". . . we put the axe to the root of crime." (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note: 

This excerpt from Engels' February 1845 speech was originally attached to the bottom of Ivan's article, 'The riots: not the way to help ourselves', in the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard.

‘Present-day society, which breeds hostility between the individual man and everyone else, thus produces a social war of all against all which inevitably in individual cases, notably among uneducated people, assumes a brutal, barbarously violent form — that of crime. In order to protect itself against crime, against direct acts of violence, society requires an extensive, complicated system of administrative and judicial bodies which requires an immense labour force. In communist society this would likewise be vastly simplified, and precisely because — strange though it may sound — precisely because the administrative body in this society would have to manage not merely individual aspects of social life, but the whole of social life, in all its various activities, in all its aspects. We eliminate the contradiction between the individual man and all others, we counterpose social peace to social war, we put the axe to the root of crime — and thereby render the greatest, by far the greatest, part of the present activity of the administrative and judicial bodies superfluous. Even now crimes of passion are becoming fewer and fewer in comparison with calculated crimes, crimes of interest — crimes against persons are declining, crimes against property are on the increase. Advancing civilisation moderates violent outbreaks of passion even in our present-day society, which is on a war footing; how much more will this be the case in communist, peaceful society! Crimes against property cease of their own accord where everyone receives what he needs to satisfy his natural and his spiritual urges, where social gradations and distinctions cease to exist. justice concerned with criminal cases ceases of itself, that dealing with civil cases, which are almost all rooted in the property relations or at least in such relations as arise from the situation of social war, likewise disappears; conflicts can then be only rare exceptions, whereas they are now the natural result of general hostility, and will be easily settled by arbitrators. The activities of the administrative bodies at present have likewise their source in the continual social war — the police and the entire administration do nothing else but see to it that the war remains concealed and indirect and does not erupt into open violence, into crimes. But if it is infinitely easier to maintain peace than to keep war within certain limits, so it is vastly more easy to administer a communist community rather than a competitive one. And if civilisation has already taught men to seek their interest in the maintenance of public order, public security, and the public interest, and therefore to make the police, administration and justice as superfluous as possible, how much more will this be the case in a society in which community of interests has become the basic principle, bind in which the public interest is no longer distinct from that of each individual! What already exists now, in spite of the social organisation, how much more will it exist when it is no longer hindered, but supported by the social institutions! We may thus also in this regard count on a considerable increase in the labour force through that part of the labour force of which society is deprived by the present social condition.’ 

Friedrich Engels, speech in Elberfeld, February 1845 

100 Years of Reforms (1945)

From the July 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are indebted to “The Economist” December 30th, 1944, for the opportunity we are taking of quoting, somewhat more fully than is customary with quotations. The article which appeared in the above issue was called “Condition of the People.” We feel the editor of this shilling weekly (beyond the reading range of the average worker), will not begrudge us the liberty we are taking of so freely quoting from its columns. Our plea, in justification, being to draw attention to their review, their comments.

Now for the quotations with our few brief comments by the way.

“A hundred years ago a young and ardent revolutionary, Friedrich Engels, wrote a book on ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.’ In the closing days of this year, it seems appropriate to attempt a review, however sketchy, of working class conditions in 1944…..

Indeed, to draw any detailed comparison between conditions in 1844 and 1944 would be a waste of time, since there can be no comparison between two incomparables. When Engels wrote his book the total population of the British Isles was less than 20 millions. People lived and worked under primitive barbarous conditions, herded together like cattle in their tenements, they were illiterate, half starved, filthy and diseased. The only relaxations were liquor, horse play and sex. Typhus and the yellow fever spread through the infested dwellings, but the toll of life was no matter because workers were plentiful and cheap.

“. . . . The infantile mortality rate was as high as 155 per thousand . . the average expectation of life in the labouring class in Liverpool was only 15 years. Not for nothing were the 1840’s known as the hungry forties. . . . There are still dark satanic mills in Lancashire and the West Riding. London still has its East End, Glasgow its Gorbals, and Manchester its Ancoats.”

Just one comment may be made here : —

Despite the amenities of life which the more fortunate workers of our day were able, before the war, to experience compared with a hundred years ago, the war years, notwithstanding their fuller employment and purchasing potentialities, find the workers, nevertheless thwarted in a variety of ways, from enjoying a higher standard of living. A few obvious factors may be mentioned; the rationing and coupon system (restricting purchases to bare necessities), black marketing racketeers, which the Government are incapable of controlling, theirs being an unconventional way of buying and selling, with the profit motive the one and only objective —i.e., Capitalism. The “black market” therefore, rules on the luxury or “extra comforts” line.

On top of all this is the aggravated misery of average home life occasioned by the bomb, black out, plus overcrowding which housing shortage causes.

Astutely, the ruling class have also fostered, on a gigantic scale, “national savings,” thereby encouraging the workers to “deny for the sweet by and by.”

The “Economist” continues : —

“But whatever the improvement in health and nutrition, the problem of the rich and the poor, the inequalities of wealth have not been eliminated. Disraeli’s ‘Two Nations,’ still exist. The most recent estimate of the distribution of property, that of Mr. H. Campion, shows that in 1936, out of a total of 16-17 thousand millions of private property …. approximately 85 per cent. was held by 1.8 million persons, or 7 per cent. of the total adult population. Moreover, three quarters of the adult population possessed less than £100 worth of property and 1.5 per cent. of the adult population had property of £10,000 and over. These estimates show that whatever levelling up at the bottom may have taken place and however the relative share of the middle classes in property may have increased, the property structure of Society has not altered fundamentally. (italics ours).

