50 Years Ago: The Liberal Party's Record (1975)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Freedom ! Liberty ! ! Read their record. The only liberty they have known is the liberty to exploit labour. Have we omitted anything from their rotten record? We have—piles of evidence. We have even omitted to mention they were a capitalist party. Is it necessary to add this now? Why, in their earlier days they were capitalism, as distinct from the Tory landed interest. The plague spots of Sheffield, Ancoats, Lanark, Cradley ; the industrial wens of the Black Country, the Potteries, the chemical districts, the mining areas; these are the heritage of the Liberal Party. A generation or so ago they re-christened Liberty. They called it by a French name—laissez faire—let alone. That was their idea of liberty, “Let us alone.” The slogan of the Manchester school : Starve, sweat, bludgeon, oppress and exploit, but let us alone. Men were stunted, crippled and crushed; women brutalised in mines and factories; children taken from workhouses and “apprenticed” to industrial exploiters; but—laissez faire; let us alone.

. . . We visualise real freedom as belonging to a time when the whole people have free access to Mother Earth; when the whole people are free from the incubus of a parasitic class ; when the whole people socially own their means of living; when development shall be free from the shackle of selling, and production free from the necessity of profit. Freedom will then lose its capital letter. It would be the normal, not the sum of a few piffling, fraudulent reforms.

[From an article "The Mockery of 'Freedom' " by W. T. Hopley, in the Socialist Standard, March 1925.]

New Zealand—A socialist country? (1947)

From the March 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain holds that Socialism involves a complete sweeping away of the prevailing system of society which is known as capitalism and the introduction of a system of society based upon the common ownership of the means of life. The introduction of reforms which occur in the normal evolution of capitalism and are necessary to its more effective working, do not constitute socialism though the reforms may be put through by politicians calling themselves Socialists as in New Zealand to-day.

New Zealand was opened up :by the New Zealand Company, and not by independent settlers as took place in America, hence its particular evolution. The dominant figure of the company and the man who defined its policy was Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He looked at the American colonists’ progress in the early days, and from his capitalist’s outlook found it unsatisfactory, because each ‘settler was virtually independent, making their own clothes, candles, soap, etc., in addition to growing their own food. That was not Wakefield’s idea. Where all are independent, as were the early American colonists, there is little capital accumulated, as there are few, if any, labourers to exploit.

Wakefield saw that if many workers could be attracted to New Zealand they would require the products of manufacturing industries in order to support life, thus creating more employment with resultant profits to the capitalist class.

Primarily employment was to be in the form of work on the land and steps were to be taken by the company to see that the ownership of the land was concentrated in a few hands, thus preventing the workers from becoming smallholders and achieving a measure of independence.

England in 1840 was, for the labouring masses, a country best left behind. The history of 1830-1840 is of revolts by agricultural workers, miners and iron workers against their appalling conditions: revolts which were ruthlessly put down. The French revolution was too recent for clemency, which might he mistaken for weakness. With the industrial revolution accomplished, there was unemployed capital as well as labour; Wakefleld believed that both could be profitably employed in New Zealand.

Alas, his hopes were doomed to failure for many years. The New Zealand Company bought up land from the Maoris at less than the proverbial song and sold it in large lots to those who were to become capitalist farmers and would, it was hoped, employ and exploit the labourers which the New Zealand Company intended to persuade to emigrate.

In order to induce workers to go out to New Zealand the Company gave free steerage passages and undertook to give paid employment in the service of the company if the workers could not at once find masters. The company did not bargain with having to redeem this pledge; they made the fatal mistake of not ensuring that buyers of land went to the colony in order to employ labour to work it. With promises of employment, hundreds of working people emigrated from England. The rough sea journey was a smooth passage compared with their sufferings when they arrived and found none of the promised jobs, and were forced to take employment with the New Zealand Company at less than a subsistence wage.

Few landowners but many labourers continued to arrive, as having once been set in motion the recruitment did not cease. Agents in England continued to be paid at a fixed rate per emigrant, and news did not filter through to warn the prospective worker emigrants.

Finally, in 1844 matters had reached such a pass that the company ceased employment and payment altogether and distress was widespread. Here the lack of any elementary form of doles became evident. The destitute labourers in England had, meagre though it was, Parish relief or relief in the Poor House. In New Zealand, however, nothing of the kind existed and charity was most tardy.

As colonization continued the price of land increased still more and the land remained in the hands of the few. As the franchise had a property qualification the government represented the interests of these few. Legislation therefore, for the provision of hospitals, schools, and the relief of pauperism, was blocked in successive Parliaments. By 1853 only four hospitals had been built in the whole of New Zealand, and these left everything to be desired, but they became the beginning of relief, the Poor Law infirmary without the Poor House ! Another attempt to deal with pauperism was the setting up of Soup Kitchens in Auckland, and in 1865 a contributory form of health insurance was inaugurated among the road makers, on the basis that they paid the whole contribution.

The year 1865 also saw the passing of the repressive “Master and Apprentice Act,” which contained a clause stating that boys or girls refusing to serve their apprenticeship could be sent to jail for three month’s This related to children of twelve.

1868 saw the first attempt at unemployment insurance, which was a tax of 10s. a year on adult male^ to provide a fund for the destitute, the sick, orphans, etc.’

By 1898 it had become necessary to make some provision for the aged poor. These were the young labourers of the early immigration ; they had not grown rich or become landed proprietors, as some earlier colonists of other countries had done. In old age, after a life time of privation, they were awarded a pension of 6s. 11d. per week.

Meanwhile, industry was going forward in New Zealand, and the introduction of refrigerating ships made export of food a paying proposition to the big farmers. The workers learned that organisation on the industrial field was essential if their standard of living was to be maintained. The United Federation of Labour was formed in the teeth of opposition from the employers, who victimised the members at ever, conceivable opportunity. The climax came in October 1913, when the employers cancelled their contract wit: the Wellington Watersiders and staged a lockout During the bitter weeks which followed the workers were completely defeated. The Labour Disputes Investigation Act was passed making sudden strikes illegal, and the Federation of Labour lost most of its power as the unions became more and more concerned with arbitration.

The Social Democratic Party originally declared Socialism to be its aim deteriorated into reformism. like the British Party, and in 1916, the present Labour Party emerged from it, its avowed object, being simply the nationalisation, that is the taking over by the state of the means of production.

It was this Labour Party that took office in December, 1935, on a programme which included state control of currency and credit, guaranteed farm prices, i national health service, and a recognition of the “right to work” !

Whatever else it may be, it, is clear that a programme of this kind bears no relation to Socialism. When Socialism is established there will be no currency, no credit, no guaranteed farm prices, nor any of the provisions that capitalism is forced to make to try to combat the effects of slumps and booms. State intervention in these problems of capitalism is not Socialism.

The set-up in New Zealand is accurately described by R. S. Parker, a New Zealand political writer, in ” The Australian Quarterly ” (March, 1941, page 30) :— 

”The Labour Government has simply continued in the New Zealand tradition of state control and regulation, private ownership and operation. The central feature of the present set-up is the survival of the spirit and content of an essentially capitalistic economy, upon which the state has imposed a far reaching, but largely negative system of regulations, controls, prohibitions."

The Labour Party has been in office for over ten years, yet in many aspects conditions in New Zealand are worse than those of Britain.

The latest report of the Director-General of Health for the year 1944-1945 proves Public Health and Industrial Hygiene to be worse than in the “old country.” As comment on all points is impracticable for reasons of space, only the most significant will be given.

