the coming revolution ?” He regretted that this insidious kind of talk was going on, and was being glibly preached at street corners, in the midst of this great war, “indeed, as one who had been so long a workman himself, nothing could be more deplorable to him than this glib talk of red revolution and the singing of the ‘Red Flag’ when they ought to be singing the praises of our men in the trenches.”

Dear me ! How they love the working class in this “democratically constituted” parliament of ours—at least that section of the working class which is not in khaki. (Whatever a man is, or has been, the mere act of donning khaki immediately converts him into a hero). But what I like about the above is its bluntness. There is no mistaking that attitude. Its hatred of the working class is manifest. From every word or so the capitalistic venom usually permeating such utterances, “Suppression” is the key note. Yet it was uttered by a Labour member—R. Tootill.

———————————-

Another of our “leaders”—J. G. Hancock, M.P. for Derbyshire, and agent for the Notts Miners—has announced his withdrawal from all association with the Labour Party in the Mid-Derby Division. Mr. Hancock has reason for his terrible sacrifice. It appears that it is “dominated by extreme Socialists,” whatever that expression may mean. So far as the writer of these notes is aware, there is not an overwhelmingly large number of Socialists in Mid-Derbyshire, though we have hopes, of course. But I suspect he means the I.L.P., with whom he was connected, I believe. If that is so, then that is quite a different thing altogether. Yet, if he claims to be a “leader” of the working class, and is scared away by the “Socialism” of the I.L.P., what hope is there for the working class from such as he ? What would have happened, I wonder, if he had been fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be introduced to some real Socialists ? . . .

“Mr. Hancock places himself unreservedly in the hands of the Liberal Association.” That’s good. That’s a more comprehensible statement, anyway. But—isn’t it a distinction without a difference ?

———————————-

Everything that ever emanated from Germany is bad—from Goethe down to German sausage. The British Press says so, therefore it must be true. That being so, the Insurance Act, a German importation, stands condemned. That is, if one prefers to use the style of argument served up each morning in the Press. We are not altogether obliged to, however, as numerous instances in its mal-administration can be quoted to prove its rotten nature, whatever its source may happen to be. I purpose quoting one in support of the assertion. It must be borne in mind that the existence of such an Act depends upon the existence of poverty and servitude before it can operate.

At a recent meeting of the National Association of Trade Union Approved Societies, held in Manchester, a representative of the Amalgamated Weavers Approved Society from Heywood brought forward the case of a woman insured under the Insurance Act, whom, he said, five doctors had refused to attend in her confinement. The husband, it was stated, went to five medical men in succession, but each declined to attend on the plea that he was too busy. Finally the woman was taken to Bury Infirmary. The child lived only a short time, and the woman died four days after admission. The Secretary stated that the Association were satisfied that this sort of thing had been going on for some time.

The explanation of the conduct of these doctors lies in the fact that the poor woman was only one of the working class, one of the “common herd.” That is but one feature of a system for which we are fighting to maintain. Workers all over the world are pouring out their life’s blood in order that the “right” to inflict every kind of indignity and torture upon us shall be the exclusive possession of one class—the master class.

This same measure, upon its introduction, was loudly acclaimed by our “labour leaders” as “the greatest Socialistic measure that has ever been placed before the House of Commons.” I leave the reader to reconcile it if he can.

———————————-

About on a par with the above was the brutal contempt shown for the workers in the answer given to a question by W. E. Anderson in the House of Commons, on the occasion of the discussion of the meat question. It was pointed out that arrangements were being considered or made in Glasgow, Dundee, Hamilton, and Aberdeen for sterilising parts of specially selected carcases of tuberculous animals for sale as food to the general public. The “general public” in this case being the poorest section of the community.

———————————-

Germany is now without a friend in the world, and this, according to Mr. Hoegger, the chairman of the Cotton and Wool Dyers’ Association, is bound to cause Great Britain to have an enormous trade after peace is declared. This is comforting at any rate, because we workers were beginning to think we were in for a damn bad time. For an “enormous trade” will mean lots of work, and lots of work will mean lots of—graft. That’s our portion.

“I should think,” says Mr. Hoegger, (good, old British name, that), “there is surely no British dye-user who would demean himself, under any circumstances, to enter again into business transactions with a nation which has shown itself so utterly devoid of every moral, social, military and naval sense.” (“Manchester Guardian,” 23.5.17).

There is one factor which Mr. Hoegger himself appears to be “utterly devoid of,” and that is “common” sense. Touching which the Commercial Editor of the “Guardian” comments as follows:

“Just now, we all feel like that, and many, we do not doubt, will maintain the feeling. Human nature, however, is in the aggregate incapable of doing it. We have seen in this war how the Japanese have come to the aid of the Russians, with whom they had a severe struggle not long ago, and the Russian Army, which may be taken to represent the populace, has lately shown anything but an undying hatred towards the Germans. If that is so with belligerents, is it not likely that the people of South America and of some other countries, too, will allow their resentment to die down pretty quickly ? We have to remember that business is not done with nations but with individuals, and when peace comes we shall probably hear that while So-and-So would never think of dealing with the ordinary unspeakable German, they have no difficulty in resuming relations with their former connections, those people being really an exceptionally decent sort. The Germans will take care, of course, to offer goods at low prices, and if there is a financial advantage in buying them, after tariffs have been adjusted, it does not seem likely that they will be kept out of any country very long. Profit is a greater power than hatred.”

———————————-

Rev. Bernard Snell, chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, preaching at Brixton the other Sunday (8.7.17), favoured reprisals as an exercise of righteous anger. This was not the time for patience and self-control, but for letting their righteous anger have full sway in the only way that Germany understood. This gentleman evidently believes in a literal interpretation of the Mosaic dispensation. How insatiable in the matter of blood these Christian agents are, for sure ! Give him an axe, somebody, and let him run amok.

Lucilius.

—————————

Can the human intellect, which can provide so much wealth for destruction, devise no means of diverting that wealth to the happiness and well-being of humanity ? Yes, by Socialism.