“Mr. R. Titmuss in his “Birth, Poverty and Wealth,” showed that before the War, the infant mortality rate among middle and professional classes was 33 per 1,000 live births, compared with 77 among unskilled labourers.. The class divisions are even sharper in Education. The calculation that only 2 per cent. of the population go to public schools, yet 57 per cent. of the members of Parliament come from the public schools is a striking illustration of the existence of privilege.”

The “Economist” quoting from “Birth, Poverty and Wealth” ibid :—”unsatisfactory sites of homes and villages, insufficient supplies of water, unsatisfactory provision for drainage, grossly inadequate provision for the removal of refuse, widespread absence of decent sanitary conveniences, the persistence of the unspeakably filthy privy midden in many of the mining areas, gross overcrowding and huddling the sexes together in the congested industrial towns and villages, occupation of one roomed houses by large families, groups of lightless and unventilated houses in the older burghs clotted masses of slums in the great cities.”

As the “Economist” says, “the above is not a passage from Engels, it is an extract from the report of a ‘Royal Commission on Housing in Scotland in 1917’ quoted in the 1944 report of the Scottish. Housing advisory Council, with the comment that: ‘these evils have been only slightly mitigated by housebuilding between the two wars.’

“. . . . 40,500 houses in Scotland still have no independent water closets and no sanitary conveniences of any kind. Conditions in Scottish mining areas, according to the recent report on the Scottish coalfields ‘can only be described as deplorable.’ The facts disclosed by the evacuation survey ‘Our Towns’ in 1943 can only be understood against the demoralising background of slum conditions. Public opinion was understandably appalled at the descriptions, unemotionally related by trained social workers, of the dirty and verminous children ridden with scabies and other skin diseases, with disgusting sleeping and feeding habits, of the negligence and fecklessness of their parents. It showed how ignorance and folly were exploited by all kinds of money lenders, clothing clubs, insurance touts, quack doctors and vendors of patent medicines …. they belong to the ‘submerged tenth’ the ranks of the unemployables and the ‘irreducible minimum.’”

The “Economist” concludes on a note of appeal to authority, the Government, to be progressive in a policy of social reform. The “Economist” puts it like this, to quote again from their article : —

“‘Progress’ said Herbert Spencer, ‘is not an accident? It is, or should be, conscious policy, and that policy should be directed towards raising the level of the lowest paid. . . . The year 1945 which should bring the end of the War, will provide an unparalleled opportunity for progress towards these aims . . . reforms in education, health, housing and social insurance . . . family allowances. . . . Whatsoever Government is returned to power it will be committed to this programme of social reform.”

Concluding and summing up the “Economist” says :—

“But to say that there has been progress since 1844 is not enough, the question is whether the advances in social conditions have been commensurate with technical and scientific progress of the nations productive capacity, and the answer, on all the evidence can only be in the negative.” (italics ours).

The above quotations should be a reminder to the working class in their political struggle for emancipation from Capitalist exploitation. A hundred years of reforms, in which Conservative, Liberal and Labour have played their part in advocating, not forgetting the “revolutionary” reforms of the Communist Party.

The Socialist Party again reminds the working class that so long as the means of life remain the private property of the capitalist ruling class, they must remain enslaved to that class. It is the function of the defenders of private property to advocate and institute reforms, thereby prolonging the privilege of the capitalist and their apologetic professional political decoys. Likewise, it is equally necessary for the working class party, the Socialist Party, to be uncompromisingly hostile to, and independent of all other political parties. Because we are convinced of this truth, we are confident, that the workers will join with us in the task we have in hand. That task is the establishment of Socialism—the common ownership of the means of production and distribution—a revolutionary objective, to avert which capitalism will offer every reform under the sun. For such reasons the Socialist Party need not waste time in their advocacy.

Billy Iles

Engels as Utopian Socialist (2020)

From the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engels became a socialist some time in 1842 after coming into contact with supporters of Robert Owen in Manchester. He contributed to their paper The New Moral World and was interested in their scheme to establish a network of communistic colonies. He was also aware of other groups in France with similar ideas. He was what he himself would later call a ‘utopian socialist’, which was not meant as a criticism of their aim but of why and how they saw socialism coming about.

In February 1845 he took part in a campaign organised by Moses Hess to popularise the idea of communism in their native part of Germany, now the city of Wuppertal. As part of this campaign a series of three meetings was held in Elberfeld. Engels spoke at two of them. In the first, on 8 February, he set out the case against ‘present-day society’ and for replacing it by communism.

His criticism of the existing system, which he called ‘free competition’, was that it was based on ‘individualism’ in the sense that each individual was left to fend for themselves to obtain the money to buy what they needed to live; this led to a war of all against all in which everyone competed against everyone else. The alternative to this ‘individualism’ was communism (or what Robert Owen and the Owenites he had met in England called ‘socialism’) where, instead of people competing against each other to get a living they would co-operate to produce and share out what they needed. As he put it:

‘In communist society, where the interests of individuals are not opposed to one another but, on the contrary, are united, competition is eliminated. As is self-evident, there can no longer be any question of the ruin of particular classes, nor of the very existence of classes such as the rich and the poor nowadays. As soon as private gain, the aim of the individual to enrich himself on his own, disappears from the production and distribution of the goods necessary to life, trade crises will also disappear of themselves. In communist society it will be easy to be informed about both production and consumption. Since we know how much, on the average, a person needs, it is easy to calculate how much is needed by a given number of individuals, and since production is no longer in the hands of private producers but in those of the community and its administrative bodies, it is a trifling matter ‘to regulate production according to needs’ (his emphasis).