The general health of the Maoris, who were in 1840, a healthy race, is poor. Tuberculosis is rampant, and the infant mortality rate very high (102.26 per 1,000 live births). Much ill-health is due to the notoriously bad state of Maori housing and no great improvement in health is possible whilst they are living under such overcrowded and insanitary conditions.

The report on Industrial Hygiene is very enlightening. Many of the comments of its author, Dr. Davidson, would fit any industrialised country: —

“… many thousands are employed in work which is hot, dusty, laborious, dirty or merely monotonous and uninteresting, and they, too, may be exposed to environmental dangers, the effects of which although less immediately disabling are none the less real” (page 20).

Continuing, Dr. Davidson holds up British Factory Legislation a-s a shining example to New Zealand, and advises those capitalists who are reluctant to spend money on amenities for their workers to think again. Covering the bitter pill of expenditure on nurses and doctors in the jam of future profits, he shows what skilled treatment of accidents, etc., may save in absenteeism, accident compensation, etc.

Dr. Davidson recognises the reasons why necessary reforms in industry are not carried out when he points out: —

”It is partly a matter of finance; merely to, keep a factory clean costs money” . . .

“Good seating, too, is no mere philanthropy, its pays.”

To the ears of the capitalist class the words “it pays” are sweeter than the sweetest of music—perhaps they will be convinced!

We have seen how young children might be jailed for refusing to work, but Dr. Davidson was surprised to find them still working : —

“I have been surprised to find children under school leaving age working full time in various factories during school vacations and in isolated cases during school terms. Children of 13 and even 12 can be seen working whole time—and sometimes overtime—in factories which in many cases are very ill-kept and in some of which highly poisonous chemicals or dangerous machinery are in use ” (page 27).

After the above report was compiled the Statutes Amendment Act of 1944 prohibited the employment of children under 14 years. Such conditions had, however, prevailed for almost 10 years under the “Socialist” Government.

The workers of New Zealand have been taken in by the promises of their Labour Party as were the workers of Britain in 1945. Disillusionment must come when it is found that neither state control nor private ownership within the framework of capitalism will solve the ills thrown up by capitalism. Only when the workers of New Zealand, together with the workers of other lands, realise the reason for their exploitation and combine to overthrow it can Socialism be achieved.

W. P.

SPGB London Meeting: “The Romantics’ Critique of Capitalism.” (2025)

An SPGB meeting next Saturday at their Head Office in South London. Cut and pasted below is a post from Johnny Mercer, who will be the speaker at the meeting:

"CALLING All ROMANTIC REVOLUTIONARIES: Mulled wine and a Christmas critique of capitalism, what’s not to love? In this talk I’ll be discussing the revolutionary ideas of people like Shelley, Turner, and Mary Wollstonecraft. I’ll be analysing how romantic concepts influenced socialists from Marx to Morris. And how these ideas continued in art/anti-art movements from Dada, to the Situationists, to a bit on my own arts practice. As ever plenty of time for questions and discussion! 3pm Sat 13th of December, 52 Clapham High Street. PLEASE SHARE LONDON ARTSY FOLKS!"

Children in labour (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The traditional view of child labour is summed up in a Low Pay Unit pamphlet:

"Child Labour" conjures up images of the pauper apprentices of Tudor times and the rag and dust sifters and mill children of the early industrial revolution. Its heyday was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when industrialisation drew upon the labour of children in new and more wholesome ways than had been customary in the family economy of earlier years.

(Working Children 1985)

Newspaper reports in recent years however. suggest that child labour is neither a thing of the past nor confined to delivering newspapers, baby sitting or similar chores normally associated with children's work. "Scandal of pin money Pupils'' was the headline in the Daily Express on 12 December 1977; "Slave Labour ", screamed the Daily Mirror, 20 October 1982. In April 1973 The Times reported that three schoolboys, all aged thirteen, were employed in a factory operating highly dangerous, defective power presses for 17 pence an hour.

Child labour does of course have a long history. In an agrarian economy, where there was no distinction between employment in the home and other labour, men, women and children each had a task to perform tending crops and providing for everyday necessities. Children also played a role in industrial labour. The daughters and sons of artisans frequently helped in the manufacturing process or were apprenticed in the trade of their parents. Children of weavers had a staged career of tasks given to them according to their age and abilities, ranging from fetching and carrying to treading cotton, winding bobbins and spinning. Life for these children was hard and often involved long hours of work.

In the late sixteenth century children orphaned due to the death or poverty of their parents became the responsibility of the parish in which they lived. A system arose of apprenticing orphans to local craftsmen or placing them in special workshops to learn a trade. This was administered by local justices whose main concern was to rid the parish of any unwanted burden. The treatment of orphans varied from employer to employer but cases of cruelty and sadism were not unknown.

With the coming of the industrial revolution the parish workshops evolved into factories and the exploitation of children as slave labour was common. The practice of apprenticing orphans continued as late as the 1840s, when boards of guardians in Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire were found to be

. . . still getting rid of pauper boys of six. seven and eight by apprenticing them to colliers with a guinea thrown in "for clothes".

(E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class)

Child labour in modern times is seen as one of the unacceptable features of capitalism. Apologists for the system moralise about it but at the same time seek to convince us that a society in which a majority are economically coerced and treated as mere factors in the profit-making machine is the best the human race can hope to achieve. Workers are employed because they produce an economic surplus over and above their wages, which are inevitably very low for a large section of the workforce. According to the Low Pay Unit, figures for April 1986 show that 17 per cent of full-time workers were being paid less than £2.40 an hour, while over a third were receiving less than £3.00. Of the women who work part-time, 50 per cent were earning less than £2.40 an hour and 75 per cent received less than £3.00 an hour. In total, around 2 million women part-time workers and 1.6 million full-time workers. both men and women, received less than £2.40 an hour, including overtime pay. (Low Pay Unit: Britain's False Economy. 1987.)

When confronted by the exploitation of child labour socialists reply that the only answer is to end the system where a majority of men. women and, in many cases, children are treated as economic units. This can only be done by establishing, by democratic political means, a world-wide system where the means of production are owned in common and production takes place solely to meet the people's needs. In such a society the exploitation endemic in employment will be replaced by voluntary co-operation to produce the things people have democratically decided they need. All will have the right to take part in decisions about what is to be produced and how production is organised. Let's take a look at what the alternative — doing "something now" — has achieved in the last 180 years in the area of child labour.

One of the earliest pieces of legislation was the 1802 Health and Morale of Apprentices Act. Its aim was to limit children's working hours and its main concern was with pauper apprentices. It sought to abolish night work and limited the working day of apprentices in cotton mills to twelve hours. There were also provisions made for school on Sunday and proper clothing and sleeping arrangements. [To]  make sure that employers complied with the act, four independent factory inspectors were appointed to enforce the law among the 3,000 textile manufacturing establishments of the time.

Apart from the low standards set by the act, its major flaw was that enforcement depended on magistrates who were in most cases mill owners themselves. Similar problems affected another act passed in 1819 and sponsored by Sir Robert Peel, which outlawed employment in cotton mills for children under the age of nine. As it had no independent inspectorate it was largely ignored by mill owners.