Conscripted from the Press. (1917)

From the September 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Strange as it may seem, there are good grounds for believing that the efforts of M. Kerensky to restore order are not viewed altogether with disfavour by certain influential persons in Berlin. These latter fear that a nation given over to the sway of Anarchy would make a bad neighbour.”—”Reynolds’s Newspaper,” 5.8.17.

In other words the German capitalist class is afraid that the German working class may become “infected” and revolt against the conditions which are the cause of their misery, poverty, and degradation. Bismarck thought the same in 1871 when he helped Thiers and the French ruling class to crush and avenge in torrents of blood the workingmen’s Commune of Paris. Despite their differences, the international parasite class are solid against the working class. When will the converse be also true?

* * *

“The Japanese are working hard in anticipation of the coming peace. When the war is over they will flood the markets with much of the cheap goods that before could only be produced in sweated Germany”.—”Reynolds’s Newspaper,” 5.8.17.

And yet some fools talk about this being the “last war” ! Was not the industrial efficiency and consequent cheap production of Germany the cause of her phenomenal commercial progress which was the chief of the immediate causes of the war ? The capitalist class of England as well as that of Japan are wide awake to their opportunities, as can be seen in their schemes for the better co-ordination of scientific research with industry, and the more efficient education of the workers.

Greater efficiency in production—bigger-profits—a larger surplus of goods for export—more competitors (Russia will rapidly develop)—fewer markets, leading to—a wild scramble to capture them, and consequently—more wars. To those with eyes to see the ferment of future conflicts is even now in virulent progress. The question is, how long will the workers stand it.

Although it is the workers who are to be “educated,” it is not they and their interests which are considered in the Government’s education proposals, but those of their capitalist masters, as I have above indicated. Mr. H. Fisher, when introducing his Education Bill, carelessly admitted this. He said :

“In asking the employers of this country to assent to these changes—abolition of half-time and the further regulation of employment during the period of elementary school life—I feel that I am asking them to submit to a readjustment of the organisation of their industries which in some cases will be troublesome to effect. But I rest my appeal upon the broad grounds of national advantage.”—”Times,” 11.8.17.

In other words some of the capitalists are requested to sacrifice their immediate interests for the sake of the prospects of that class as a whole.

* * *

When Herr Michaelis, the new German Chancellor, was a lecturer at a law school in Tokyo (1897) he said :

“Practically we have at the moment in the world only one real opponent and enemy, that is the Englishman. Nowadays wars of nations are only fought on economic grounds, and our economic development is opposed by the Englishman. We bubble over in Germany, we must get outside. Wherever we want to go, there stands the Englishman, with his legs apart and shameless, in the door to bar our way.”—”Times,” 9.8.17.

The Chancellor means by “Englishman” the English capitalist, who certainly has grabbed most of the corners of the planet worth having, greatly to the discomfiture of his foreign competitors, especially the German capitalists.

Michaelis has no illusions about the cause of the war ; neither have we. Workers ! study our principles thoroughly, and when you realise the sordid reasons for the wars you slaughter and are slaughtered in you will know also how to end them.

* * *

Whether “ideal” or economic aims are at the root of China’s entry into the war will be seen from this cutting from the “Daily Chronicle,” 7.8.17 :

“China will benefit financially by throwing in her lot with the Allies. Automatically, her obligation will cease to pay Germany her share in the Boxer indemnity amounting to half a million sterling a year. A similar fate would also befall the payment on the German shares of the five Anglo-German railways and other loans granted during the last 20 years.”

* * *

The truth of the Socialist contention as to what determines wages was admitted by Mr. Prothero, M.P., Minister of Agriculture, when he moved as part of the wages clause in the Corn Production Bill, that—

“In fixing minimum rates under this section the Agricultural Wages Board shall so far as practicable, secure for all able-bodied men wages which, in the opinion of the Board, are adequate to promote efficiency and to enable a man in an ordinary case to maintain himself and his family in accordance with such a standard of comfort as may be reasonable in relation to the nature of the occupation.”—”Times,” 7.8.17. 

The italics are mine.

Wages are not, and never have been, determined by what the worker himself produces, but by what it takes to produce the worker. Like the chattel-slave of old, he receives enough on the average to keep him in such a condition as will make him a profitable instrument of production.

“Just like a horse or a cow,” you will say. 

Exactly so, except that you can be starved when you are not required for work, while a horse or a cow must be fed.

H.

Blogger's Note:

'H' was the pen-name for Edgar Hardcastle (E. Hardy) for nearly 70 years in the pages of the Socialist Standard, but there's no guarantee that the 'H.' in the September 1917 Socialist Standard was Edgar Hardcastle. My reasoning is threefold:

• Edgar Hardcastle would only have been 16 or 17 in 1917.
• According to the early membership records Edgar R. Hardcastle joined the Tooting Branch of the SPGB in March 1920.
• According to his Marxist Internet Archive's page. Hardcastle's first article in the Socialist Standard was in the February 1921 issue. In his first few articles in the Socialist Standard, he signed off with his initials of E.R.H. or E.H.

Words that bear repeating. (1917)

From the September 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our good will and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.

The World for the Workers.

— S.P.G.B. Manifesto, September 1914.

Editorial: The strikes in France (1953)

Editorial from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The strike movement which began on 5th August among Post Office workers and quickly spread to transport, gas, electricity and many other state and private undertakings and involved at its height some three or four million workers was still in progress a fortnight later; though by that time some workers had returned to work because their strikes had been deliberately limited to one or two days, and others had been reported as drifting back. As a movement to demonstrate workers' solidarity and to bring pressure to bear on the government and the employers it was complete and highly efficient. As was remarked by one observer, the Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, “rarely has any strike movement in France, planned and announced in advance, been so successful ” (Manchester Guardian, 8/8/53).

