The depression is over and prosperity is here once again. This is the good news discovered by politicians, bankers and captains of industry and passed on to the workers in speeches and articles up and down the country. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, in a speech at Birmingham on January 29th said that the Midlands are “enjoying a greater prosperity than had ever been known in the history of living people.” (The Times, January 30th, 1937.) Mr. Colin Campbell, Chairman of the National Provincial Bank, Ltd., in his survey of the country’s affairs at the annual meeting of his bank, sees "prosperity firmly based on well-distributed purchasing power.” (Economist, January 30th, 1937.) Indeed, the bankers and economists are becoming alarmed at the comparative shortage of skilled labour and consequent ability of the workers to secure wage increases. The question occupying their minds is when the next slump is due to break and whether by any means they or the governments can prevent it.
Prosperity for Whom?
It need hardly be said that the prosperity which so impresses the spokesmen of the propertied class is the prosperity of that class: hence their view that higher wages due to scarcity of labour is an ”evil.” They can talk of "prosperity” with registered unemployment at 1,700,000; with 4,500,000 people, according to Sir John Orr, inadequately fed because they can only afford to spend an average of 4s. a week on food, whereas the normal Army food allowance is 7s. 3½d. a week (Daily Herald, February 13th, 1937); with millions of workers inadequately housed and overcrowded. The Times (December 22nd, 1936) admits that house building in Glasgow is actually declining, although “in that city one-third of the population is overcrowded.” “Prosperity ” with 70 per cent, of the adult population in the Rhondda Valley drawing unemployment pay or public assistance; and with an army of 1,223,478 persons in England and Wales in receipt of Poor Relief at the end of September, 1936. In Scotland there were a further 316,674 in receipt of outdoor relief alone. (See Ministry of Labour Gazette, January, 1937.)
Mr. Neville Chamberlain and his associates can bear the poverty of the working class with Christian fortitude, not to say indifference and contempt, while at the same time they are able to find £1,500- millions for new armaments over the next five years.
From Gladstone to Chamberlain
Elsewhere in this issue we reprint an address written by Marx in 1864 in which he tore to shreds the complacency of an earlier Chancellor of the Exchequer, a similar narrow-minded representative of property, Mr. W. E. Gladstone. The one was a Liberal free-trader, the other is a Conservative protectionist; both were able to hide the facts of unemployment and needless misery under a cloud of tawdry principles of “sound finance,” and under mocking assertions of better times here and now or better times to come.
It is instructive to compare the two as examples of the type of propertied men thrown into prominence in the capitalist era, a nice blend of unimaginative brutality and dull, book-keeping efficiency.
All that divides them is their belief in or rejection of free-trade, an issue of no concern to the great mass of the population. Both so wedded to capitalism as to be unable to conceive of a rational alternative system, both dazzled by statistics, and unaware of the nature of the capitalist system they nominally controlled.
Three-quarters of a century of “ Progress ”
What has this capitalism brought to the working class in the 73 years since 1864? Malnutrition, unemployment, pauperism and insecurity still stalk the land in spite of a yet more “intoxicating augmentation Of wealth and power,” entirely or nearly entirely confined to the propertied class. If the condition of the worst-paid workers and the unemployed is somewhat better than then, the extent of unemployment is greater, and insecurity has now come to be a permanent nightmare for grades of better-paid workers who used to believe themselves immune. It is still as true as ever that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of industrious workers are worse fed and clothed than convicts, and at or below the level of the workers who are receiving public assistance. Mr. Gladstone went into ecstasies over trade figures and tax returns. What would he have said had he lived in our time? Imports and exports in 1863 together totalled £444-millions; in 1034the total was £l,127-millions, after having reached nearly £2,000-millions in 1929; Yet even in the latter year unemployment was well over 1,000,000. In 1863 there were 80 very rich persons having taxable incomes over £50,000 a year. In 1928-9, according to official tax returns (Statistical Abstract, 1936, p. 200) there were no fewer than 575. Even during the depression in 1933-4 the number was 279. So little have death duties and income tax and social reforms interfered with the normal tendency of capitalism to make the rich richer that in 1932-3 there were more people (84) with incomes over £100,000 a year than there were with £50,000 a year in 1863.
The continued increase in powers of producing wealth has been used by capitalism to widen still further the gulf between rich and poor. Great Britain has multiplied its foreign trade, added over a million square miles to the Empire, and still the fact remains, as Marx pointed it out then, that there are hard-working thrifty men and women who have to sacrifice cleanliness and comfort in order to get a bare sufficiency of food. It has been brought home only recently again that better housing (at higher rents) for ex-slum dwellers has- meant less food and a higher death rate.
Nothing will be done by the Ruling Class
One harmful notion widely believed at present is that now for the first time the Government and public opinion are aware of poverty and undernourishment, and therefore something will be done.
It is true that in recent years there have been many official and unofficial inquiries into malnutrition, wages, unemployment, and so forth and therefore the ruling class cannot so easily be ignorant of the facts. But it will mean next to nothing. Apart from genuine concern about the low physique of recruits needed for their armed forces the ruling and propertied class will not sacrifice their wealth in order to raise the standard of living of the workers. They will yield nothing that is not forced from them by the pressure of the working class.
Do they know in 1937 that many millions of workers are under-nourished ? So they did in 1864 as Marx points out. They did nothing then, nor will they now.
Once the momentary stir has been allowed to subside the facts will be forgotten or denied by our rulers, or hidden under Chamberlain's ecstasies about prosperity. Just as The Times could boast in 1865 that the preceding years of working class misery were “an epoch of unbroken peace and unparalleled prosperity" (Evening Standard, January 13th, 1937), so our rulers will do again in defiance of continuing poverty.
The need of our times is a working class which refuses any longer to trust to capitalist promises, and determines to take action for its own emancipation.
Apply to the world of to-day the following pregnant passage from Marx's address. There could be no better statement of the truth of the Socialist condemnation of capitalism: —
“In all countries of Europe it has now become a truth demonstrable to every unprejudiced mind, and only denied by those whose interest it is to hedge other people in a fool's paradise, that no improvement of machinery, no application of science to production, no contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, nor all of these things put together, will do away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but that on the present false base, every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must tend to deepen social contrasts and point social antagonisms."
Edgar Hardcastle
No comments:
Post a Comment