Class Warrior. The Selected Works of E. T. Kingsley, Edited and introduced by Benjamin Isitt and Ravi Malhotra. Canadian Committee on Labour History. 2022.
E. T. Kingsley (1856-1929) was a prominent member of the old Socialist Party of Canada that was founded in 1905 as a result of socialist parties and groups in the various Canadian Provinces merging. Based in British Columbia, he was the editor of its paper, the Western Clarion, one of its main organisers and a popular speaker. In their introduction, the authors describe him as the founder and leader of ‘the British Colombia school of socialism’ which adopted the ‘impossibilist perspective’ that ‘viewed capitalism as a system that could not be reformed’ and ‘stressed the impossibility of uplifting the working class through incremental reforms’. This led them to seek support only for ‘the abolition of the wages system’ and to avoid advocating ‘palliative measures’, a position the authors describe, not unfairly, as ‘one-plank Marxism’, the one plank being to win political power for the sole purpose of using it to establish the common ownership of the means of production.
They mention the SPGB as espousing ‘similar ideas to this very day’. Unfortunately, this is in connection with Kingsley’s opposition not just to ‘palliatives’ but also to trade unionism and strikes which he also regarded as useless. For him, the trade union struggle for better wages and conditions was not part of the class struggle, but was just a commodity struggle. This is not (and was not at the time) our position, nor that of other members of the SPC.
There were certain obvious parallels between the SPC and the SPGB. The SPC pioneered the idea of writing ‘Socialism’ across the ballot paper where there was no socialist candidate standing; they took the position that socialists elected to national or local office should judge measures put before them on whether or not they would be in the interest of the working class; and they refused to affiliate to the Second International on the grounds that it was dominated by reformists. They opposed participation in the First World War. Kingsley didn’t, which led to him leaving the SPC.
The authors suggest that Kingsley and the SPC advocated, and practised, taking part in elections (Kingsley was a candidate himself on a number of occasions) ‘primarily as a means to educate the public about the evils of capitalist wage exploitation’. This is to get the emphasis quite wrong. The SPC, and Kingsley in particular, saw elections as the way for the working class to win control of political power as the first step towards abolishing capitalist wage slavery. As Kingsley put it in 1911 in articles reproduced in the book:
‘The determination of the workers to conquer the state and use its organized powers for the purpose of striking the fetters of wage slavery from their limbs by the abolition of capitalist property, marks the awakening of labor.’‘The conquest of the capitalist State by the working class will open the gateway for the transformation of capitalist property into the collective, or common, property of the working class. This will mean the ending of the wages slave system … With the ending of the rule of capital, “the State will die out”, as Marx and Engels have said. With no longer a ruling class and a class to be ruled it would no longer have a function to perform. It would become obsolete.’
That the way to ‘conquer the state’ was through the intelligent use of the ballot box by the working class was spelt out in this passage from a pamphlet Kingsley published in 1916:
‘In most countries the workers possess some semblance of a franchise, and to that extent at least they have the legal right to conquer the state for their own purposes. In countries where the workers do not possess the franchise, or where there are such limitations placed upon it as to nullify their superiority of numbers, they are justified in exercising their political power in any other manner they may choose for the attainment of the end in view. In Canada and the United States, there is nothing in the way of a working class conquest of the public powers at the polls at the present time, except the peculiar perspicacity of the slave that usually enables him to readily discern his master’s interests, while at the same time remaining blissfully blind to his own.’
The last sentence is a typical example of Kingsley’s style of speaking and writing with its heavy use of irony. He didn’t hold back from calling workers ‘slaves’ and telling them they were stupid to support capitalism and its politicians, but his audiences seemed to like it. This pamphlet, The Genesis and Evolution of Slavery, the only one he wrote, is a typical socialist propaganda pamphlet of the time.
The editors have included a lot of what he wrote and said after he left the SPC over his support for the war. After the end of war, he seems to have convinced himself that not only capitalism but civilisation itself was about to collapse and that ‘the only hope for the race was for the farmers and city dwellers to come to some arrangement whereby the latter would withdraw to the land and sustain themselves’. He forgot his Marxian economics and came up with the currency-crankish idea that surplus value only existed as debt settled by future production and which couldn’t go for much longer.
This nonsense makes painful reading. The editors probably included his writings and speeches from this period as in them he also took the overthrow of the Kerensky government in Russia in November 1917 as what it appeared to be: the workers there taking power. The authors betray their Trotskyist background when they note that Trotsky’s ‘notion of transitional demands is unlikely to have appealed to him’. Of course it wouldn’t! Such a programme of palliative measures would have had no appeal to an impossibilist (and still doesn’t). In that respect the ‘British Columbia school of socialism’ was way in advance of Trotskyism.
The old Socialist Party of Canada disappeared in the 1920s and was reconstituted in 1931 with the same declaration of principles as the SPGB, including the ‘conquest of the powers of government’ with a view to converting them from ‘an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation’. Two of those mentioned in the book as chairing or speaking at Kingsley’s meetings for the reformist Federated Labour Party — W. A. Prichard and Charles Lestor — later returned to ‘impossibilism’. For a history of the past and present SPC see: www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/SocialistParty/HistoryofSPC.pdf
Adam Buick
No comments:
Post a Comment