The spark that set off the Post Office strike was a report that the Government’s “emergency” economy measures included reductions of Post Office staff and extending the age of retirement on pension. It was later denied that the Government had ever intended to make the later retirement compulsory but a possible explanation is that they were preparing the way and only the unanimous demonstration of resistance by the strikers made them repudiate it. The reason why the strike was enthusiastically joined by millions of other workers demanding higher wages was that the workers in general were finding their low standard of living being further reduced by rising prices. Mr. Douglas Jay, in the Daily Herald (13/8/53) estimated that “the average wage-earner in France today if he is single, gets a wage not much above two-thirds of what the British wage-earner gets." It is only through the higher rate of family allowances in France that the worker, if he has a wife and three children, has an income about equal to that of workers in Britain. Mr. Jay also pointed out that under French rent acts rents are exceedingly low—he goes so far as to claim that "the British worker’s family on the average spends eight times as much on rent as the French.”

But he went on to say:—

“However, these cheap rents—which the new decrees are to raise—are not much consolation to the French worker. It is partly just because food prices are so high that he has little to spare for anything else." (Italics, Mr. Jay’s).

Although Mr. Jay draws attention to these facts he fails to see how hollow they make the social reforms of the “Welfare State” which he and the French Labour leaders so blindly support. Unless the workers use their only industrial weapon, the strike, to fight for higher wages; low rents and social insurance benefits merely operate to enable employers to pay a low money wage. This is further borne out by Nora Beloff, writing from Paris to the “Observer” (16th August, 1953) on the condition of French workers.

"An official publication has revealed that they enjoy an even smaller proportion of the national revenue today than before the war: the substantial rise in social benefits has been more than offset by the severe drop in real wages. The Civil Service is proportionately worse off than am employees of private business."

So much for the alleged benefits of the “Welfare State” and of being employed by the Government.

The strikes themselves have had some very interesting features. It has been customary in Western Europe, including Great Britain, for Governments and some trade union officials to see in every strike the hand of the Communists; but the French Postal strike was started not by the Communist Union but by the anti-communist French Post Office Workers’ Union belonging to the “Labour Force” trade union federation. They took the initiative first in the Post Office and then in other industries, and the Communist Trade Union Federation (C.G.T.) and the Christian Trade Union Federation later joined in. It happens that the “Labour Force” Union is stronger than the Communist and Christian Unions among Post Office workers, though the C.G.T. claims in all 2,000,000 members as against about 800,000 in the “Labour Force” Federation and the same number in the Christian Federation. As the Times remarked (7/8/53) “ No Communist interference seems to have been needed to start the trouble.”

But though the excuse of Communist “plotting” could not be used this did not prevent the French Government from threatening to use all measures to smash the strikes, including the movement of tanks into Paris (News Chronicle 18/8/53).

The French Prime Minister when he ordered the movement of tanks might have recalled the outcry three months ago when Russian tanks in Eastern Germany were used to overawe German strikers; but the Western Governments' reaction then was very different. They approved the strike and made horrified protests about the tanks, and with their approval the American Government has been distributing millions of food parcels to the hungry East German workers. But this time it is the French tanks not Russian, and there has been no offer by Western Governments of food parcels for the hungry French workers. The Daily Worker (11/8/53) seized on this and denounced British and other unions in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions for their decision to give money to help the East German workers while not doing the same for the workers of France and Italy. But the Communists are actually taking up a still worse attitude. Some British unions have agreed to give financial help to the French workers, while the Communists, instead of helping the strikers against the Communist Government of Eastern Germany pretend that they were not strikes but “American-inspired riots.”

The real tragedy of the trade union movement in France and in the world generally is that most trade unionists allow themselves to be diverted from single minded concentration on working class unity because of their attachment to nationalism and to support of one or other forms of Government of Capitalism. Except for a brief spell after the first world war and again after the second world war the international trade union movement, which before 1914 was a single organisation paying at least lip-service to international working-class unity, has been divided into bitterly hostile camps, the W.F.T.U. supporting Russian State Capitalism, and the I.C.F.T.U. supporting Western capitalism; not to mention the Christian and Independent groups maintaining isolation.

One hopeful aspect of the strikes in France was the way in which workers in the three rival groups (Labour Force, Communist and Christian) came out on strike together, temporarily forgetting their rivalries. This, and the fact that the strikes in Eastern Germany have demonstrated the workers’ defiance of the Communist dictatorship there may give reason to hope for some future movement towards world working class unity.

In the meantime the divisions in the French trade union movement endangered the strikes. It is of great importance, especially in a more or less general strike, that there should be common action not only to come out on strike but to go back as a united body. It is equally important that such strikes should not be allowed to drag on until, under pressure of starvation, workers begin to drift back one by one. This danger was heightened in France by the efforts of some of the leaders of the three main groups to outmanoeuvre and discredit each other in the conduct of the strike and by the parallel tactics of the Government and the employers to play one off against the other.

The Passing Show: Our way of life (1953)

The Passing Show Column from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our way of life

Mr. Blundell, leader of the European elected members of the Kenya legislature, has been devoting deep thought to the cause of the Mau Mau trouble. He has reached his conclusion: the disturbances stem from the fact that one section of the people in Kenya is trying to impose its rule on all the rest. Does this mean that Mr. Blundell is now an opponent of the rule of a small white upper class over all the original inhabitants of the country? Not a bit of it. This is what Mr. Blundell had to say:

The problem is one we have had since 1916. Since we brought British administration to this country, for more than fifty per cent. of that time we have had reluctance by the Kikuyu to accept the benefits of law and order and our way of life, with the prosperity which can stem from it, except on their own terms. This is a challenge by the Kikuyu people—whether actively or passively sustained—to impose their rule on all the other people this country. (Times, 25/7/53).

This accusation by a member of a ruling class which has recently come into Kenya and stolen the best land there, that some of the original inhabitants are trying to do what Mr. Blundell and his class have already done themselves, would be merely funny if its implications were not so serious. In fact the speech, by showing the attitude of mind of the whites in Kenya, goes far towards explaining the outbreak of violence on the part of the Kikuyu.

