The Socialist indictment of modern society is as plain and logical in meaning as any postulate of a political party might well be. It is that the means that human society requires to produce and distribute its wealth are privately owned by a mere portion of the population. The number which makes up this section of society is of little importance; it is the bare fact of sectional or private ownership which stands out as the supreme factor in the indictment. The means of living to-day are the land, mines, mills, factories, means of transport, machinery, and all such agents of wealth production and distribution essential to the economic needs of human society.
By common consent, those who own these are known as the capitalist or employing class, and this class owes its social position not merely to its ownership of the world’s economic resources, but by virtue of the existence of another class in society, namely, the working class. Generally speaking, this class owns nothing but their physical and mental capabilities, their social status being a property-less one. Such small amounts of property or investments in savings banks, etc., owned by a portion of the working class are a negligible factor to seriously consider when assigning their position in relationship to that of the capitalist class, with its enormous wealth and power.
Denied access to the use of the powers of production, except upon certain terms to suit capitalist requirements, the workers are compelled, in order to live, to carry out the necessary functions in wealth production with only such a portion of the wealth allowed them as will secure their continued working efficiency. As a class the capitalists produce no wealth, but they own it when produced; the workers produce the wealth, but have to eke out a poverty existence throughout their entire lifetime. This system of society is one of slavery—wage-slavery—just as real in its effects as the economic servitude of the feudal serf or that of the chattel slave of old.
When Shakespeare made old man Shylock chant his personal plaint against Portia’s judgment—
Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that: you take my house when you do take the prop that doth sustain my house: you take my life when you take the means whereby I live.—
he made Shylock express a fact of profound sociological significance when applied to society based upon private property in the means of living. For, given the power to privately own the means by which any section of humanity obtains its living, the enslavement of those who are without those means follows as a logical and social consequence. Not only this, but it confers upon those who thus enslave the power to say yea or nay to the mode of living that may be sought at any time by those who are enslaved. These may be repressed and even starved into submission at the least sign of revolt to obtain a better standard of living. An important point this in the Socialist case. The poverty and generally insecure position of the workers is an anomalous feature of modern society, but the mere fact of the existence of a dominant class who may determine what is produced, how it shall be produced, and even whether wealth may not be produced or distributed at any given time is one of the leading counts in the Socialist position.
The Socialist challenges that power at every step of the way, no matter what measures of so-called social amelioration may be established within the domain of capitalist society. We urge the working class to organize to abolish capitalism, by and through the control of the political machinery, and thence to convert the entire forces of production and distribution into common or social property. We insist that historical development of human society has made this step an imperative one on the part of the working class. There is no other way out, if the workers are to obtain the fruits of their labour and to determine their mode of living in accordance with the best that the associated efforts of humanity can produce.
This, in brief, is our case, and it cannot be refuted. The class division in modern society is fundamentally economic in character, and has been so throughout historic times. All the old anti- Socialist pronouncements concerning the “superior brains” and innate “directing ability” of those who rule and have ruled in the past are of no avail against the analysis which reveals that class differences are accounted for by the ownership or otherwise of the means of living.
“One thing, however, is clear," says Marx, “Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power.” And the same may be said of every other division in society prior to the capitalist form.
However, there are some people who profess to accept the main outline of the above position and yet would divert the interest and attention of the workers from the task of its realisation. At the moment we deal with but one of these diverting agencies.
Recently we were asked to send a representative of the Socialist Party to state its case before a meeting of the ”English league of land tax values.” The request was complied with, and a considerable discussion took place; one result being that a representative of that organisation paid a return visit to state the case for land tax values at a meeting of the Socialist Party.
Mr. Andrew Maclaren, formerly Member of Parliament for Burslem, was the speaker in question; his entire position amounting to a declaration that in the process of the exploitation of the workers, the land owner is the “villain of the piece." Land monopoly, according to him, is the basic anomaly of present-day society, against which the exploitation by the capitalist pales into insignificance. Singularly enough, the writings of Marx were quoted as a means of bolstering up part of this position.
Students of sociology are well aware of the means by which the foundations of capitalism were laid; chief among these being the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil. This historical process has been analysed by Marx in “Capital” (Vol. 1), where can be found numerous facts taken from historical records on the spoliation of the peasantry from the 15th on to the 19th centuries. Whilst this process went on throughout Europe, particular reference is made to England, the “classic land of capital." Marx summarised his account as follows: —
Thus were the agricultural people forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary to the wage system.
Well and truly does the same writer say of this history that it “is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire."
Once driven from the land, their sole source of livelihood, the mass of the peasantry were forced into the towns, there to offer their bodily powers to whomsoever had need of them. The servitude of the expropriated peasantry was the vital requirement of capitalist development.
“The starting point that gave rise to the wage-labourer," says Marx, "as well as to the capitalist, was the servitude of the labourer."
However, this historical record is seized upon by Mr. Maclaren and his fellow advocates of “land tax values" to mean something totally different from the Socialist conclusions stated by Marx. These people argue that unless people are divorced from the land capitalism cannot exist. But this is only another way of saying that if the essential conditions of capitalist society are non-existent, then capitalism cannot exist, which is pure tautology, conveying little or no intelligence whatever.
By way of emphasising the land taxers' point of view, Mr. Maclaren makes special reference to Marx's chapter on the “Modern theory of Colonisation." Here Marx quotes E. G. Wakefield, who saw clearly enough that the property-less condition of the worker was absolutely essential to the growth of capitalism in the colonies as elsewhere. Wakefield's statement, as reproduced in “Capital,” is as follows: —
Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price. ("Capital,” Vol. I, Glaisher Edition, 1912, page 794.)
This, of course, is perfectly true, as those who endeavoured to carry on the usual capitalist mode of exploitation in the colonies in the early part of the 19th century found to their cost.
But all this does not help the land taxer in the slightest way to unravel the problem of the way out of the conditions of capitalist society, as they confront the working class. Nor was the historical account of the coming of capitalism given by Marx intended to mean that in the process of the modern capitalist mode of exploiting the workers the land owner is the chief culprit.
On the contrary, Marx's writings clearly indicate that land owning as a dominant social status declined with the final breakdown of feudal society and the imposition of capitalism on its ruins. The industrial capitalist, employing many hundreds or thousands of workers, has supplanted the feudal over-lord. To-day the workers enter the spheres of production, etc., not merely on ”the land,” but in vast factories or mills where they are exploited by the owners of giant machinery and the various appliances necessary to the output of wealth. The immediate employer or capitalist is the exploiter of the workers he engages. He has to hand back to them, in the form of money—wages only a portion of the value of their product. The remainder is his own property immediately considered; but, as is well known, he may not own the land or the factory where his production takes place, hence he is compelled to pay rent for the privilege of using these to their owners. From out of what does he pay? Answer, out of the unpaid labour of the workers. From the surplus left over after the wage bill of the workers has been met, a portion of the wealth may be handed to the landlord, and still another portion to the lender of money.
But where, however, our capitalist owns his own factory site and does not have recourse to loans of money whereby interest charges have to be met, he takes and holds the surplus himself. The all- important point to the workers is that no matter which position applies, it would not matter a brass farthing to their position as an exploited class.
Even were it possible to tax the holders of land out of existence, as the land tax advocates insist, it would solve no problem towards social ownership, such as we Socialists are seeking to establish.
To levy taxation at all, the control of the political machinery is necessary. The control of this machinery, which includes the armed forces, is insisted upon by the Socialist Party, not for purposes of taxation but to socialise the whole of the forces of wealth production and distribution in the interest of all.
We hope with time, space and inclination, to discuss other aspects of the question at a later date.
Robert Reynolds
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This article was written under the pen-name of 'Robertus'.
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