Next came the Factory Act of 1833, which was based on the evidence of the Sadler Committee of 1832 and the Factory Commission of 1833. It outlawed the employment in all textile factories of children under the age of nine; between nine and thirteen no child was allowed to work more than 48 hours a week; for those aged thirteen to eighteen the limit was sixty-nine hours and anyone under twenty one years was prohibited from night work. Such was the concern to [missing text]

In 1840 a further factory commission investigated employment in the mines, discovering even worse conditions than those existing in the mills. Small children were used to operate ventilation traps which involved sitting in the dark, sometimes thirteen to fourteen hours. Other children were used to hurry coal down shafts, pushing great loads for miles with their heads while bent double. Soon after the commission published its report in 1842, the Mines Act was passed which prohibited the employment underground of children under ten and women. It also restricted the number of hours and types of work performed by children.

An important turning point in controlling child employment came with the Elementary Education Act of 1870. This provided elementary education on a national basis and set up an administration system of local school boards to keep track of attendance. The 1880 Education Act made school attendance compulsory for the first time and a child could only leave school at ten if he or she satisfied the attendance requirements. Children with poor attendance records were not allowed to leave until the age of thirteen. Prior to the 1880 act. the Factory and Workshops Act of 1878 had extended the 1833 Act to all factories and raised the minimum age of employment to ten. which also limited the hours children under fourteen could work to half the normal working day.

In 1920 the International Labour Organisation and the League of Nations met in Washington to draw up a convention on the employment of children binding on all ratifying nations. In Britain it was embodied in the Employment of Women. Young Persons and Children Act of 1920, which tied together past legislation and provided a list of types of employment which were prohibited to children under a minimum working age.

Subsequent acts such as the Children and Young Persons Act, 1933, the Factory Act of 1961 and the Infants Children and Young Persons Act. 1963 form the basis of modern child labour law. The most important aspects of these acts are the prohibition of child employment in industrial undertakings, a minimum age of thirteen for part-time employment, restrictions on hour and times of work done by children and the provision for local authority bye-laws which can set higher standards than the minimum requirements. There exists a wide variation between local authorities as to the extent of provisions under these bye-laws and the degree of care that is taken to see that they are enforced.

As with the nineteenth century act the major problem with more recent legislation concerns enforcement, responsibility for which falls mainly on three bodies — the Health and Safety Inspectorate. Local Authority Health Officers and the Education Welfare services. All of these bodies have other tasks apart from discovering the illegal employment of children and all are massively understaffed. It is estimated that the Health and Safety Inspectorate has only 750 general factory inspectors to cover 730,000 manufacturing establishments. Much of the education and welfare surveillance work on child labour is done by educational welfare officers through voluntary overtime, patrolling the streets outside normal hours of work.

Due to this understaffing routine inspections are more frequent in large firms or those where the risk of accident is considered high (for example, chemical plants). Less visible firms may never see a factory inspector. As a result "back street firms" — most likely to employ child labour illegally are least likely to be visited. In addition, educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry. As the Inner London Education Authority states:

The more serious kinds of illegal employment in factories, restaurants and building sites tend not to be detected because educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry.

(Working Children, pp. 12-13)

In 1973 an attempt was made to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the legal protection given to working children. The Employment of Children Act received the Royal Assent on 23 May of that year but as yet it still remains on the statute book and has never been fully implemented.

It is therefore not surprising that child labour is still widespread in modern Britain. A survey carried out by the Low Pay Unit and Open University in 1982-3 estimates its extent. Interviews of 1,700 children in the London, Luton and Bedfordshire areas found that, apart from newspaper delivering, children were employed in a wide range of jobs including retailing, catering and cleaning. Close to one in ten children in the survey had more than one job and half of these had more than two. While newspaper delivery accounted for one third of all children working, shop work accounted for one in five and farm work and cleaning both accounted for 13 per cent. A variety of other work performed by children included hotel and catering. painting and decorating, sewing machining. modelling, clerical work and work in street markets. More than one in five children were employed in manual jobs, cleaning, furniture removals, construction labour and garage work. The findings confirm that a majority of these children were in one way or another working illegally. An analysis of the data for London found that four out of five were illegally employed, either under age, working illegal hours or working in jobs they should not have been doing.

It does not require a degree in economics to appreciate that children are forced to work because of the financial position of their families. The survey indicated that there was a definite relationship between the socio-economic position of the families and child labour. The highest proportion of working children in the survey were from manual working class backgrounds (51 per cent) and the unemployed (52 per cent).

Neither is it any mystery why employers use child labour. It is of course a source of cheap and easily disposable labour power and savings can be made not only directly on wages but also indirectly. Children are invariably paid "cash in hand", do not appear on employers’ records and therefore are not subject to national insurance contributions. They are not members of a trade union even where the company is unionised. Neither have they any of the rights of adult workers, such as the right to claim unfair dismissal, the right to an itemised pay slip and, as they pay no national insurance, they have no right to sick pay. Furthermore they are not classified as employees under the Health and Safety at Work Act. If injured at work children have no right to compensation unless their parents can prove in court that the employer has been negligent in some respect. Since most children are employed illegally, taking such cases to court could result in the parents being deemed parties to such negligence.

Despite the large number of health and safety regulations applying to the employment of children, a large minority of those surveyed reported having accidents while in their current jobs. One third of all boys and 29 per cent of girls reported some accident or injury. The main causes were heavy weights, broken glass, slipping or falling and injuries from materials and machinery. Of all the children at work only 19 per cent of boys and 18 per cent of girls were given uniforms or any kind of protective clothing by their employers.

Apart from accidents, the health of working children suffers in other ways. In 1970 a group of teachers in Tynemouth conducted a survey of pupils to discover why so many were falling asleep in class. They discovered that of the 390 interviewed over one third were working illegally and many of them were being grossly overworked and underpaid. As the Low Pay Unit pamphlet suggests, these findings illustrate the fallacy of the view that employment is good for children's health and education. An official of the National Association of School Masters stated:

Children are late to school, fail to do their homework, fall asleep during lessons and are unable to take part in any out of school activities such as sports because they have to report to work.

(Working Children, p.32)

The exploitative use of child labour is not a thing of the distant past. Reform via legislation has failed. The enactment of new laws may give the illusion that something is being done but this is merely a surface appearance; the problem remains because its root cause has not been treated. Doing something now may sound appealing but the reality is that nothing changes because a system unfit for men. women and children remains firmly in operation.

Ray Carr

Blogger's Note:

Sadly, the original text was garbled in places. It looks like there was a typesetting/proof-reading mishap. I couldn't see any notices of corrections in later Standards.

New Reprint of Art, Labour and Socialism by William Morris (1962)

Party News from the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

This 1962 pamphlet was a reprint of the SPGB's 1907 pamphlet with an added modern assessment. Reprinted below is the foreword from the 1962 Executive Committee, plus the modern assessment.

Art, Labour & Socialism by William Morris

With a Modern Assessment

Foreword

An address that William Morris delivered at University College, Oxford, was reprinted by him in the magazine Today, in February 1884, under the title “Art Under Plutocracy”.

In 1907 the larger part of it was published by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in pamphlet form as Art, Labour and Socialism.

It has long been out of print and we are issuing it again because, in the words of our Foreword to our original edition:

“It is not often that an accepted master in the arts can express himself with lucid brevity in the language of the common people; and even less frequently is that master able to scientifically diagnose the conditions of his own craft”.

“It is therefore the more refreshing to discover a work by an admittedly great figure in the artistic world which gets down surely to rock bottom facts, and in a style of quite charming simplicity establishes the connection of art and labour, and the conditions of labour which, after all—and however distasteful the information may be to the school of the ‘Intellectuals’—art is, in the final analysis, no more than a reflection”.