 

* * *

 

Reservation of amenities

 

While Mr. Blundell upholds the cause of white supremacy in Kenya, Dr. Malan upholds it in South Africa. The latter's policy of apartheid, when presented by a skilled exponent, can be made to sound almost harmless. All it means, it is said, is that the white people and the black people of South Africa are to keep themselves to themselves, and are to develop along their own lines in their own areas. No superiority is implied of one race over another, it is alleged. But recently some courts in South Africa have been taking this kind of propaganda at its face value, and have been refusing to convict Negroes of offences against the apartheid laws unless it was shown that amenities of equal comfort have been reserved for them in railway stations, trains, post offices, etc. Dr. Malan has now given his answer. His Minister of Justice (sic) has introduced a Bill which rules that “reservation of amenities for a particular race or class of people cannot be invalidated merely because no similar amenities have been reserved for any other race or class’’ (The Times, 4-8-53). This reveals the apartheid policy for what it is. The South African ruling class has the same feeling towards the working class it oppresses and exploits as any other ruling class has: it fears them, because they are in a numerical majority. But this fear has been developed to a higher pitch in South Africa because the workers there have a different racial origin, and a different colour of skin; and because, for historical reasons, the workers of South Africa have not yet achieved the level of education and the standard of living which the workers of Western Europe and America have gained. The desire of the South African ruling class to keep the workers in subjection, and to maintain inviolate the present class-structure of South

African society, bears fruit in the racial superiority theories, and the apartheid policy, of Dr. Malan.

 

* * *

 

Public ownership à la Morgan Phillips

 

In those industries which were taken over by the Labour Governments from 1945 to 1951, some changes were made, but the basic capitalist structure was preserved intact. Since the 1951 defeat and the loss of ground at subsequent bye-elections, the Labour Party have had to face the fact that the workers, having experienced what the Labour Party called “Socialism” —that is, nationalisation—are for the present less prepared to support them at the polls in sufficient numbers to return them to power. So they have been casting round for new ideas. And their new proposals show that they contemplate making even fewer changes in industries they take over in future. Instead of making (for example) the mining machinery and machine tools industries wholly state-capitalist, Morgan Phillips proposes that a future Labour Government should merely acquire a fifty-one per cent. shareholding in certain key firms within these industries (in an article m the August issue of the Labour Party magazine, “Fact”). Mr. Phillips continues to use the term “public ownership” to describe the projected organisation of such industries, but at least he is now more chary of calling such plans “Socialist.” And so he should be; the Labour Party is more and more revealing itself as merely another capitalist party.

 

* * *

 

The work-insiders

 

Incidentally, what of all those people who have told us in the past that they disagreed with us, but that they were going to join the Labour Party in order to “work from within,” and change it into a Socialist party? They are clearly failing to do this, as could have been forecasted (and was). There is only one party for Socialists, and that is the Socialist Party.

Alwyn Edgar

The Nature of War (1953)

Pamphlet Review from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Must Man Wage War!” by F. A. Crew. Thrift Books No. 18.
 C. A. Watts & Co., Ltd. 1952. Price 1/6.

After the news of the Atomic Bomb in 1945. scientists in general, and atomic physicists in particular, got rather hot under the collar because they had done the pioneering research work which led to that horror of horrors; now with the possibility of bacteriological warfare the biologists are searching their consciences. Professor Crew has much experience of both warfare and scientific research, as he served in the army in the first world war, was Director of Medical' Research at the War Office in the second, has been in the Territorials for 36 years, and since 1928 he has been a university professor of biology. He uses this experience and the data which is available on recent wars to analyse many aspects of war in this book. He has done this because, in his own words, “I have come to wish to be a citizen of the world, not of the world as it is but as it could be ” (preface). He divides his study into three chapters on the biological aspects of the causes, conduct and consequences of war.

The Cause of War

There are some people who suggest that warring is inherent in human beings, because we are born aggressive, and therefore there will always be wars. However the professor does not fall for that fairy tale, pointing out that,

“Aggressiveness may be inborn, but this attribute is expressed only when specific outside pressures are brought to bear upon the developing individual. He may be prepared to display aggressiveness, but there is no intrinsic need that he should ever be called upon to do so.”— (Page30.)

After examining the way people are brought up, and how aggression is fostered in this bitterly competitive world, he comes to the conclusion that,

"He can develop in a competitive world where men, wanting the same thing, fight for it ; or he can find himself in a world in which all things are shared."—(Page 32.)

When such arguments are pointed out to some people they will reply that although that may be true of “us civilised people,” there are other peoples, such as the Indians, for example, who are readily classified into warrior and non-warrior types, into those who by virtue of their genetic endowment come to display those attributes which distinguish the fighting man, and those who, because of a different genetic constitution, are inevitably timid and cowardly, and thus are unsuited for a military career. To such people, the professor, who is a specialist in genetics, the science of inheritance, replies simply,

“There is no evidence which proves beyond all doubt that one ethnic, political, or social group is, for purely genetic reasons, superior to another in respect of military attributes."—(Page 20.)

Having brushed away these mental cobwebs, he considers the structure of society, noting that in modern society,

"Certain groups exist which are in no way productive but live on the surplus created by the productive groups. The maintenance and reproduction of non-productive groups can only be achieved, therefore, by the maintenance and extension of power, of their dominion over the productive groups."—(Page 15.)

He goes on to point out that war began in earnest with class society and is inherent in a class society, concluding that,

"Wars are no longer waged for material things required for subsistence; they arise out of the productive relationships of groups concerning the acquisition of surplus."—(Page 36.)

This is because the ruling class, which is unproductive and lives on the surplus produced by the large majority of society, has something to gain from victory or lose by defeat, but the vast majority, the working class, gain nothing from war but sorrow, loss, and mutilation. However without their willing participation wars could not occur. Why then do they allow themselves to be persuaded to support it?