Hess spoke the following week and, besides dealing with the objection that communism was against human nature and the question of who would do the dirty work, made it clear that as in communist society ‘the aim of the individual to enrich himself on his own’ would disappear so would money:

‘We all have to peddle our life-activity in order to buy in exchange the life-activity of other men – and what is the sum total of all our faculties and of all our forces, which we throw on the market and which we must turn into money, but our own whole life? It is not our body, which we only touch from the outside, but its real force that constitutes our life. When we sell this force of ours we ourselves sell our very life. Money is the mark of slavery; is it not therefore but human value expressed in figures? But men who can be paid, men who buy and sell each other, are they anything but slaves? How can we begin to escape from this traffic in men as long as we live in isolation and as long as each person has to work for himself on his own account in order to gain the means of existence? Who gives us the means of life, the means of our physical and social activity if we don’t gain them by buying and selling our own life?’ (www.marxists.org/archive/hess/1845/elberfeld-speech.htm)

At the time Engels saw a communist society as coming into being gradually and peacefully as a result of social reforms such as education for all workers and communist colonies for the unemployed paid for by a progressive tax on incomes. Later that year, as he and Marx clarified their ideas, they came to the conclusion that ‘present-day society’ was not based on everyone trying to exploit everyone else but on the exploitation of the ‘proletariat’ (the working class) by the ‘bourgeoisie’ (the capitalist class) and that a communist society would come about as the result of a political revolution in which the ‘proletariat’ would overthrow the rule of the ‘bourgeoisie’.

However, Engels never changed his view that communism was a society based on the common ownership of the means of life with production carried on directly to satisfy people’s needs and which by the 1880s he had come to call ‘socialism’.

The full speech can be found here: Speeches in Elberfeld, February 8, 1845

Adam Buick

Letter: A vanguardist writes (1998)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A vanguardist writes

Dear Editors,

With reference to the February 1998 issue of your journal, most modestly I want to raise a few questions on the articles published on “The Communist Manifesto” written by Lew Higgins and Gwynn Thomas respectively.

The article by Higgins

(1) fails to trace the historical background of the Communist Manifesto and at the time of the Communist League. Both were mainly the product of the Chartist movement. It is implicit in Marx’s realisation that “the proletarian movement is the independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of immense majority” which has been expressed in the manifesto.

(2) Based on this false premise, Higgins has arrived at a false hypothesis that “the Manifesto was written with Germany in mind”. Whereas the Manifesto has been working as guideline for Communist Parties of the World for the last 150 years, he further writes that it was written for a particular organisation with particular purpose. This is not only unjustifiable, but also it is a biased opinion that tends to misinterpret the Manifesto.

(3) In the concluding part, Higgins has found out six ideas of the Manifesto valid for the 21st century. But in the second point he appears to make one believe that Marx wants to replace the class society through democracy. This idea has also been expressed in another place of the article. But, if one looks at the fourth point, one will find that the change must be brought about by revolutionary political action of the working class. Both the points put together may lead to the idea that Marx’s views were contradictory. But the fact is that Higgins’s views are rather contradictory.

(4) That communism must be world-wide as the system it replaces, i.e. capitalism, is world-wide is a fact, as maintained in the third point; but simultaneously it is also true that the proletariat of one country can not wait for their unprepared counterparts outside their own territorial limit and postpone their struggle even if the conditions in their country are favourable for them. That is why the Manifesto rightly states that proletariat of one country must battle against the bourgeoisie of their own country. The line can not be ignored.

(5) In the penultimate point, Higgins observes that the revolution must be brought about by the majority of the working class, not a minority. The idea is not merely contrary to the science of dialectics that the forces of progress or development, though minority at present, must emerge as the winner, it is also subjective. In order to negate the fact that the November Revolution of 1917 was a socialist revolution and, that though a minority, the working class was in a position to lead the revolution, the notion has been placed. That there may be different phases of Socialist Revolution, as happened in China, has also been deliberately ignored by the author. The attempt is highly condemnable.

(6) The last point as it is written appears to be contradictory in itself. It is beyond my knowledge, if the Communists are being the most organised and political section of the proletariat, why they cannot be the vanguard of the working class. It is almost like the views of anarchist Bakunin.

The less said about the article by G. Thomas, the better. In the very beginning of para 2 under the sub-heading “From Capitalism to Socialism” he writes “. . . Socialist Revolution must be world-wide and cannot be achieved in one country alone”. Marx, while expressing such a view in the Manifesto, also observes, as I wrote earlier that the proletariat of a country has to win the battle with the bourgeoisie of that country at first. Thus the view observed by Thomas is misleading, such view is that of Trotsky, who whatever may he be, was not a Marxist.

In the penultimate sentence of the same paragraph he writes “The Bolsheviks had no possibility of introducing Socialism.” I personally do not agree with the view because I think, though a minority, the proletariat can be and had become the vanguard. The basis of my views is the science of dialectics (as mentioned earlier) which, I suppose, has been ignored in this respect.

From the two articles, it has appeared in my mind that, in the name of Socialism, the World Socialist Party, if it represents the views expressed in them, is a mere petty bourgeois party. It preaches the petty-bourgeois view in the name of Socialism. And that’s why the Socialist Standard does not deserve any attraction for me.

Prof Sakiranjan Basu, 

Bishnupur, India

Reply:

1. The article did give a paragraph on the historical background to the Manifesto. The Chartist movement did have an influence on the Communist League, though it is an exaggeration to say the League and Manifesto were both “mainly the product of the Chartist movement”.