“We do not claim for Morris that he was always a convincing and consistent instructor in economics. Indeed, his work in this direction, regarded as a whole, entitles him to no more than a place in the category of the Utopians . . . But this does not blind us to the fact that Morris occasionally struck shrewdly at the pretensions of a vainglorious and shoddy intellectuality, placed art in its proper perspective, and did effective service by his unequivocal insistence upon the necessity, not only of passive working class discontent with, but active working class revolt against, the system of society that enslaves them, robs them of the results of their labours, and incidentally deprives them of that joy in the work of their hands which stands for him at the very foundation of art”.

Executive Committee

Socialist Party of Great Britain

February 1962

 

A Modern Assessment

I. Morris and His Work

Most of the writings about Morris concentrate upon his work as a poet, interior decorator, printer and designer of coloured glass windows, but neglect the other side of his activities: speaker, teacher, and writer about Socialism.

He was already an international figure in the art world when the poverty, squalor and ugliness that constantly confronted him led him to probe into the problem, and he began to take an interest in Socialism, and finally came to study Marx’s Capital.

He joined the Social Democratic Federation, which claimed adherence to Marxism, in 1881. However, he soon became dissatisfied with its reformist policies and its electioneering tactics. He left the organisation along with Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax, Frederick Lessner (and old associate of Marx in the production of the Communist Manifesto) and Marx’s son-in-law Edward Aveling. They then formed the ‘Socialist League’ in 1884. Along with Bax he edited the ‘League’s’ Journal The Commonweal. In the first number of this journal, on the front page, there appeared an ‘Introductory’ by Morris and the ‘Manifesto’ of the League. The beginning of the ‘Introductory’ was as follows: – “We beg our readers’ leave for a few words in which to introduce them to this socialist journal, The Commonweal. In the first place we ask them to understand that the Editor and Sub-Editor of The Commonweal are acting as delegates of the Socialist League, under its direct control; any slip in principles, therefore, any misstatement of the aims and tactics of the League, are liable to correction from the representatives of that body. As to the conduct of The Commonweal, it must be remembered that it has one aim—the propagation of Socialism”.

This was certainly an innovation and a very promising start. A few paragraphs from the League’s ‘Manifesto’ will further indicate how far Morris and his associates had progressed in understanding:

“Fellow Citizens,

We come before you as a body advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is, we seek a change in the basis of Society—a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities.

As the civilised world is at present constituted, there are two classes of Society—the one possessing wealth and the instruments of its production, the other producing wealth by means of those instruments but only by the leave and for the use of the possessing classes.

These two classes are necessarily in antagonism to one another. The possessing class, or non-producers, can only live as a class on the unpaid labour of the producers—the more unpaid labour they can wring out of them, the richer they will be; therefore the producing class—the worker—are driven to strive to better themselves at the expense of the possessing class, and the conflict between the two is ceaseless. Sometimes it takes the form of open rebellion, sometimes of strikes, sometimes of mere widespread mendicancy and crime; but it is always going on in one form or other, though it may not always be obvious to the thoughtless looker-on.

We have spoken of unpaid labour: it is necessary to explain what that means. The sole possession of the producing class is the power of labour inherent in their bodies; but since, as we have already said, the richer classes possess all the instruments of labour, that is, the land, capital, and machinery, the producers or workers are forced to sell their sole possession, the power of labour, on such terms as the possessing class will grant them.

These terms are, that after they have produced enough to keep them in working order, and enable them to beget children to take their places when they are worn out, the surplus of their products shall belong to the possessors of property, which bargain is based on the fact that every man working in a civilised community can produce more than he needs for his own sustenance.

This relation of the possessing class to the working class is the essential basis of the system of producing for a profit, on which our modern Society is founded.”

Although this was written so long ago, how well it fits conditions today, despite the claims that capitalism has changed and society has progressed. There is a further quotation from the ‘Manifesto’ which makes the comparison even more apt:

“Nationalisation of the land alone, which many earnest and sincere persons are now preaching, would be useless so long as labour was subject to the fleecing of surplus value inevitable under the Capitalist system.

No better solution would be that of State Socialism, by whatever name it may be called, whose aim it would be to make concessions to the working class while leaving the present system of capital and wages still in operation: no number of merely administrative changes, until the workers are in possession of all political power, would make any real approach to Socialism.

The Socialist League therefore aims at the realisation of complete Revolutionary Socialism, and well knows that this can never happen in any one country without the help of the workers of all civilisation.”

The last three paragraphs show how far in advance Morris was in relation to the Socialism in one country Communists, the Labour Party, and the multitude of reformers who misuse the word Socialism.

As this pamphlet shows, what was of abiding interest to Morris was to build up a Socialist system, devoid of wage-slavery and degrading toil, in which conditions would enable the producer to find joy in his labour, and would therefore enable him to make articles that were both useful and beautiful.

In Art, Labour & Socialism Morris had something worthwhile to say to his generation; we must consider now whether it is relevant to the conditions of today—and tomorrow. Some of the problems are examined in the following pages.

II. Has Machinery Lightened Labour?

In Art, Labour & Socialism Morris invited his readers to look at the purpose for which employers had used machinery. Like Marx before him, Morris agreed with John Stuart Mill who had written in his Principles of Political Economy:

“It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”

Mill went on to say:

“They [machines] have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes.”

One evil consequence of the introduction of machinery was that it increased the employment of women and children in the factories. Sir William Ashley in his work, The Economic Organisation of England (Longmans, 1921, page 161), wrote of this development:

“The new machinery rendered the work physically so light that it became possible to employ women and children in large numbers; and the sinking of capital in costly machinery made it seem in the interest of employers to work that machinery as continuously as possible. Neither the employment of children nor excessive hours were absolutely new phenomena. Both had been seen in the domestic workshop. But the employment of children was now systematised and extended on a vast scale; and excessive hours, instead of being an occasional episode, say once a week, became a regular thing, every day in the week.”

In the same year that Mill’s work was published, 1848, Marx and Engels had written in the Communist Manifesto:

“ . . . in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery etc.”

Marx, Mill and Ashley were writing of a period when machinery was taking away the livelihood of craftsmen and forcing them to work in factories under harsh conditions and for long hours. Since then, as the working hours of most workers have been much reduced and child labour in factories has been made illegal, we may ask to what extent the statements made by Marx and Mill in 1848 would be true today. We can accept that there are fewer workers doing jobs which involve heavy lifting, hauling, hammering, excavating and other hard physical effort, but along with a fairly general shortening of the working day and working week labour has been intensified, the speed of machines has increased (and with it the number of accidents) and more workers are compelled to perform monotonous repetition work which can be as tiring as heavy physical labour. It is the aim of employers to exact as much effort in the shorter working week as before, a fact making itself felt in the workers’ fatigue at the end of the day and the week.

The claim made in the early days of machine production that machinery lightens the labour and increases the comfort of the worker is being made now for automation; but again the high capital cost is leading to a worsening of conditions—this time in the increase of shift working. Mr P. G. Hunt of the Labour Relations Staff of the Ford Motor Company wrote about this in 1958. After claiming that with automation “almost invariably . . . the physical effort of the operator is vastly reduced or even completely eliminated”, he went on:

“A further factor that emanates from the high initial cost of automated plant is the need to recoup on capital outlay within a reasonable period, which can be achieved only by high utilisation of the equipment concerned. Such a recoupment in turn can be achieved only by longer hours, and longer hours mean shift working. . . . There is no denying the unpopularity of shift work particularly night work—with the majority of those who are called upon to operate it. It seems clear, however, that the trend towards such working must continue and increase, and that automation is at least in part responsible for this” (Financial Times, 1 December 1958).

Even the reduced hours of work are an illusory gain because, with the concentration of manufacture in big industrial areas, workers are compelled to travel longer distances between home and work.

Machinery has clearly failed to give that lightening of toil that it could have given and that economists and employers claimed in the early days that it would. We have an illustration of this in the picture that industrialisation presents to workers in less developed countries. Far from being invited to enjoy the prospect of having machines to lighten toil for them, and raise their standard of living with less effort on their part, they are being told by their leaders to be prepared to work harder: Mr Jomo Kenyatta, leader of Kenya Africans, hit on the appropriate phrase of calling on his followers to be prepared to work as hard as white men! (Daily Express, 6 November 1961).

 III. The Employers’ Attitude to Machinery

We live in a world in which each day brings news of inventions and discoveries in the field of industrial machinery and methods; but not all of them are applied. Some never get beyond the stage of being tested; they are ideas that will not work in a practical way. But some which are proved to be technically sound and practical never come into commercial use. As it is put in a pamphlet on Automation: “Technically about every industrial operation could be made automatic but economically many are impracticable” (What is this Thing called Automation; published by ASSET). It is only the economically practicable ones that are of interest to employers, the ones that will increase their profit.

There could be no clearer illustration of this than the fact that employers, after installing new machinery, will even remove it if it does not pay. Over a century ago a Government Commission of Inquiry into the conditions of hand-loom weavers reported instances in 1834 “where employers gave up machinery and went back to hand labour as it was cheaper” (Industrial and Commercial Revolutions in Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century, Professor L C A Knowles. Second Edition, page 119). That happening in Britain in 1834 has its recent parallel in USA. The pamphlet on Automation referred to above relates how “In Cleveland, Ford management reverted to hand insertion of small liner bearings in the engine-block because automation of this process was uneconomical”.

What most commonly determines whether a new machine will be economic is the level of wages of the workers whom the machine will displace. It follows from this that variations of wage levels can cause machinery to be economic in one place and not in another and at one time and not at another.

Marx wrote about this in the eighteen-sixties:

“Hence the invention nowadays of machines in England that are employed in only North America; just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries machines were invented in Germany to be used only in Holland, and just as many a French invention of the eighteenth century was exploited in England alone” (Capital, Vol. I. Kerr Edition, 1906, page 429).

It is not labour-saving as such that the capitalist seeks, but cost-saving, and if for any reason wages are relatively low the capitalist will be quite content to carry on production by methods which employ large amounts of labour. As Marx put it, “Nowhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human labour-power for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery”.

It is the same in our own times. Machinery is manufactured in one country or locality where wages are low for use elsewhere in relatively high wage areas.

It was the scarcity of workers in rural areas of Britain and America during the two world wars that led to a great increase in the use of machinery that had been long available. Milking machines were being marketed for many years before labour-shortage caused them to be taken up in considerable numbers. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has the following on the use of these machines in USA: “The shortage and the high price of desirable labour for milking cows has extended the use of milking machine” (1950 Edition, Vol. 6, page 983). Even so it was estimated that in 1944, nearly 30 years after such machines were available, only 25 to 30 per cent of American dairy farmers used them.

Sometimes new machines are brought into use not because they directly save labour or cost, but because they give additional precision, which is of course indirectly profitable for the manufacturers selling the products of the machine in competition with other, less efficient products. And sometimes the gain is simply speed of production. It may be good business for a company to use machinery which is quicker, but the products of which are more costly, if by this means the products can be put on the market for quick sale, in advance of the cheaper but more slowly completed products of rival firms.

This is a particular example of a widespread waste that results from capitalist competition. The successful competitor who captures the market is not concerned that his success may mean the bankruptcy of unsuccessful rivals and the consequent breaking up of plant and machinery which could still be useful. When competition is keen it will induce profitable companies to scrap their own plant and machinery while it still has years of useful life before it in order to install costly improved machinery that will enable them to keep ahead in the race for markets.

The picture of capitalism’s use of machinery is hardly complete without reference to the construction of a £30,000 mail bag, power machine shop in Leicester Prison in November 1961, ending the years-long prison labour of hand-stitching. Mechanisation was needed “to meet the mail bag supply demands from the Post Office”.

IV. Socialism and Work

The establishment of socialism will bring far-reaching changes in production and distribution, flowing logically from the ownership of the means of producing wealth being transferred to the whole of society.

The products of labour will no longer be privately owned; incomes from property ownership and from employment will alike disappear, along with buying, selling, and profit-making.

In distribution the principle will be “according to need”, and, of course, without the double standards that now exist throughout the capitalist world, of best quality for the rich, and varying degrees of shoddiness for the poor; which, in turn, presupposes that in production every person will give “according to his or her ability” and will see to it that there are no poor quality goods turned out.

Unfettered access to educational and training facilities will enable all to acquire knowledge and skill and end the existing barriers between unskilled and skilled, manual and mental labour.

Great demands will be made on the productive capacity of society but there will be ample means of satisfying them. With the ending of capitalism enormous additional resources of men and materials will become available through stopping the waste of arms and armaments, and the innumerable activities that are necessary only to capitalism, including the governmental and private bureaucracies, banking and insurance, and the monetary operations that accompany every branch of production and distribution. On a conservative estimate this release of capacity will double the number of men and women available for the work of useful production and distribution. In addition, we may expect a continuing annual increase of productivity resulting from the accumulation of skill and knowledge and of productive equipment.

With these large additional resources at its disposal society will easily be able—if need be with some loss of productivity in particular fields—to end excessive hours of work, harmful speed and intensity, and unnecessary night and shift work, and to use machinery to replace human labour for types of work that cannot be other than unpleasant. This socialist policy will be a reversal of the capitalist policy applied in the nationalised coal industry, the head of which, Lord Robens, can declare that “there are literally thousands of jobs in industry which can give no satisfaction to the workers and never could” and can at the same time be increasing anti-social hours of work by pressing for shift working round the clock in order to avoid “expensive machinery” standing idle for a large part of the 24 hours (Times, 9 October 1961, and Sunday Telegraph, 9 July 1961).

Morris and Marx stated a positive attitude to labour, but before considering what they said it will be useful to examine the criticism that both were viewing the problem in relation to the ruin of craftsmanship by machinery, and that in the present century the problem is a different one and needs a different approach.

Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto to which reference has already been made, wrote about the advent of machinery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century:

“Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarian has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”

One critic of Marx was the late Henri de Man who published a study of machine work in Germany in the early nineteen-twenties, part of which was republished in England under the title Joy in Labour (George Allen & Unwin, 1929).

His criticism was that Marx drew a general conclusion about machine work based largely on the textile industries and that while that conclusion remained unquestionably applicable to “large strata of the working class . . . there are other strata to which the technical developments of the last eighty years have made it completely inapplicable, so that of them the reverse is true” (page 85).