Noting that in capitalist society there is much human unhappiness, for millions of people spend most of their lives performing tasks which are both dull and tedious, giving neither physical nor mental satisfaction, and so live lives that are drab and featureless, he concludes that,

"Wars are made possible because the lives of so many individuals in the modem State are so grey and so dull, so complicated, and so unsatisfying.... War promises that which the individual has sought in peace and failed to find. It fills a life which has been empty. It unifies a people,... in short, war remains possible because in peace there so little to satisfy the creative urge of the mature and skilled and to enlist the energies of adventurous, restless youth.”—(Pages 34-5.)

The Conduct of War

Chapter 2 starts with an analysis of the way people are prepared for war, and then goes on to a description of a number of aspects of modern war. For example, he points out that in wartime hospitals are emptied of the tuberculous so that those injured by bombing, or on active service, can have the beds, and that in the army the men are exposed to conditions that lower their general well being, so making them prone to diseases such as tuberculosis. The result is that during the war the number of people suffering from this disease increased tremendously.

As germ warfare has been in the news in recent years and much has been written of it, but little substantiated, the following comments by an expert biologist are of interest.

“That it is possible to manufacture weapons of great lethality out of existing biological knowledge is beyond all reasonable doubt; that such a weapon already exists is highly probable} . . . the biological bomb could be used in such a way that it would surpass the atomic bomb itself as a weapon of mass terror; it is cheap; it could be produced in complete secrecy, no vast plant tucked away in the remote desert being required for its manufacture.

"Certainly it is not beyond the ingenuity of man to produce such a weapon. It must presumably take the form of a package of exceptionally virulent pathogenic micro-organisms or of parasites of one kind or another which, being deliberately let loose in the enemy’s country, initiates an epidemic among the human population, its animals of economic importance, or its crops."—(Pages 65-6.)

Some Consequences of War

There are some people who think that war is beneficial to the human species because it is eugenically selective. They think that the “stronger” eliminate the “weaker” so the “fitter” or “better” only survive, and in this way humanity rids itself of inferior types. On the other hand there are others who suggest that in war it is the most worthy who are the first to be killed, so that it is the “better” who are killed and the inferior types that survive in most cases. They suggest that it is because war claims the “cream of the youth” that economic crises and other evils of capitalism occur, as those left cannot cope with the difficult problems that occur. The professor points out that neither view is sound. The first because tactics and weapons are far more important in war than any possible slight difference in biological make-up; the second because it has never been established that it is the “betters” who are killed off. With the mass attacks on civilian populations, which have become commonplace in recent times, such arguments are rapidly losing any appeal that they may have had in the past.

He discusses colonisation by conquest and points out that in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, Britain France and Germany each gained by conquest millions of miles of territory, and so extended their domination over millions more people. However, in the twentieth century all the lands of primitive peoples have been colonised, so war is between nations of more or less equal technological development, who come into conflict over raw materials and markets. Since the Great Powers are highly industrialised they produce weapons of a new and more terrible type, and so war becomes more and more horrible.

What of the consequence for the working class? He says that more than 27 million people were killed, by war, between 1914 and 1918. Some of these on the battlefield, but many by the general lowering of resistance to disease that occurred through worry, anxiety, long hours of work, and lack of nourishing foods. For example, the influenza epidemic of 1918 was greatly aggravated by war conditions, and even after 1921 the mortality rates were considerably higher than would have been expected if the war had not occurred. Having mentioned the 8,000 T.B. patients discharged from sanitoria in the second world war, and its disastrous effects, he goes on to consider how war breaks up homes and so leads to an increase in crime, and considers the statistics on the lack of housing. Then, with a few well chosen examples, he shows that although the British working class got nothing but misery, disease, violence, and premature death, from war, the plight of the workers of the other countries of Europe was even worse. Such is the lot of the worker in capitalist society; be always gets the dirty end of the stick!

The Prevention of War

After this powerful indictment of war he considers that,

"The prescription for prevention is the complete transformation of the social inheritance and of the social structure, which by its very nature must periodically yield warring. . . .  A unified world must be created in which in peace the needs of the bodies, the intellects,, and the emotions of all shall encounter the means of satisfaction." —(Pages 36-7.)

He concludes that,

“The only remaining obstacles to the achievement of this aim are those that reside in the minds of men."— (Page 38.)

He states that he will work actively to oppose war.

So far, so good, but how are we to go about this? Professor Crew gives no consideration to that very practical question. However, from the analysis we see that to prevent war, capitalism, the society of classes and therefore of wars, must be replaced by socialism, the society of human beings where war cannot exist. To do this it is necessary for the majority of the people of the world to understand capitalism and desire to introduce socialism. The change in human society will then be made by sending a majority of socialist delegates to the parliaments of the different countries with the mandate to make the required legislation, for parliament is not merely a “gas-house,” but is the seat of power. Then the power will be transferred from the ruling class, the capitalists, to all mankind. Such is the nature and purpose of the socialist revolution. The Socialist Party is the instrument fashioned by members of the working class, to carry out this historic task. 

Conclusion

The terminology used in this book has not the precision of the Marxist terms that the socialist is familiar with. Often the word State is used when country would be more accurate, nation is used when peoples are meant, and the capitalist, or ruling class, are often referred to as power groups. The author does, not seem to be sure of his analysis of the state capitalisms of Russia and Yugoslavia. As to formulating organised action on the basis of this analysis of society the writer gives us no lead, and in the preface he even supports the present armament drive and the present warfare in Korea!

However, this text of 81 pages is a powerful indictment of war, and the capitalist society that breeds it. Therefore it should be on every socialist’s bookshelf next to “The Socialist Party and War,” for it treats certain aspects of war for which there was not room in that pamphlet. We are glad that priced at 1/6 it is within reach of all workers.

R.J.J.