2. The article did say that the Manifesto was written with Germany in mind, “though not exclusively”. The article also did say that in the final section of the Manifesto we can read that in 1848 “Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution”. So the Manifesto was written for a particular organisation with particular purposes, such as the measures for a bourgeois-democratic revolution at the end of the second section. You offer no evidence for your claim that this is unjustifiable, biased and a misinterpretation. But if necessary we can provide plenty of evidence that the so-called Communist Parties of the world have consistently misinterpreted the Manifesto.

3. In the concluding part of the article, the second point refers to the replacement of class society with a democratic society. Nevertheless, it is true that this must be brought about democratically, for as the Manifesto pointed out “the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, which is the struggle of democracy”. You appear to think that democratic political action cannot be revolutionary. Or perhaps you think revolution is synonymous with minority violence and so cannot be democratic? Marx thought a socialist revolution must involve the working class in a democratic struggle. So do we, and the force of numbers means the revolution can be peaceful. We and our comrades in India and elsewhere are living proof of democratic revolutionary political action for socialism.

4. You are right that the Manifesto says the working class must defeat the capitalist class of their own country. That is why we are organised as a political party. It is why we and our companion parties around the world are working for the democratic capture of state power and the replacement of international capitalism with world socialism. However, you would be wrong in supposing that one country alone could throw off capitalism under a global capitalist system of society. The Manifesto does not suggest it and the 150 years since have shown that it was right not to.

5. The working class struggle for socialism, as you note in (1), “is the independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority” (Communist Manifesto). You now say this is contrary to “the science of dialectics” and subjective because the minority must emerge as the winner. You offer the experiences of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, where the working class was a minority of the population in both cases. But this is the dialectical opposite of what Marx argued. Socialism is not possible in one country, especially a semi-feudal country with an overwhelmingly peasant population, where only a minority of the working class supported those who falsely called themselves Communists.

6. There can be no socialism without socialists. Socialism, which can only be democratic world, must be brought about democratically. This point should become obvious if you think about it. Democracy rules out leadership and self-appointed vanguards. Socialists who know what they want and how to get it do not need leaders to tell them what to do.

The capture of power has to be done on a state-by-state basis because this is the way political power is structured in the world today. As the Manifesto pointed out, it will first be necessary for the working class of a country to win the struggle of democracy over the capitalists in that country. But this does not mean that there can be socialism in one country. Nor does it mean that we can expect the workers of one country to be ready for socialism while the rest of the world lags behind. The idea of world socialism cannot be confined to one country.

You disagree with our argument that the Bolsheviks could not introduce socialism because it is your personal view that the working class had become the vanguard. Again you base this on “the science of dialectics”, whatever you may mean by this.—Editors.

The Rear View: Same the whole world over (2021)

The Rear View Column from the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Same the whole world over

‘The Green Party, the Socialist Left and the Marxist-inspired Reds – all pro-environmental – are all expected to make gains and will seek to influence the next government, as will the rural Centre Party. Climate, wealth gap in focus as Norway go to polls’ (yahoo.com, 9 September). A similar Red-Green Coalition ruled 2005-2013 with Labour Party leader Jens Stoltenburg as Prime Minister. He has since become NATO’s General Secretary. The party’s current leader is the capitalist Jonas Gahr Støre. Once upon a time, Labour was considered ‘radical’: in 1919 it joined the Third International which had its headquarters in Moscow. Similarly, the Green Party was once concerned with alternative economics (who remembers BD Brochmann?), alternatives to military service, alternative energy, partial opposition to whaling (whale meat is still for sale) as well as going some distance towards the decriminalisation of certain drugs. The Socialist Left, formed in 1975, has its origins in a group which left the Labour Party over NATO membership. Interestingly, they were predictably against the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq but the Party leadership favoured NATO air strikes against Serbia over that country’s role in Kosovo (killing thousands and causing as many as 1.5 million people to flee as refugees). The ‘Marxist inspired’ Reds are, as history shows, anything but. The Red Electoral Alliance was formed in 1973 as an electoral front organisation for the Workers’ Communist Party. Much can be said about the WCP, but the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten’s headline from 28 August 2005 probably cannot be bettered: ‘They worshipped Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot’. And one Vidkun Quisling was a Minister in government for the populist Centre Party’s earlier incarnation as the Farmer’s Party. He later led Nazi-occupied Norway. Eugene Debs’ WW1 remark remains apposite: ‘Yes, a change is certainly needed, not merely a change of party but a change of system, a change from slavery to freedom and from despotism to democracy, wide as the world’.

A Better World is Possible

This is the title of an essay by Dr. Cesar Chelala, which concludes: ‘We have the resources. What we need is a new look at life and its wondrous possibilities. I may be called naïve. But those who are not naïve are the ones that have led us into these wars. We can create a better world, if we truly want it’ (counterpunch.org, 3 September). Indeed. This call echoes others made in the past:

1859: ‘There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery…’ (Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, 16 September). He observed that the ‘Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage’ (Capital, Vol. 1, ch. 25).

1898: ‘Hence it has happened that the development of steam navigation, of railroads and telegraphs, of mechanical and chemical science, and the growth of the population, while enormously increasing productive power and the amount of material products—that is, of real wealth—at least ten times faster than the growth of the population, has given that enormous increase almost wholly to one class, comprising the landlords and capitalists, leaving the actual producers of it—the industrial workers and inventors—little, if any, better off than before’ (Alfred Russel Wallace, The Demon of Greed).

1923: ‘Such a great [socialist] production is already possible, with the knowledge already possessed by mankind’ (Sylvia Pankhurst).