Henri de Man’s two conclusions were that even under capitalism “the existence of detail work is not necessarily a cause of distaste for work” and that it is not impossible for skilled machine work to give the work full satisfaction even though much machine work fails to do so. We can accept both points, but they do not affect the validity of the general principle behind Marx’s words. Marx was not arguing that work with machinery is necessarily an evil. Like Morris, he recognised that it would be a positive gain if much unpleasant and degrading manual work was done by machines: as already mentioned, one of his charges against British capitalists was that they had failed to replace labour of that sort by machinery because it did not pay them to do so.

Following on the same train of thought Marx maintained that Socialism would do what capitalists had failed to do and that “in a communist society (*) there would be a very different scope for the employment of machinery than there can be in a bourgeois society” (Capital Vol I, Chapter XV, Section 2).

In a speech made in 1856 Marx had this to say of the possibilities of machinery: “Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it”.

(*) In the middle of the nineteenth century Marx preferred to use the word communism because of the current misleading ideas associated with the word Socialism. Later on, he used the two words interchangeably to mean what the SPGB means by Socialism: which, of course, has no relationship to the misuse of the terms Socialism and Communism as applied to Russia today.

The central point of Marx’s criticism was that man should not be an appendage of a machine, doing monotonous work robbed of all individual character and charm, any more than he should be doing manual work of a like kind.

There are three principles that can be applied to work and production. The capitalist would like to have a working class which “lives to produce”; working class life being subordinated to the need of producing profit. A second attitude is that of many non-socialist workers and trade unions, that workers should “produce to live”; work being accepted as a necessary evil, to be kept to a minimum, and “life” to be lived in the leisure hours.

Marx and Morris took a third view, that the aim for a society of free men and women should be that work is part of life, no more to be neglected than other intelligently conducted human activities.

Marx, writing in 1875, stated his view with force and passion:

“ . . . when the slavish subordination of the individual to the yoke of the division of labour has disappeared, and when concomitantly the distinction between mental and physical work has ceased to exist; when labour is no longer the means to live, but is in itself the first of vital needs; when the productive forces of society have expanded proportionately with the multiform development of the individuals of whom society is made up—then will the narrow bourgeois outlook be transcended, and then will society inscribe upon its banners ‘from everyone according to his capacities, to everyone according to his needs’” (From Marx’s Criticism of the Gotha Programme, SLP Edition, page 9).

There is a certain irony in the situation that while many workers are content to accept tedious, repetition work as a necessity some employers have themselves discovered that its damaging effect on the workers is such that it does not pay. The Economist (2 December 1961), writes about this discovery:

“In the early years of scientific management it was presumed that the greater the breakdown of jobs into their component parts, the greater the efficiency. The trouble with this, however, was that men came to be treated as mere extensions to their machines. Today, industrial theorists have come to realise that beyond a certain point the simplification of work creates so many problems of boredom and dissatisfaction among workers that diminishing returns may set in. as a result, in many firms the pendulum has begun to swing back a little, and some tasks are being deliberately re-combined to make their execution more complex”.

It will be seen that Marx posed the same issue as did Morris. Is it still a real issue? Some people think that automation will abolish all work problems, and that we shall have workless production:

“Today our life is largely shaped by having to produce goods for our feeding, for our clothing, and so on. Suppose we could just turn on a spigot and have all these basic things just as we now have water?” (Robert Jungk, Guardian, 2 November 1961).

That idea came into the minds of many people (Robert Owen among them) in the early days of machinery; but for the foreseeable future it is a fantasy. Not that it would be technically impossible to build a factory operated by very few workers (this is an early possibility); but that is not production without workers, any more than the automatic telephone system or the driverless train system is production without workers. What has been going on for a century or more is the progressive elimination of workers from some manual operations, with simultaneous increased numbers of machine-making workers in the metal, engineering and electrical industries and of workers in engaged on maintaining the machines. Overall, there is a continuing small net saving of labour, but no dramatic developments that would change the present dependence of production on human labour in some form or other.

What then should be the Socialist attitude to the issues posed by Marx and Morris? There is no doubt what the answer must be. In a free society, depending for its healthy functioning on agreement and voluntary co-operation, in which “the government of persons will have given way to the administration of things”, people will not wish to spend the working part of their lives as human automatons serving machines, any more than as human automatons performing monotonous manual operations. The principle must be that people in a Socialist society shall be able to bring to all the various aspects of life, including work, all qualities of body and mind, skill, knowledge, thought and imagination.

Arts, crafts and machine techniques will all have their place as Marx and Morris would have urged. The difference since their day is that powers and methods of production have become vastly greater and more varied; which means that man’s power to control the conditions of his life is correspondingly greater. He has potentially must greater freedom of choice and it is inconceivable that under Socialism man will decide to enslave himself to productive processes of his own making.

We are confident that the reader will find Morris’s work ideas worth thinking about, including that most important idea of all, that in order to get a better system of society it is necessary to get rid of Capitalism and establish Socialism.

Booms and Slums (2007)

From the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who has read Frederick Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England will long remember much of what it says. Page after page describes the lives of workers in the big cities in 1844. Two boys in London, for instance, were arrested for stealing a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop: the magistrate discovered that their mother had sold or pawned all the family’s possessions in order to buy food. Many others had little or no furniture and slept on the floor, covered in rags.

The accounts of slum dwellings are sometimes hard to believe. Perhaps the worst was the Little Ireland area of Manchester, where four thousand people lived in overcrowded, unsanitary, decrepit cottages and the filth and stench were all but intolerable. Similar conditions were found in Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Glasgow, and so on. It is difficult to disagree with Engels’ statement that working people were enduring ‘a condition unworthy of human beings’.

In 1971 Robert Roberts published The Classic Slum, an account of his upbringing in Salford in the early twentieth century. In 1910, he records, his mother cajoled their landlord into installing a cast-iron bath (which meant an extra shilling a week in rent). Several neighbours came to look at the bath, its taps and so on: they had never used or even seen a bath before. Workers scrimped and saved to afford a rag rug and a couple of framed pictures, let alone ‘luxuries’ such as a watch or a bike. Getting by from week to week often relied on pawning their Sunday best clothes. In looking back at his childhood and the lives of his neighbours, Roberts refers to ‘the spoiled complexions, the mouths full of rotten teeth, the varicose veins, the ignorance of simple hygiene, the intelligence stifled and the endless battle merely to keep clean’. Such were the good old days amid the flourishing of the British Empire.

And is it all just in the Victorian and Edwardian past? While homelessness and bad housing still exist, can it be said that slums — crowded, filthy, nasty — are no longer the lot of most? Mike Davis’ book Planet of Slums describes a world where one in three of the urban population, mainly in the ‘Third World’, live in slums. It goes without saying that slum life is bad for your health and life expectancy. Landslides, floods and earthquakes threaten those who live in shoddy housing in marginal areas. Fires, whether accidental or deliberately set by property developers, can spread so fast that nobody can escape.

Sanitation is another disaster area, with the situation having changed little since Engels’ day. Sewage systems are virtually non-existent in many cities: Davis cites one slum area in Nairobi which had just ten working toilets for forty thousand people. But there is hope for the future, as in some places pay toilets have become a hugely profitable growth industry — though of course they’re not so convenient for the millions who cannot afford to use them.

Profiting from poverty is widespread. Such is the population density in slums that landlords make plenty of money from even the poorest neighbourhoods. Many cities in Asia and Africa are effectively owned by small numbers of landlords, and those who rent from them are the most powerless of all. Squatting becomes increasingly difficult as vacant land is developed and forcible evictions increase: over three-quarters of a million evicted in Harare in 2005, for instance. Slum-dwellers often have little choice but to fight back by building their own homes or resorting to food riots.

Cities like Manchester in Engels’ time were essentially the result of the Industrial Revolution. But in contrast, Davis argues, the growth of megacities and hence of megaslums over the last twenty years or so has been marked by deindustrialisation, as factories have closed in places such as Mumbai, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo. Like Mexico City and Jakarta, these have enormous populations but far smaller economies. The new slums are also mostly on the peripheries of the cities rather than in inner-city areas, and so usually lack any half-way decent transport infrastructure.

The financial institutions of global capitalism have played a major role in maintaining the regime of slum living. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have helped finance slum ‘improvement’ programmes in city after city, via privatisation of housing supply and the ending of food subsidies. The result has not been to eradicate slums, of course, but to spread ‘informal’ employment which lacks contracts and bargaining power. Along with this has come an expansion of child labour along the lines recorded by Engels and Dickens.

The development of capitalism, then, has not done away with the horrors of slums. Inadequate housing continues to exist in ‘advanced’ countries, with an estimated 100,000 homeless people in Los Angeles and one child in seven growing up in bad housing in the UK. Perhaps two million American families will lose their homes over the next couple of years, as the sub-prime crisis bites. Worldwide, as many as one billion people live — or do their best to create some kind of life — in slums. While the rich reside in their gated communities, the poor dwell in conditions of scarcely-imaginable squalor, marginalised in terms of work and family life. A Socialist society would face a tremendous task in replacing slums with decent housing, but that is a problem that capitalism can never tackle let alone solve.

Paul Bennett

Coal Face-offs (2024)

Joseph Skipsey

From the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conflict has always been integral to capitalism. The contradictory relationship between employers and employed erupts periodically into often bitter, at times deadly, conflict. Workers have banded together to fight for their mutual interests only to be met by intimidation and even physical force on behalf of employers, often by the forces of the state.

2024 is the 40th anniversary of the most recent protracted struggle against a blatantly determined government bent on nothing less than breaking the power of trade unions in general, the National Union of Mineworkers in particular.

Miners have long been at the forefront of struggles for better wages and working conditions. An industry bedevilled by very obvious dangers benefitted from the close communities generated. However, such social, and political, solidarity was always perceived to be a threat by mine owners and state alike.

One hundred and fifty years previous to the Great Strike, in 1832, the Durham and Northumberland coalfields were riven by collier strikes and belligerent responses to those industrial actions. An instance of this was the Battle of Goose Green in Gateshead. A strike by miners was met by a direct attempt to break it by employers bringing in unemployed lead miners from other areas of the country. They needed to be housed, so the owners resorted to evicting the striking miners and their families from their tied housing. Unsurprisingly there was determined resistance which resulted in armed special constables being deployed to enforce the evictions.

When some of that force were disarmed by miners, who then had weapons they could use, they became a significant threat. This resulted in troops from a barracks in Newcastle being sent to extinguish this act of rebellion. A clear example of the state deploying its forces to protect the interests of capital, in this case, mine owners.

In the same year, Cuthbert Skipsey, a pitman at Percy main colliery, near Tynemouth, was shot and killed outside The Pineapple, a pub in the village of Chirton, North Shields. It was an incident highlighting the difference in treatment a miner might expect from the authorities, compared with when a victim was of the authorities, such as a magistrate.

Cuthbert Skipsey was generally regarded as quiet and inoffensive. A meeting of striking miners taking place in Chirton was confronted by special constables and what was described as an affray ensued.

It seems that Cuthbert stepped forward intending to diffuse an explosive situation. Whether his action was genuinely misunderstood or there was malice, one of the constables, George Weddle drew a pistol and shot Skipsey.

The death of the respected collier, and the subsequent plight of his wife and eight (or 6, accounts vary) children was, unsurprisingly, the cause of outrage in the community. This resulted in Weddle’s arrest. His trial, on 3 August, and conviction for manslaughter lasted 12 hours and led to a sentence of six months imprisonment with hard labour.

Previously, on 1 August, another collier, William Jobling, was found guilty of killing Nicholas Fairless, a magistrate. He was sentenced to death, his body to be hung in chains near the location of the crime.

The death of Cuthbert Skipsey had a rather unlikely outcome. His family was plunged into poverty, his children being expected to do whatever they could to ease their dire circumstances, such as gathering nettles for the cooking pot.

Newly born around the time of his father’s death, Joseph Skipsey, aged 7, became employed, in what had been his father’s workplace, Percy Main Colliery, as a trapper. Twelve hour shifts underground opening and closing trapdoors used to control air flow to, hopefully, prevent the build-up of gases.

As it was just hewers digging the coal, the only work activity that was actually directly paid, at the face who had any light. So a trapper would spend his or her shift in complete darkness. A situation from which a phrase was coined that is still in use; ‘so-and-so’ is not worth the candle.

From such an unpromising beginning Joseph went on to become a poet, friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Oscar Wilde and others of the literary world. He became secretary of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, Custodian of Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford upon Avon and recipient of an annual pension awarded by Queen Victoria.

There was a somewhat tenuous link between Joseph and the Queen. On 16 January 1862 at Hartley Colliery, near Whitley Bay, the huge arm of the steam pumping engine sheared off and fell into the single shaft of the pit, effectively sealing it.

204 men and boys were trapped and perished. Joseph Skipsey marked this tragedy by writing The Hartley Calamity, a 25 stanza ballad poem. He toured the area giving readings to raise money for the widows and orphans. Queen Victoria, on learning of this tragedy, pressed her ministers to legislate to outlaw single shaft pits. From then all mines had to have at least two ways in and, more importantly two ways out.

A life that began in tragedy commemorated one tragedy amongst so many in that industry. Coal mining serves as an exemplar of the impact of capitalism on working class lives, too often the premature losing of those lives.

Of course, the situation in mining changed from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, as it did in wider society. Engels had recognised when he wrote about the condition of the labouring masses that the state would have to intervene to bring some stability to capitalism by curbing its worst excesses.

While the depredations of capitalism were mitigated they have not been, and cannot be, erased altogether. The nationalisation of coal mining did a great deal to improve the conditions in which miners laboured. However, the portrayal of nationalisation as a socialist act was and is grievously mistaken. It could not be possible for miners to take strike action in 1972, ’74 and then 1984-5 if they, as workers, were the owners of the industry. They would have been striking against themselves.

Even if miners had become the mine owners, the rest of the working class would have been excluded from that ownership, which would have been effectively private. A non-mine worker wanting coal to meet a need for fuel would not have had free access to it.

The miners’ strike laid bare how the state and its legal system will always be stacked against the working class acting on its own behalf. Until that is workers realise that only by dispossessing capital of the means of wealth production and deploying those means mutually to meet their own needs.

Until that happens then, in the words of Joseph Skipsey:

Not rest or peace, but toil and strife,

Do there the soul enthral;

And turn the precious cup of life

Into a cup of gall.

(From The Stars are Twinkling)

Dave Alton

The Bogey Man (1945)

F

rom the March 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ruling classes of all time have used in their armoury of weapons the powerful one of leadership. In order that the workers may be prevented from discovering their own strength and power, priests, politicians and teachers have saturated the workers’ minds with awe, fear and reliance upon some great deliverer, spiritual and otherwise. In times of stress, social, economic or political, the workers’ thoughts (skilfully prepared) turn to a “leader” or “saviour.” This mental condition enables the ruling class to canalise the thought-tendencies of the workers away from the emergent growing class concept of events to one of individualist responsibility, all dependent upon a “good” or “bad” leader. Parents having been trained that way themselves, continue on the same lines with their children.

In order to curb the ardent spirits of their unruly progeny, mothers call to their aid their own childhood teachings, and threaten their offspring with fears of a “bogey man.” The ruling class do the same. In the first years of the nineteenth century British capitalism had as its challenger the new youthful capitalism of France, and in order to harness the common people to their war machine, preached fear of the French through the medium of “bogey man” number one—Napoleon. Whilst the common people were dying at Waterloo to prevent “their” country from being stolen, three million acres of “common” land was filched by various enclosure acts. Four years after (August, 1819) the men who had won Waterloo were peacefully assembled in Peter’s Fields, Manchester, listening to orator Hunt, when the Yeomanry charged them, and the subsequent massacre became known as Peterloo. Half a century after (the Peterloo and Waterloo heroes being safely dead) British capitalism was in danger at its Empire gateway in the Mediterranean, so the workers had to be frightened by “bogey man” number two. This was the Czar of Russia, who on behalf of his own ruling class was seeking a warm-water port. The bones of British working men lay bleaching on the Crimean snows in a war waged so that “Russia shall not have Constantinople.” Half a century later we fought a war to see that she should have it. For fifty years after the Crimean war decent sized “bogey men” were scarce, and only practice matches were played against small-timers learning the trade, such as Dinizulu, Charka, Lobengula, the Mahdi, the Mad Mullah, etc., but the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the present century brought us “bogey man” number three—the Boer Kruger. Now here were the ingredients for a “just and righteous” war. We fought it to free the “outlander,” give “equal rights to all whites,” and at the same time collar the gold of the Rand and the diamonds of Kimberley. The net result being—two independent republics lost their “independence,” cheaper Chinese labour introduced into the mines, and a big slice of Africa marked red on the map. The workers of Britain got an extra dose of unemployment, but had laid low “that” bogey man. Another dozen years passed, and “bogey man” number four appeared on the scene. Not a Frenchman, not a Russian, not a Boer, but a German—the Kaiser. Once again the workers, true to their training, determined to lay him low, and fear of the “bogey man” became most pronounced in such questions as “What would you do if the Germans came?” This time there was to be no nonsense. We would make Germany pay and hang the Kaiser. Alas! the workers paid in blood and tears and intensified toil for some and unemployment for millions, and they didn’t even hang the Kaiser; he settled in Doorn, doing well until he went to his hall in Valhalla. Will the workers always fall for a “bogey man,” or will they learn Socialism?

Lew.

Railways and their Rise to Monopoly. (1906)

From the September 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

The study of our railways is interesting and instructive in view of the rapid rise and development of this form of capitalism to monopoly.

The first railway sanctioned by Parliament, known as the Surrey Iron Railway, from Wandsworth to Croydon, was opened in 1805, under the “Iron Railway or Tram-road Act.” passed in 1801, which authorised the construction of a railway for the conveyance of goods and coal. The line was open to the general use of traders and carriers, who supplied their own vehicles and horses (horse-power being the only motive power used), for which the railway company were entitled to charge tolls.

Passing over a period of a few years, during which this Act was followed by several others, we come to the “Stockton and Darlington Railway of 1821 for the construction of a horse tramway. But before its completion, George Stephenson having established the value of the locomotive, application was made to Parliament in 1823 for permission to use steam-power ; the Act allowing the Company to charge a toll “for every gig, landau, waggon, car, coach, chariot, chaise, cart or other carriage which shall be drawn or used on the said railways or tram-roads, for the conveyance of passengers or small packages or parcels.”

The “Great Western Railway Act” (1835), states “That all persons shall have free liberty to pass along and upon and to use and employ the said railway with carriages properly constructed as by this Act directed, upon payment only of such rates and tolls as shall be demanded by this said Company,” etc.

Thus we see that the first idea in the construction of railways was merely the provision of another means of transit (the existing means being the roads and canals) open to the use of anyone upon payment of a toll. But it was not long before it occurred to the railway companies to be their own carriers, “to provide haulage as well as the road, and passenger carriages as well as the haulage,” the general economical advantages securing the ready adoption of the new system.

A Parliamentary enquiry in 1840 resulted in the railway companies being permitted to perform all the duties of general carriers, so that in the course of forty years, from being merely the providers of the railway for the use of carriers, they combined both functions and became the general carriers themselves. Thus the seeds of monopoly were sown.

As time passed the railway companies found that while they held a monopoly with regard to traffic in which quick transport was the first consideration, they had, in the carrying of minerals, grain, timber, etc., where speed was not the prime necessity, formidable competitors in the canals, whose small maintenance and working expenses gave them the advantage (it was declared that goods could be conveyed by water at one-tenth the cost of conveyance by railway). The railway companies therefore set themselves to kill such dangerous competitors, and have succeeded to such an extent that they now control more than one-third of the canal mileage. In evidence before the Canal Committee in 1883, Mr. Condor stated that: “they have obtained their 1,717 miles (out of some 3,800 miles) of canals so adroitly selected as to strangle the whole of the inland water traffic.”

Having obtained a monopoly, and by an amalgamation among themselves to keep up rates and fares made monopoly more complete, “from every district between John O’Groats and Land’s End, and from every industry and trade, come constant complaints against railway companies charging rates that are excessive, preferential, and unjust, and withholding facilities which the traders believe they have a legal right to demand . . . There is no need to attribute to railway directorates either an undue lack of patriotism, or motives uncovered by the usual commercial code. (Oh ! that elastic commercial code.) They are elected and paid to serve the interests of their shareholders, and if these are not coincident with the interests of the public then they can scarcely be blamed for the antagonism. The short-comings will have to be looked for in the intrinsic character of the present system.”

There is something delightfully quaint in this admission. Railway directors are elected to produce a profit, and if the interests of the public do not coincide with the interests of the companies, well—so much the worse for the public.

The cry of the commercial capitalist against the railway monopolist is but an expression of the commercial war in which one capitalist section obtains a pull over the other—and uses it. But while they compete one with the other they are united in the constant endeavour to wring an ever greater profit from the producers of wealth—the working class.

There is not the least doubt that railway rates have had a damaging effect upon British trade generally, nor, which is the important matter from the Socialist point of view, is there the least doubt that the private ownership of the means of transit (in common with the private ownership of all the other means of life), is entirely detrimental to the interests of the working class, but “these short-comings will have to be looked for in the intrinsic character of the present system.”

And since these short-comings are inherent in and inseparable from the present system (of private ownership in the means of life), it follows that the remedy must be in the abolition of the present system, and the substitution of another in which all means of production and distribution (land, factories, railways, etc.) are worked by and in the interest of—not a section of the community, to the hurt of the community in general —but in the interests of the WHOLE COMMUNITY.

This is the mission of The Socialist Party of Great Britain, to show the workers how they will have to effect the change, how they may emancipate themselves from the thraldom of Capitalism.

As every interest sends its representatives to the legislative bodies of the country to safe-guard those interests, so must the working class send their representatives to seize the reins of political power. The working class form about seven-eighths of the population, and hold over two-thirds of the voting power. They can possess themselves of political power directly they are ready. Therefore—

“Arise, ye workers of the world,

Gird ye your loins for the strife ;

For in thy power united lies,

The promise of a truer life.”

W. W. Hunt