The dogs do bark (1953)

From the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lowly but surely the match sellers, street singers, hawkers and blind fiddlers are coming back. Not as many as in the past, because there is still no mass unemployment; the writer, raised in East London in the years after 1918, remembers beggars in every main street. Undisguised begging is, of course, legally prohibited (nevertheless, it is still done in every big city in the world); the mendicant has to have something to play or something to sell, or, as an extra indignity if he can afford neither, he must sing for his succour. The war, which provided jobs even for the unfit, and its aftermath, which gave gratuities to the soldiers and pickings to the spivs,, took away the beggars. Now there aren’t the jobs and there isn’t the money, and the beggars are re-appearing.

Begging today is a series of unenviable one-man businesses, lacking organization or enterprise. It was not always so. The heyday of beggars was in the reign of Elizabeth the First. They went in gangs, hordes and regiments, often highly organized, with their specialists and their hierarchies. Some unknown rhymester of the sixteenth century coined a jingle which went:

“Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark—

The beggars are coming to town.”

It was no children’s song then, but a piece of grim news.

The numbers of sixteenth and seventeenth century beggars are astonishing. In London there were twelve thousand among a population of less than two hundred thousand in 1600. Holinshed recorded that

“. . . there is not one year, commonly, wherein three hundred or four hundred of them are not devoured and eaten up by the gallows in one place and other. Henry the Eighth, executing his laws very severely against such idle persons . . . did hang up threescore and twelve thousand of them, in his time.”

It was the same all over Europe. Huberman claims that a quarter of the people in Paris in the 1630's were beggars. The Low Countries swarmed with them. In sixteenth-century Switzerland, according to Renard and Weulersse:

". . . when there was no other means of getting rid of the beggars who besieged their houses or wandered in bands about the roads and forests, the wealthy even organized hunting parties against these wretched homeless ones.”

And in Spain, books like “Lazarillo de Tonnes” and Quevedo’s “Great Rogue” described in minute detail the organizations of beggars.

Where did they all come from? Many were peasants, driven from their land by enclosure and rack- renting. In the fifteenth century they had pulled down enclosures, started fires, risen in impotent protest; now they became beggars. Others were soldiers, returned penniless but with a taste for plunder from the continental wars, or set adrift from the disbanded feudal armies. The dissolution of the monasteries added former servants and retainers—"abbeylubbers,” they were nicknamed—to the ragged hordes; and took away, too, the principal source of charity to vagrants. Then there were chapmen, strolling players, gipsies, ballad-mongers, scholars—Gamaliel Ratsey and Luke Hutton, the Elizabethan highwaymen, were University men— and ever so many more. There was no work to be had, and no charity; the new owners of the land had no tradition of generosity to the poor. It was beg, steal or starve.

By the 1570’s there were huge guilds and fraternities of vagabonds; he who joined had to undergo initiation and serve an apprenticeship. The vagabonds, like the law, saw no difference between vagrancy and crime. They had their own dialect, called Pedlars’ French or the Canting Tongue, a mixture of Elizabethan English with the varied contributions of soldiers, foreign beggars and vagrant monks; some of its words—cant, foist, booze, crank—are still with us.

The head of a beggars’ fraternity was known as the Upright Man—certainly nor uprighteous, for he usually had more than one mistress, and they were called Morts or Doxies. Plain beggars were Rufflers; then there were the Clapperdogens, who blistered their flesh with arsenic and herbs to gain pity.. The Counterfeit Cranks ate soap to feign fits and the Abraham Men pretended to be mad, while Dummerers folded their tongues in their mouths to be thought dumb. If a beggar got his bread by telling tales of misfortune, he was a Freshwater Mariner. Among the petty thieves, there was the Hooker or Angler, who carried an iron- hooked staff and “fished” to good purpose with it; the Foist, who picked pockets; and the Nip, who slit purses when their owners looked the other Way—“a knight of the knife,” Ben Jonson called him. Most common of all in London was the Coney-catcher, or confidence trickster—the forefather of the spiv. There were Upright Women, too; Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse, was the head of a gang which for years terrorized the Shooter’s Hill area.

The administrators of Elizabethan England tried hard to solve the problem. In 1571, a census of beggars and rogues was attempted; the following year, the famous edict was published by which "lusty and valiant beggars” were to be

". .. grevouslye whipped, and bumte through the gristle of the right Eare with a hot Yron of the compasse of an ynche about."

This seems to have offered little discouragement, and in 1598 further measures were introduced, including the instruction:

"Every vagabond found begging is to be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and openly whipped, until his or her body be bloody."

At the second offence, a beggar became a felon, and was liable to be hanged.

Whipping, branding and hanging gave no solution. In 1601, alarmed by bad harvests and what Thorold Rogers describes as “a growing disaffection,” Elizabeth’s last Parliament passed the Poor Law Act which, in general principles, remained unchanged until 1834. It made relief of the poor the task of each parish, to be paid for by compulsory Poor Rates. Did it solve the problem? Well, three years later, James the First was condemning vagrants to be branded with a large “R” on the left shoulder and. on a second offence, summarily transported to Virginia.

Some people had their own ideas of a solution. Edward Hext, a west-country Justice of the Peace, thought the beggars were merely lazy:

"Work they will not, neither can they, without extreme pains, by reason (heir sinews are so benumbed and stiff through idleness, as their limbs being put to any hard labour will grief them beyond measure."

Others said that drinking and gambling caused all the trouble; still more people put it down to the growth of London, which doubled its population between 1558 and 1600. Parliament tried to check the metropolitan spread as unsuccessfully as it tried to combat the beggars.

It was the growth of capitalism that did it. In the sixteenth century the merchants were securing the accumulations which were the starting point of industrial capitalism; and at the same time the other necessity, the class of free labourers, was coming into being. Broken away from their former security of subsistence, the beggars were part of the nascent working class, coming face to face with poverty and the freedom to starve. Gradually, as urban life developed, the vagabond fraternities fell away; in their place came organized crime and disordered medicancy. The poor were to be always with us.

In eighteenth-century Scotland there was the same problem. Fletcher of Saltoun estimated—probably too lavishly—that there were two hundred thousand “sorners,” or sturdy beggars: a sixth of the population. Some, called “gaberlunzies,” were licensed by the Kirk Sessions to beg from door to door, in country districts they were the carriers of news and the repositories of folk-lore.

And so it went on. More Acts of Parliament (usually passed in emergency or as the result of panic); the stocks, prison and transportation for the beggars. Defoe, who had reported the lives of the indigent in “Moll Flanders,” asked for work-houses in “Giving Alms No Charity”; eighteen years later, in 1722, they were set up. The nineteenth-century Poor Law Act made the workhouses places of terror. Not surprisingly, people did their best to keep out of them. The legislators tried hard to stamp out begging. Vagrancy Acts were passed in 1824, 1838 and 1873, and in 1904 a committee was set up by the Local Government Board to enquire into the whole thing.

Legally, the following activities are banned. Begging in public, or causing a child to beg; having no home or visible means of subsistence, or being unable to give a good account of oneself; telling fortunes; exposing wounds to get alms; peddling without a licence; failing to maintain one’s family. The Vagrancy Acts brought into being the street singers, the unmusical musicians and the rest.

Consider, then, the beggar. Brought into being by capitalism as the “free” labourer, without work or hope; scourged, branded, killed, hunted and ridiculed— tramping and mumping his way through four centuries, sometimes violent, sometimes obsequious, the symbol of the dispossessed. He was an angry peasant in 1553, a ruffler in 1603, a fugitive from the workhouse in 1853, a legless ex-soldier with a barrel-organ in 1923, and is a kerbside singer in 1953. Consider, too, the failure of brutes and humanitarians alike to do away with him . . .  and then consider the world that could be.

Robert Barltrop

"What agonizing thoughts . . . " (1953)

From the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

What agonizing thoughts must sweep 

     The doubting Christian mind 

When reason waking from her sleep 

      Immortal God to find 

With drooping faith and frantic pain 

      Scans the wide universe in vain.

W. W. Ford.

Blogger's Note:

More information on W. W. Ford via his January 1958 obituary.

Betting and the clergy (1953)

From the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

That pious organization, the Churches' Committee on Gambling, has been getting quite hot under the famous collar, to judge by their annual meeting in London.

It appears that an enterprising firm dealing in football coupons had the audacity to send some of them to the Secretary of the above-mentioned organization, the Reverend J. Clark Gibson. He says: “They have been sent to me at my home quite unsolicited and unwanted. What would happen if I were bumped off one night and the police came in and these coupons were found in my home, I do not know." (Daily Telegraph, 27.3.53). Of course the reverend gentleman would not know, seeing that he would be as dead as mutton.

Other speakers complained of football pool coupons being sent to them. To illustrate that pool betting is a game of chance and not a matter of skill, the Reverend Clark Gibson brought to the Committee's notice a device similar to a child’s puzzle, with a glass front and fourteen horizontal divisions. In each division is a ball, and the top of the gadget is marked with 1, 2 and x. It is shaken and the coupon is filled in according to where the balls settle. All this, mark you, to prove that this sort of gambling is a game of chance!

Dr. Ellison had this to say: "The danger the country is faced with is the setting up of an industry of gambling. If the gambling habit were allowed to establish itself further it would bring moral collapse." Dr. Ellison should know that the gambling habit has been established for years. Presumably a "flutter" on the horses would be classed as gambling—in which case the gentleman in question should reprimand the British Monarchy, who are not above attending race meetings and, being human, may indulge in speculation. And then there are the gamblers on the Stock Exchange— but, of course, that is entirely different!

Another contributor to this jolly little gathering was Lord Ammon, former Labour M.P. and Member of the Government, who said: "Wages were never higher and we have full employment, yet never was so much being spent on betting and drink. These things indicate a rapid decline in moral standards." Full employment is a somewhat elastic term. Lord Ammon as one-time member of the National Dock Labour Board will know the uncertainty of employment for dockers under "full employment."

It is significant that not one of these guardians of our morals speaks of war being a danger to morals. Their voices are silent on the vilest form of gambling, juggling with human life for the capture of world markets and trade routes. They are more concerned with letters being thrust through their doors. A group of people sets up rules and calls them morals, and an inert mass obeys them.

Social life is largely governed by do's and don'ts. Our rulers and preachers would wish the people to obey these edicts to the letter. That some of them don’t is an ever-increasing anxiety to our rulers. How can society remain stable when there are such rebellious transgressors? It really is too bad, think the clergy. For their very existence is at stake. They must assert themselves at every opportunity, and the Churches' Committee on Gambling knows this.

When it comes to raising people's living standards, religion is usually silent. Practical work was never done by priests—they come in at the death.

J. Crowe.

Party News Briefs (1953)

Party News from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

A last-minute reminder to members and sympathisers that our Autumn Delegate meeting is being held at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, on Saturday and Sunday, September 5th and 6th, commencing each morning at 11 a.m. A Dance will be held in the Conway Hall on Saturday evening and the usual propaganda meeting will be held there on the Sunday evening commencing at 7 p.m. London and Provincial speakers will address the meeting.

* * *

"Questions of the Day" in a revised and enlarged edition is now available in restricted quantities. Further deliveries are expected soon. Obtainable from branches or the Literature Committee at Head Office, price 1s. per copy or 1s. 2d. post free.

* * *

The Party held another of its week-end schools at “Treetops” Holiday Camp in June. This year the attendance was not large, probably on account of the weather. Several comrades who notified their intentions of attending, altered their minds at the last moment, making organisation very difficult. However, despite these drawbacks, it was a happy gathering. Comrade Willmott led a discussion on Anti-Dühring and Comrade Turner opened up on Trade Unions.

Phyllis Howard

SPGB Meetings (1953)

Party News from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Editorial: On the move . . . (1985)

Editorial from the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

 

. . . for socialism

 

The governments recently introduced board and lodgings rules (see Socialist Standard, June) which forced thousands of young people to move around the country every few weeks or risk having their benefit cut, have been declared illegal in the High Court and the DHSS will be compelled to pay arrears to those whose benefit was reduced.

But it should be noted that it is not on humanitarian grounds that this decision has been made. On the contrary, it was the method by which the regulations were introduced that has been declared unlawful. According to the decision, Norman Fowler had no powers under present legislation to designate board and lodging areas within Britain or lay down time limits for those staying in them.

Mr Justice Mann, hearing the case, made this quite plain when he said:

In my judgement a decision to the effect that able-bodied and independent young people who live on supplementary benefit in lodgings should move from one area to another in search of employment, after a stay judged appropriate for the quest in the first area, does not come within any distance of being outrageous (quoted in The Times. 1 August. 1985).

Maybe he should have taken a look at the annual report of the Manpower Services Commission published at the end of July, which shows that for those aged 18--24 (the age-group affected by the regulation) the unemployment rate is 24 per cent. Of the 1,166.000 unemployed in this age group, 29 per cent have been unemployed for more than a year.

Unemployment is unlikely to affect those present at the American Bar Association's recent London jamboree, where two lawyers gave a paper in which they described the way high unemployment has curbed industrial action and led to lower wage settlements. Unconcerned about the plight of the unemployed themselves, they expressed fear that high unemployment might lead to problems in the future if the apparently docile and compliant work force was in fact saving up their grievances.

The authors have good reason to be worried. But let’s hope that workers do not continue passively to accept the sufferings that capitalism daily serves up, and recognise that strikes for higher pay are not enough. It would be nice to give the American Bar Association something to really worry about — like socialism.

Running Commentary: Rich and well (1985)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rich and well

 

After the successful operation to remove a cancerous growth from his colon, President Reagan advised Americans to have a medical check-up "if you think something isn't right". This might have rated as the most sensible words Reagan had uttered had the facilities been freely available.

In Britain we do have free health care, but that doesn't help the thousands of people who die from curable cancers every year because they aren't detected early enough. Take cervical cancer for example. If detected early enough there is an almost 100 per cent guarantee of a cure. And yet the screening programme, which was begun twenty years ago. has not improved survival rates: about 2.000 women die of this cancer each year (The Times, 23 July). At present there is a backlog of 25.000 samples waiting to be tested at one laboratory because of under-staffing. Similarly, cancer of the ovary causes 4,000 deaths a year in Britain. As yet there is no national screening programme because of the high cost of ultra-sound scanning equipment.

The moral of the story is clear: if you happen to be Ronald Reagan or any other member of the ruling class who can afford to pay for the best that medical science can offer, then your chances of early detection and cure of cancer are probably high. The rest of us, who have to rely on medical services restricted by considerations of cost, might very well end up as one of the 100 people who die in Britain every day from curable cancer of the breast, cervix, ovary or bowel.

Class “justice”

During the miners' strike 646 people were charged with offences of riot and unlawful assembly which, if proved, carry a possible maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Those cases are now being heard in court. Since their arrest those charged have been under the considerable strain of stringent bail conditions and in fear of the possible imposition of jail sentences if they were found guilty.

In July and August a succession of such cases have been thrown out or dropped for lack of evidence, the most notorious of which related to incidents at the Orgreave coking plant on 18 June last year. Fourteen of the 98 miners charged with riot or unlawful assembly on that day walked out of Sheffield Crown Court when the prosecution abandoned its case after 48 days of the trial. One of the policemen who gave evidence admitted that part of his written statement was inaccurate and that around 20 policemen present at Orgreave were given "rough dictation" of what they should write down. "We just wrote out what we were told" said PC Browning of Merseyside police.

The fact that similar cases against many other miners have also been dropped or lost should not blind us to the class nature of the “justice" being handed down: public order offences like unlawful assembly are inherently political since they can always be used by a nervous ruling class against what is seen as a threatening working class. In the case of the miners' strike the bringing of such charges against so many men served the intended purpose of removing as many as possible from the picket lines and criminalising miners in the eyes of their fellow workers. Once the strike was over there was no point in creating working-class heroes by convictions and imprisonment.

Suffocated

It took 20 years for the ban to be lifted on the showing of the film The War Game. But just in case you thought that freedom of speech was alive and well in Britain, in the same week as the screening a ban was imposed on another TV programme, At the Edge of the Union. It was to have shown interviews with representatives of two organisations in Northern Ireland which advocate the use of political violence. Despite the producers' claims that the programme did not advance the cause of either but rather aimed at exposing the similar backgrounds, motives and behaviour of the men interviewed, the Board of Governors of the BBC, under pressure from the government, decided to withdraw it.

There are a number of ways in which the ruling class can control the media. In Russia it is done directly by government censorship of what is broadcast; in the western "liberal" democracies the means used are more subtle. On the one hand it is achieved through the ownership of TV and radio stations by capitalists like Rupert Murdoch, who exercise effective editorial control through their control of the purse strings. In Britain, the BBC is supposed to be editorially independent although the Home Secretary has an effective veto over any programme.

In the case of the Northern Ireland programme he did not have to use that veto—a few well-chosen words to the BBC governors and they did his dirty work for him. This is not surprising really, when you consider some of the members of the capitalist class who sit on the BBC's Board: Chairman. Stuart Young, senior partner in the city accountants. Hacker Young; Lady Faulkner of Downpatrick; Watson Peat, member of the British Agricultural Council and a prominent figure in farming and food production; Sir John Johnston, former diplomat; Malcolm McAlpine, director of McAIpine construction company.

Margaret Thatcher, in a speech to the American Bar Association, made her intentions plain prior to the programme's banning: terrorists, she said, must be denied the "oxygen of publicity". But democracy also

requires "oxygen" — the oxygen of freely available information and freely expressed views. It is we, the workers, who are being suffocated by the curtailment of those freedoms. consistently starved of information which will enable us to make up our own minds.