A Useful Volume Reviewed. (1914)

Book Review from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour in Irish History. By James Connolly. Paper covers, 1s net. Published by Maunsel & Co. Ltd., 96, Mid Abbey St., Dublin.

Home Rule and Carsonism are filling the columns of newspapers. Wild and furious threats, accompanied by more or less genuine spasms of gun-running, are thrown out as to what will happen if Home Rule is established, and thousands of workers both in England and Ireland are quite excited as to the result of the conflict.

At such a time much good may be done by drawing attention to certain historical evidences for the fundamental facts so important for the workers’ consideration.

And this book will largely help in such a desirable end.

Written by one who has made some study of the Marxian analysis of society, it cuts through the sham superficialities of the struggle between Home Ruler and Ulsterite, Catholic and Protestant, and shows how in Ireland, as everywhere else where classes exist, the real fight, the fundamental antagonism, is between those who own the means of life and those who have nothing but the sale of their labour-power to depend upon for an existence.

The development of the worker in Ireland is traced from the days of the Williamite wars to the present day, after a short account has been given of the previous conditions.

A particularly useful part of the book, in face of the many romances dealing with the time, is the description of the period preceding and covering the “Act of Union” between England and Ireland. The analysis of the various “revolutionary” leaders and their movements, with the exposure of frauds like Grattan, Flood, and O’Connell, is well worthy of study. Above all the fear and hatred of the working class by the wealth owners is shown by their slimy scheming to disarm the volunteers at that time.

These consisted of three sections—the Liberty Corps—working class; the Merchants’ Corps—capitalist class; and the Lawyers’ Corps—members of the legal profession.

As the author puts it:

“The Government [Irish Government bear in mind] had to use force to seize    the arms of the working men, but the capitalists gave up theirs secretly as the     result of a private bargain . . . and the lawyers privately handed their guns over     to the enemies of the people.”

    

“The working men fought, the capitalists sold out, and the lawyers bluffed.”    (p. 58).

An interesting account of a co-operative colony founded at Ralahine, County Clare, in 1831 is given, but the reader will tend to gather the impression that it is by such means the workers will emancipate themselves—an impression distinctly reactionary in face of the growth of the Social forces and the power needed for their economic manipulation.

There is one part of the work, however, to which distinct exception can be taken. This is the section dealing with the first Irish Socialist. One is here curiously reminded of the same attitude taken up by Miss Beatrice Potter (now Mrs Sidney Webb) in her book on "Co-operation".

The attitude is one of suggesting a thing without actually saying it.

The author claims that the great forerunner of Marx—standing between the Utopians and the latter—was an Irishman named William Thompson, who, among numerous notable statements, laid bare the source of value in his work entitled, An Inquiry into the Principles of Wealth most conducive to Human Happiness, etc, published 1824, where it is laid down that all labour can be reduced to unskilled labour of the average kind at a given time.

Miss Potter says Marx took his notion of “homogenous human labour” from Thompson and incorporated it in Capital.

The author says “In the English speaking world the work of this Irish thinker is practically unknown, but on the Continent of Europe his position has long been established” (p. 115).

Now what is common to both Connolly and Miss Potter is the curious fact that neither of them state who established Thompson’s position and made him known on the Continent. The uninstructed reader may learn with surprise that the person responsible was—Karl Marx!

Many years ago Dr Aveling pointed out in a little book called Darwin Made Easy, that the various “objections” by ignorant Christians and parsons to Darwin’s work were all first formulated by Darwin himself in the Origin of Species, and no opponent had ever brought forward any other. So with Marx. All the opponents of Marx who are so loud in their claims to have discovered “forerunners” of his work and ideas are all of them—German, English and Irish alike—indebted to Marx, who first discovered and gave full credit to them in his various works, particularly in the Poverty of Philosophy and the Critique of Political Economy.

And among others he points out that Benjamin Franklin had already in 1721 stumbled on the secret of undifferentiated labour as the source of value, though he (Franklin) did not work the idea out to any extent.

However, it is the fashion to-day among the shallow critics of scientific Socialism who are unable to refute the case or show a flaw in the arguments of Marx to pretend to demolish that genius by finding someone who “anticipated” him, and keeping “gradely dark” the fact that the very person they are indebted to for such discovery is Marx himself.

Jack Fitzgerald

"Rake's Progress" (Political Version) (1946)

From the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

The majority of people know Mr. Strachey as Minister of Food. There is a minority who have come to regard him as an exponent of Marxism as well. Indeed, Tom Driberg, M.P., in Reynolds' (1/6/46), said that it was as a Marxian economist that he approached the Labour front bench. That a copy of Marx’s “Capital” leaves Mr. Strachey’s bookshelves when invited to Cabinet discussions is doubtful. Nevertheless, in an article in the Daily Herald (28/5/46) on Mr. Strachey, Mr. Francis Williams resolutely refused to convey any suggestion of a Marxist skeleton in the cupboard of Mr. Strachey’s political past and merely commented "He wrote able and bitter political works, some of which have been regarded as minor classics of the Left.” In these minor classics Mr. Strachey developed major attacks on the Labour Party. In the ”Coming struggle for power” (p. 338) he accused them ”of laying down the working-class organisation necessary for Fascism.” Theorists like G. D. H. Cole, who, he alleged, believed in a form of controlled high-wage-paying capitalism, he charged with having the same political objectives as the Fascist Corporate State. His now somewhat uncomfortable prognostication of Mr. Morrison was that he envisaged a Whitehall or Smith Square controlled capitalism, adding that the difference between Mr. Morrison’s views and those of G. D. H. Cole were merely one of emphasis and mode of expression. His own party he summed up as—“Labour Party rotten before it was ripe” (“The Nature of Capitalist Crisis,” p. 341-352). From the Herald's viewpoint such a skeleton is best kept under lock and key. It was left to the New Statesman to frivolously twitter “Mr. Strachey’s series of Socialist studies must have been the one brilliantly successful attempt to translate Marxism into the King’s English.” While the King’s English reputation of the New Statesman is deservedly high, their qualifications to pronounce on Marxism is notoriously low. It is, of course, Mr. Stracliey’s Marxism which is in question.

Mr. Strachey’s exit from the Conservative Party into the Cloud-Cuckooland of I.L.P. politics, his pre- Fascist Mosley associations and monetary reform theories, are without significance apart from confused thinking. His Marxist reputation rests largely on the fact that via the Gollancz Press he spread and popularised Stalinist fairy-tales of Socialism in Russia for political adolescents of the vaguely termed middle class. Ironically enough it was the Fabian anti-Marxist Webbs who were his intellectual paramours in all this, their work, ‘‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation,” his authority. (“The Theory and Practice of Socialism,” p. 49.) The Public Hangman is not usually asked to write a thesis on the need for the abolition of Capital Punishment. Fabianism, whose high priests were the Webbs, is merely State Capitalism, and it was G. B. Shaw who, on returning from a visit to Russia, proclaimed, “The Bolsheviks have only realised the Fabian Programme.” The Webbs’ work on Russia was then but the priestly blessing of their own creed. The "Marxist” Strachey appears as the uninvited acolyte in the Fabian temple.

It is not surprising, then, that he hailed the new Russian Constitution (direct vote and secret ballot) as a super Democracy, quoting Soviet leaders’ views that a classless society was coming into being (‘‘Theory and Practice of Socialism,” p. 148), although admitting (p. 165) that hitherto the illiteracy of the Russian population had prevented it. Later, Engels is quoted to show that the State is an instrument of ruling-class coercion. The growth of Soviet State bureaucracy indicates, then, a classless society’s need for increasing ruling-class coercion. Leaders, however, were chosen in Russia through long and searching apprenticeship in the Communist Party (p. 163) and were controlled far more effectively than those of the capitalists. It is this, he said, which made working-class control unique. The carefully controlled “chosen” were later liquidated as wreckers, spies and Fascist criminals. Truly this form “of working-class control” was unique. In the section, the Economic System (‘‘Theory and Practice of Socialism”), Mr. Strachey heavily underscored his ignorance of the nature of Socialist society. To Marxists, Socialism is the democratic ownership of the sources of production. But not only will the producers control the instruments of Labour, they will also determine the character and manner of the productive process by which the products of their labour are turned out. Mr. Strachey simply denies this. For him, Socialism is planned production par excellence, the Soviet model its working hypothesis. For common ownership he substitutes a Planning Authority which would control and decree wealth production and distribution, quantitatively and qualitatively. His quick phrase that the Planning Authorities’ conscious and deliberate decisions will be set up and controlled by the community (p. 42) is a pure verbal concession. Ownership and control of wealth production are inseparably integrated; thus the non-control by the wealth producers must entail non-ownership as well, and the workers in Mr. Strachey’s scheme would he as effectively divorced from the means of production as they are now. Mr. Strachey’s “Marxist” production for use suspiciously resembles Stuart Chase's “Economy of Abundance.” Both agree on the economic ideal of maximisation of wealth distribution and centrally organised control. Stuart Chase saw it as a means of continuing Capitalism. Mr. Strachey mistook it for Socialism.

Inevitably, then, all the economic categories of capitalist society reappear in Mr. Strachey’s new one, viz., trade, markets, wage labour, etc. in deference to the new social forces they are called Socialist. Mr. Strachey assures us that Socialism will have an unlimited market, but any Marxist Economic primer could have informed Mr. Strachey that the market is the economic mechanism whereby a profit-making society (Capitalism) merely realises the profits that are created in the productive sphere by exploitation in the form of wage labour. An unlimited market would then presuppose unlimited profits and, of course, unlimited exploitation. A desirable but hitherto unrealisable capitalist ideal. Production of value and surplus value is inherent, then, in Mr. Strachey’s “Socialist Society”; just as in “The Only Socialist Country,” profitability of Soviet enterprise to get higher levels is constantly being stressed by Stalin. Thus the productive limits of such an economy would be set by this profitability principle with its concomitant features of mass overproduction and unemployment. In substance, the difference between all this and a highly developed monopoly Capitalism or State Capitalism is less than the shadow of a ghost’s shadow.

Mr. Strachey thought that inventing, say, a working model of how a planned economy might work in America or here avoids our discussing Socialism in the abstract (“Theory and Practice of Socialism,” p. 29). Actually, it avoids discussing Socialism altogether. Only the theoretically incompetent would pose such a proposition. Socialism cannot be discussed in the abstract because it is itself the historic product and consequence of the actual concrete conditions of present society. True, Socialism will have its technical as well as economic problems (Strachey substituting technical re-organisation for an economic revolution in productive relations confused the two), but these can only be solved by the conscious participation of the majority, consistent with the prevailing ideas and genuine social needs—existing at that time. Socialism cannot, then, by its very nature be a sum of ready-made recipes imposed from above by a Planning Authority. Socialism, because it is an historical process, provides not only the conditions but the means for its own realisation and fulfilment, thus demonstrating its scientific worth over blue-printed Utopias. Mr. Strachey, on his own showing, is a Utopian.

Mr. Strachey did tell us that a knowledge of Marxism avoids our becoming the dupes of capitalist planning. Informed by such knowledge, he supported the idea of Popular Front government with a planned programme of social measures. Anyone refusing to co-operate in the formation of this get-together Mr. Strachey stigmatised with the sin of sectarianism. Out of all the political sinners, our sin was the most scarlet. Of our party, he said they neither attempt nor wish to attempt to work in the Labour movement (”What Are We To Do,” p. 909). Had we campaigned for and on behalf of co-operation with the Labour Party a little previously, Mr. Strachey might have hissed "Social Fascists.” He. added that our sole purpose, like religious bodies, was to provide subjective comfort and consolation to our members. Yet Mr. Strachey, in attempting to account for the failure of any real working-class political achievement, had to resort to the expediency of using a S.P.G.B. principle—that working- class knowledge is the essential condition for working-class emancipation—in order to show why this must necessarily be so. In ‘‘The Nature of Capitalist Crises” (p. 347) he admits that lack of working-class understanding leads workers to give their energies, even their lives, hopelessly trying to achieve what is inherently impossible, and finally becoming dupes and blind drudges for talented adventurers. Mr. Strachey unconsciously, it seems, presented the working class with a truly tragic Hobson’s Choice, but at least it concedes us the advantage of providing subjective comfort to our own members rather than material comfort to allegedly "talented adventurers.”

But all this was in the past. Came the war; the second imperialist war, which Mr. Strachey’s Marxist knowledge enabled him to predict with certainty (“The Nature of Capitalist Crisis,” p. 960). What he forgot to predict was that he would support it. At the beginning Russia was outside of it and his former Communist Party allies were violently, even if temporarily, proclaiming it as ”a war between robber nations for world domination.” Mr. Strachey was thus faced with a conflict of loyalties between his own fatherland and adopted one. It was then Mr. Strachey discovered Soviet totalitarianism. He even discovered in the same sentence that “it (Soviet totalitarianism) has not hitherto turned out to be of a totally different character from other totalitarianisms ” (“The Betrayal of the Left,” p. 201).

It is true that the Dictatorship versus Democracy issue (p. 204) is complicated for Mr. Strachey by the fact that the "Socialism” which he supported existed only in the form of a totalitarianism to which he was opposed; and the capitalism which he opposed possessed the democracy which he supported. So Mr. Strachey decided to burn his Russian boats by declaring (on p. 205) "that the enforcement of totalitarianism was a catastrophe from which the world might never recover.”

Nevertheless, the inevitability of war did not necessarily guarantee Allied victory. At times there were difficulties. In an article in the Observer (2/6/46) on Mr. Strachey it is mentioned that a critical moment in the development of British bombing policy had been reached. Heavy raids on German cities, causing heavy civilian casualties among German civilian women might, it was thought, rouse British public objection. But Mr. Strachey was standing by. Says the Observer:

“Strachey was put on the air. Gently he took the minds of his listeners off the receiving end of the bombing attacks and fixed it on the courage of the crews and the plans behind the attack. So the outcry feared by Bomber Harris never came.” 

Consequently, it seems, neither did any bombing respite for German women and children, as the possible result of public sentiment. Mr. Strachey had made a vital contribution. "Mr. Strachey believed in bombing,” says the Observer, "and developed Bomber Command faith with the same invincible logic that had gone before to 'Revolution by Reason,’ the Communist Party and the Popular Front.” The Spectator, once commenting on Mr. