Poverty (1943)

From the September 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

To those of us interested in social progress, the greatest of evils that has confronted and still confronts humanity, is Poverty. Poverty is a cancerous growth that has shattered the lives of workers. Housed in poisonous slums, an exhibition of ugliness and dirt, who can but wonder that workers have their senses dulled, and their creative aspirations crushed out of them. Debased through overwork and periodic unemployment, living in conditions of squalor-breeding disease, and having little time to review the world around them, it is understandable why the working class have not yet found a solution to their poverty.

And what of the respectable poverty of those workers who dwell in sweet suburbia? Those workers who surreptitiously scrimp and save in order to keep up appearances in a life which offers them a monotonous round of “pictures”—Saturday, “Local” or Church on Sunday, and of being “something in the city” during the rest of the week. A demoralising existence, but one of Respectability which must be maintained at all cost, even if it means apeing in manners, speech and dress the parasitic ruling class. Behind this grinning mask of false jovialness is the growing fear of insecurity. Capitalism is casting a dark shadow of doubt in the minds of workers wherever they live.

And you, the workers in khaki, scattered over the face of the globe on your mission of death and destruction—possibly the only time you travel abroad—you will find a colossal contrast between the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the workers, no matter in which country you find yourselves.

Poverty and riches are relative. In China and India the teeming millions of toilers literally have a hand to mouth existence, while the industrialists, mandarins and princes live in luxury, comfort and ease. In the highly developed Capitalist countries, because of the development of machinery and speed of production, the workers produce far more wealth than the Indian peasants and workers, but receive only sufficient on an average to maintain them in efficient working condition. In contrast to this, the capitalists have, in abundance, those things that are denied to the workers. Yet the working class produce everything that is placed on the world market.

Workers, it is no use relying on the capitalist class to solve your problems. If they could abolish poverty, they would lose their privileged position, power and prestige. The Beveridge Plan, the Atlantic Charter, Churchill’s Four-Year Plan, and any other nostrum can all be thrown on the scrap heap. They do not delve into the roots. It is the Socialist, and only the Socialist who has the solution, and it is the working class who have the power to build a world in which life can be a beautiful adventure. A world where slums, starvation, dole—in a word, POVERTY, no longer exists.

How can this social evil which hangs like a spectre over the working class be eradicated ? It is necessary to repeat a truism that few people now deny, but many unfortunately forget. THERE ARE TWO CLASSES IN SOCIETY. The capitalist class who constitute the minority in society,own the factories, mines, workshops, slums, ships, railways, airways, and all the machinery for producing wealth, but who are parasitic because they do not take part in its production. . . . The working class who are forced to sell their energies to the private property owners, because they, the workers, do not own the means and instruments of wealth production, and are propertyless. The working class constitute the vast majority.

THERE IS A CLASH OF INTERESTS within capitalism. On the one hand workers organise on the industrial field in Trade Unions to struggle for better working conditions, and higher wages : while capitalists struggle to force wages down. Conditions are favourable for workers in their struggle when there is little unemployment, as at the present time when conscripts have replaced the queues of job-hunters outside the Labour Exchanges, and unfavourable when there is widespread unemployment.

There is no way out for workers within the framework of capitalism. Struggle as they may to improve their lot, and they do sometimes get a few crumbs, THERE ARE TWO CLASSES IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY. Here lies the root of the trouble. When the majority of workers become class-conscious nothing will prevent them from overthrowing and replacing Capitalism by the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of wealth production, which presupposes a moneyless, classless society, in which people will have free access to all the good things that society can produce. This is SOCIALISM.

Is this too much to ask of those who produce but do not possess? Only you can judge. Would that we could circulate our literature over a wider field. Would that our pens could in a few words crystallise to each one of you weary slaves, the message of Socialism. WORKERS AWAKE FROM YOUR SLUMBERS—YOU HAVE A WORLD TO GAIN.

S. W. C.