1948: ‘A world of peace and friendship, a world with the plenty which modern science had made possible was a great ideal. But those in power had no patience with such an ideal. They said it was not practical politics’ (John Boyd Orr, former director of the Food and Agriculture Organisation).

1951: ‘It is time for mankind to ensure itself of material abundance by establishing a free, self-managed world society of productive labour, thereby freeing its mental powers for perfecting its knowledge of nature and the universe’ (Anton Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy).

All that is missing from achieving this is ‘the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat’ (Rosa Luxemburg).

Comrade Speaker?

‘You cannot have a system where the success of some springs from the exploitation of the workers and springs from the exploitation of the environment and the rest, and we have to correct that’ (yahoo.com, 17 September). Indeed, but our fellow socialists in the WSP(US) do not expect Nancy Pelosi to join them anytime soon as she makes clear elsewhere that she wishes to reform capitalism, not replace it. Other, sadly long-dead Democrats stated: ‘ All men are brethren. We denounce all political and hereditary inequalities and distinctions of castes… We believe the earth, with all its natural productions, to be the common property of all… We believe that the present state of society, which permits its idlers and schemers to monopolise the fruits of the earth and, the production of industry, and compels the working class to labour for inadequate rewards, and even condemns them to social slavery, destitution, and degradation, to be essentially unjust… We condemn national hatreds which have hitherto divided mankind… Convinced that national prejudices have been, at all ages, taken advantage of by the people’s oppressors to set them tearing the throats of each other when they should have been working together for their common good, this society repudiates the term ‘foreigner.’ We recognise our fellow-men, without regard to country, as members of one family, the human race, and citizens of one commonwealth, the world’ (Manifesto of the Fraternal Democrats, 1845).

The "Hungry Forties" and Now. (1912)

From the June 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

Liberals, when discussing the present condition of the working class, or upholding their social reform legislation, are very prone to point to the “hungry forties,” and the condition of the working class under Protection.

While admitting the badness of the condition at that period, we might also ask ourselves: “Are we so much improved since then ?”

The so-called saviours of the working class— the Liberals to wit— have held the reins of Government for the major portion of the last sixty years, and the Conservatives have been in power for the remainder of the period. Starvation and misery were rife in the forties, no doubt, but are they appreciably less in evidence to-day?

Do not forget that wealth is produced twenty times as fast as it was in 1840, owing to the development of machinery. Yet where do the workers stand?

Let us take a few statements from capitalist economists and statesmen.

Mr. Chas. Booth “There are 32 per cent. of the population of London living on 6d. per day.” 

Mr. Seebohm Rowntree:—“8.5 per cent, of the families of York have incomes of less than 21s. per week ; average family, six persons.”

Mr. D. Lloyd George, M.P.:—“ You have got, side by side with most extravagant wealth, multitudes of people who cannot consider even a bare subsistence as assured to them. What do I mean by a bare subsistence? I don’t mean luxuries. I exclude even comforts. I mean that minimum of food, raiment, shelter, and practically the care which is essential to keep human life in its tenement of clay. The wolves of hunger prowl constantly round millions of doors in the land.”

Mr. C. F„ Masterman “What was the use of building cathedrals and great central halls of worship when under their very shadow life was being upreared under conditions more intolerable than the world had ever seen.”

Mr. L. G. Chiozza Money .—“I do not think it is generally realised that during the last 15 years the wages of the British workman have fallen. The Board of Trade knows nothing of a certain class of boot workers who earn twelve shillings in a seventy hour week.”

30,000,000 people of the United Kingdom own no land.

Seven London landlords draw £14,640,000 per annum in ground rent.

Can anything be worse than this? Are Free Trade and Protection worth talking about? Is not there some deeper cause of the workers’ poverty? Is it not time that the working class awoke to the fact ?

Our duty is plain. Why are we poor? Because we are robbed by the capitalist—whether by a rack-renting landlord or a sweating company. We are robbed of a large portion of the wealth we produce.

Britain, with all its vast resources, belongs to a few people. These few own our jobs; owning these they own our lives.

We, the workers, provide the finest of clothes and wear the shoddy. We build the palaces and live in the slum. How long will we stand this producing for profit instead of for use? A baker does not produce bread to feed people— be produces it for profit. Profit is his incentive, not use.

The working man or woman who depends from week to week upon wages is face to face with hunger and misery as soon as employment ceases. Why should there be starving people in a land of plenty?

When our masters talk upon wages or work they speak not as Liberals or Tories, but as exploiters. The workers send the masters or their representatives to Parliament, where they control the armed forces which shoot you down when on strike for better conditions. Remember what Liberals and Tories have done at Peterloo, Belfast, Featherstone, Llanelly, Liverpool, and Mitchelstown. Give up your blind faith in the Liberal and the Tory; use your political power for the benefit of your wives and your children, yourselves and your class. Study Socialism and find out what it is, not from your masters’ hirelings, but from the Socialists.

J. Cushing

Cooking the Books: The 'Engels pause' (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Engels pause' is the name given by an economic historian, Robert C. Allen, to the period in Britain when Engels wrote his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. It was brought up by David Smith, the Economics Editor of the Sunday Times, in an article in the Times (4 October) discussing the flurry of defences of private enterprise capitalism provoked by Corbyn's speech at the Labour Party Conference.

Corbyn was reported as saying that capitalism was in crisis. Actually what he said – and he was just quoting the Financial Times – was that capitalism was facing a 'crisis of legitimacy' (which it is, and a good thing too). He wasn't opposing capitalism, only the so-called 'neo-liberal' policies pursued by governments over the past decades, and was merely calling for more state intervention to stimulate private capitalist investment. Even the Times (28 September) recognised that he couldn't be opposing capitalism, not even private enterprise capitalism:

'Labour aides could not say whether Mr Corbyn's new economic model would be capitalist, hinting only that a majority of assets would be privately owned. '

Smith's argument was that capitalism was currently in the same sort of situation of rising profits and stagnating wages that it had been when Engels wrote:

'Engels bemoaned the plight of the “propertyless millions who own nothing and consume today what they earned yesterday”. Industrialists, he said, were growing rich on the “misery of the mass of wage earners”. 

Economic historians, Smith went on, have confirmed that in the first half of the 19^th century 'real wages stagnated' and 'profits rose strongly and the profit share of GDP increased', but

'Capitalism adjusted, almost as soon as Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, and well before Marx's Capital two decades later. In the second half of the 19^th century, rising real wages and rising productivity went hand-in-hand. The Marxist diagnosis of permanently downtrodden workers was replaced by one of rising living standards.'

Did Engels argue that the conditions he described in Manchester in 1844 – people living in hovels sometimes alongside pigs, no sewage system, rampant adulteration, no limitations on the hours of work, employers swindling workers by obliging them to buy from the company store – were the permanent lot of the working class under capitalism? Was this really the 'Marxist diagnosis'?

In a word, no. Engels lived to see what happened in the second half of the 19^th century (he died in 1895) and described what and why in the Preface he wrote to the 1892 publication of the English translation of his book:

'The state of things described in this book belongs today, in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned.(....) The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new industrial epoch. (...) ...England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist exploitation described by me ...'

In other words, Engels recognised that the conditions he had described in 1844 were those of an early stage of capitalism. He listed the changes as the introduction of Factory Acts (which improved conditions for factory workers), the acceptance of trade unions (which pushed up the wages of skilled, engineering and building workers), and sanitation improvements (to prevent the spread of cholera, etc).

Marx's Capital, published in 1867, takes into account these changes. By then the bigger capitalists had come realise how short-sighted and counter-productive it was to underfeed and overwork the geese that laid the golden eggs. The workers were still exploited – in fact they produced more surplus value than before – even though they were not as 'downtrodden' as in the 1840s. They still are. There has been no pause in that.

Marx and England before 1849 (1985)

From the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was no doubt Engels who first drew Marx’s attention to the key importance of England for any adequate theory of communism. His father was a part-owner in a firm engaged in cotton spinning in the Rhineland as well as in Manchester, then the capital of the world cotton industry.

In November 1842 Engels went to England to work in the office of the Manchester factory of Ermen and Engels. He was already a communist in the sense of wanting to see established a society based on common ownership in which co-operation would replace competition and he soon made contact with like-minded people in England. From November 1843 he was contributing articles to The New Moral World, the organ of Owenite socialism. He was also a regular reader of the Chartist weekly, the Northern Star, then published in Leeds, though he did not contribute any articles to it at this time. He did, however, meet one of its journalists, George Julian Harney (1817—1897), who was later to prove a valuable contact between English and Continental revolutionaries.

If Engels had gone to Manchester earlier on in 1842 he would have witnessed the second wave of Chartist agitation and unrest in Britain. The "People's Charter" was a document that had been drawn up in 1838 in the form of a Bill to be presented to the House of Commons providing for six changes in the electoral law: universal suffrage for men. secret ballots, equal electoral districts, payment of MPs, no property qualification for MPs. and annual parliamentary elections. In itself this was a demand to continue and complete the "Reform" of Parliament begun with the Reform Act of 1832 enfranchising the capitalist class, or "middle" class as it was then known, but still leaving the workers voteless. A number of Radical MPs, as representatives of the capitalist middle class, had in fact played a part in drafting the Charter, regarding it as a means of further undermining the political power of the landed aristocracy.

The working class, however, whose acceptance of the Charter had been prepared by the trade union agitation and by the formation of Working Men’s Associations up and down the country in the preceding years, gave the Charter a social content — rejection of the economic system of "profit- mongering" and "wage-slavery" which the capitalist class had introduced and was extending — which was to make Chartism essentially a political movement of the working class, distinct from and hostile to the capitalist middle class.

The recognised leader of the Chartists in the 1840s was a former Irish MP and landlord, Feargus O’Connor (1794—1855). O’Connor was a very effective orator and enjoyed immense popularity among the working class. The Chartist movement also had its political thinkers such as James "Bronterre" O'Brien (1805—1864). dubbed by O'Connor "the Chartist schoolmaster" O'Brien had translated into English in 1836 the seminal work of European communism. Buonarotti’s History of Babeufs Conspiracy for Equality (1828). In the columns of the Northern Star and in other Chartist and Radical papers. O’Brien never ceased to emphasise the antagonism of interest between the working class and the middle class and to insist on the need for the workers to gain political power — through the implementation of the Charter — before they could do anything effective to improve their social position.

The Chartists faced competition, in their bid for working class support, from the Anti-Corn Law League which had been set up in 1838 to campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Its most prominent leaders were the industrialists John Bright (1811—1889) and Richard Cobden (1804—1865). The Corn Laws, passed after the end of the Napoleonic Wars to protect British (including Irish) agriculture from foreign competition, imposed a duty on imports of corn whenever the price fell below a certain amount. The effect was to maintain the price of corn and so of bread, in Britain at an artificially high level.

The Anti-Corn Law League tried to attract working class support by promising a "cheap loaf". The Chartists replied that, as a dispute between the capitalist and landlord classes, the repeal of the Corn Laws was not an issue that concerned wage-workers but a diversion from what ought to be their main aim: the winning of political power through the implementation of the Charter. The Chartists also pointed out that a "cheap loaf" would mean cheap wages.

A first petition for the Charter had been rejected by the House of Commons in May 1839. A second, more radical, petition was presented to Parliament in May 1842. As in 1839 it was rejected and. as in 1839, unrest broke out. In July and August, a few months before Engels’ arrival, the North of England experienced a wave of strikes. These were primarily industrial in that the basic aim was to restore the wage levels that had prevailed in 1840, but the demand for the implementation of the Charter was also put forward by some of the strikers. It was suggested at the time that some of the strikes had been deliberately provoked by the employers in order to create unrest as a means of putting pressure on the government to repeal the Corn Laws.

Engels was planning to write a book on the social history of England and, for this, besides reading Chartist and Owenite literature and participating in their meetings, he read the works of English writers on economic theory, or ’political economy" as it was then called. On the basis of this reading he sent an article entitled "An Outline of a Critique of National Economy" to Marx in Paris (who had meantime, during the winter of 1843-4, himself become a communist) which was published in the first — and only issue of the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher in February 1844. This article was a criticism of the theories of the political economists, as represented by Adam Smith (1723—1790), David Ricardo (1772— 1823) and his disciples James Mill (1773— 1836) and J.R. McCulloch (1789—1864). and by Malthus (1766—1834) and the Frenchman J.B. Say (1767—1832). It greatly impressed Marx and helped orient his studies towards economics. In fact, the "critique of political economy" which Engels had suggested needed to be done was to become virtually Marx's life work.

Marx began his study of economics by reading — in French translation — the authors mentioned by Engels and made some preliminary notes for a work on economics of his own, some of which have survived as the ’Paris Manuscripts" of 1844. Marx does refer once or twice to England in these manuscripts noting, for instance, that landed property there was no longer feudal but money-making, a point he was to incorporate into his later analyses of English history, society and politics.

Engels remained in Manchester until August 1844. The book he wrote on his return to Germany was not the social history of England he had originally planned but one describing the terrible conditions under which the working class lived in England which, according to the theories of the political economists, was the richest country in the world. This book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, was published in Leipzig in May 1845 and also influenced Marx’s thinking, this time with regard to the political development of the working class. In the chapter on "Labour Movements", which gave a very sympathetic account of trade unionism, Chartism and Owenite socialism, Engels outlined a pattern for the evolution of the working class movement under capitalism. Working class resistance to capitalist class domination first took the form, said Engels, of individual acts of crime, then of machine-smashing before evolving into trade unionism with the strike, or "turn-out", as its weapon. Out of trade unionism, Engels went on, had developed Chartism, a general political movement of the working class against the capitalist class:

Chartism is the compact form of their opposition to the bourgeoisie. In the Unions and turnouts opposition always remained isolated: it was single working-men or sections who fought a single bourgeois. If the fight became general this was scarcely by the intention of the working-men; or, when it did happen intentionally, Chartism was at the bottom of it. But in Chartism it is the whole working-class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and attacks, first of all, the political power, the legislative rampart with which the bourgeoisie has surrounded itself (p.254).

Finally, said Engels, the Chartist movement could be expected to become explicitly socialist (communist).

Marx was expelled from France in February 1845 and went to live in Brussels. Engels joined him there a few months later. In July and August they went to England for six weeks. Marx's first visit to the country. In London they met Wilhelm Weitling (1809-1864), the German tailor whose communist writings had influenced the German artisans in Paris who had helped convert Marx to communism. They also met Harney, still a journalist on the Northern Star, now edited from London, who agreed to accept articles from Engels, the first of which was published in September. From London Marx and Engels went on to Manchester where they spent most of the time they were in England. Marx was particularly interested in reading some books on economics which he had been unable to obtain on the Continent. particularly those by English-language authors who criticised the existing economic system from a communist or working class point of view such as the Owenite, William Thompson (1785 -1833), from whose An Enquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth he made extensive notes.

Another of these writers who particularly impressed him was John Francis Bray (1809-1897). Bray, a journeyman printer, was the author of Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy which had been published in Leeds as recently as 1839. He, like Thompson, had been influenced by Owenite ideas and advocated "the system of community possessions" as the long-term ideal society. As a transition to such a communist society, he proposed the exchange of goods according to their labour content.

In the criticism of Proudhon s views which Marx wrote in the winter of 1846 7 and which was published, in French, as The Poverty of Philosophy in Brussels in July 1847. Marx quoted extensively from Bray (whose book he described as "remarkable ”) in order to show that Proudhon's views had been anticipated in England:

Anyone who is in any way familiar with the trend of political economy in England cannot fail to know that almost all the Socialists in that country have, at different periods, proposed the equalitarian application of the Ricardian theory. We could quote for M. Proudhon: Hodgskin, Political Economy, 1827; William Thompson. An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness, 1824; T.R. Edmonds, Practical Moral and Political Economy. 1828. etc., etc., and four more pages of etc. We shall content ourselves with listening to an English Communist. Mr Bray (p.77).

Later on, after he had moved to England. Marx read other works in this tradition and was particularly impressed by another book by the same Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) he mentions here, Labour Defended against the claims of Capital (1825), describing it in Capital as “this admirable work". Hodgskin, a retired naval lieutenant, was not in fact an Owenite but he was staunchly pro-trade union and pro-working class.

In a sense Marx, too, could be classed among those who "proposed the equalitarian application of the Ricardian theory" since he also started out from Ricardo's labour theory of value and analysis of society divided into a landlord class, a capitalist class and a working class and gave these theories a pro-working class interpretation. In fact, until he made the key theoretical distinction (in 1858) between "labour" and "labour power ”, which enabled him to realise that what workers sold to the capitalists for wages was not their labour (the product of their labour, what they produced) but their labour-power (their mental and physical energies, their capacity to work), Marx's explanation of how the working class was exploited under capitalism was not basically different from those of writers like Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray.

They thought that workers were paid less than the value of what they produced because competition held wages, as the price of their "labour", down to subsistence levels, the surplus over and above this being the source of the profits of their capitalist employers. Marx's solution — "union", "combination", "association", "co-operation". to overcome the effects of competition — was not all that different either. Marx in fact always had the highest respect for the original "English Socialist". Robert Owen (1771-1858). who made himself the champion of this idea.

But, unlike Owen, Marx held that the working class would have to gain control of political power before anything lasting could be done to improve their lot. This once again was derived from the English working class movement. In the final section of The Poverty of Philosophy on "strikes and combinations of workers”, Marx puts forward the same pattern for the evolution of the understanding and organisation of the working class as Engels, basing himself on the experience of Chartism, had done in 1845:

England, whose industry has attained the highest degree of development, has the biggest and best organised combinations. In England they have not stopped at partial combinations which have no other object than a passing strike, and which disappear with it. Permanent combinations have been formed, trades unions, which serve as ramparts for the workers in their struggles with the employers And at the present time all these local trades unions find a rallying point in the National Association of United Trades, the central committee of which is in London, and which already numbers 80,000 members. The organisation of these strikes, combinations, and trades unions went on simultaneously with the political struggles of the workers, who now constitute a large political party, under the name of Chartists.
  The first attempts of workers to associate among themselves always take place in the form of combinations. Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance—combination. Thus combination always has a double aim. that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations. at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favour of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favour of wages. In this struggle — a veritable civil war — all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.
    Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people in the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle (pp 194 5).

The same pattern is again described in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and it remained Marx's view to the end of his life and was to be the basis for his intervention in the English working class movement in 1852-6 and in 1864-72.

Meanwhile, in 1846, the Anti-Corn Law League had achieved success when the British Parliament voted to repeal the Corn Laws with effect from 1848. This marked the beginning of the era of Free Trade for Britain and was a significant economic event which Marx, as a student of economics, did not let pass without comment. In September 1847 he attended a conference on Free Trade in Brussels. He had intended making a contribution to the discussion, but was denied the opportunity of doing so. The text of his intended speech was later published in the Belgian French-language journal L'Atelier. It was also translated into English and published in the Northern Star, of which Harney was now the editor, on 9 October and so became the first article by Marx to appear in print in England (and indeed in English). Marx returned to the question of Free Trade in another speech in Brussels on 9 January 1848 in which he declared himself in favour of Free Trade on the sole ground that it would hasten the revolutionary confrontation between the working class and the capitalist class:

The English workers have made the English free-traders realise that they are not the dupes of their illusions or of their lies; and if, in spite of this, the workers made common cause with them against the landlords, it was for the purpose of destroying the last remnants of feudalism and in order to have only one enemy left to deal with (pp.241-2).

In November and December 1847 Marx was in England for a second time, to take part in the second congress of the Communist League (Kommunistenbund) at which he and Engels were appointed to draw up a statement of the communist aims and principles of this German workers' organisation. While he was in London Marx was invited to make one of the speeches at a dinner, organised by the Society of Fraternal Democrats with which Harney was associated. to commemorate the Polish uprising of 1830. This was the first occasion Marx spoke to an audience in England (even though he spoke in German) and. addressing himself to the Chartists, he told them that the best way they could aid the cause of Polish freedom would be to achieve "the victory of the English proletariat over the English bourgeoisie" Marx and Engels later met Harney privately, together with another Chartist and Fraternal Democrat, Ernest Jones (1819-1868), to discuss the organisation of an international congress of "Democrats" (which then referred to those who wanted a thorough-going bourgeois-democratic revolution).

The planned international congress never took place, even though Harney and Jones did meet Marx in Paris in March 1848 where he had returned following the overthrow of King Louis-Philippe in February. It was overtaken by events as the European refugees, including Marx and Engels, hurried back to take part in the bourgeois-democratic revolutions which were breaking out in their native countries. Thus in April Marx moved to Cologne where he revived the newspaper he had edited there before he was a communist in 1842-3 calling it the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Most of the articles he wrote for this daily concerned the day-to-day conduct of the bourgeois-national-democratic revolution that was then going on in Germany — which Marx held communists should work for on the grounds that it would be, as he and Engels had put it in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution". One or two of the articles did mention England in passing: a comparison of the French and English bourgeois revolutions with current events in Germany and an article on the prospects for the year 1849 which mentioned the abortive "Young Ireland" uprising of June 1848 and which declared:

Only a world war can break old England, as only this can provide the Chartists, the party of the organised English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising against their powerful oppressors. Only when the Chartists head the English government will the social revolution pass from the sphere of utopia to that of reality (184. 1.1.1849 NRhz).

But 1849 was not to live up to Marx's expectations. Not only was the bourgeois revolution in Germany not immediately followed by a proletarian revolution, but the bourgeois revolution itself did not take place properly as the King of Prussia re-asserted his feudal-bureaucratic rule over the Rhineland. As for the Chartists, they had already missed their chance in February 1848 when they had failed to react after Parliament rejected. for the third time, a Petition for the Charter. The British government was quick to exploit this weakness and Ernest Jones and a number of other prominent Chartists were already in prison while Marx was speculating about the conditions for a successful Chartist uprising in Britain.

In June Marx left Cologne for Paris and, being made unwelcome there, moved on in August to London, where his permanent home  was to be for the rest of his life.

Adam Buick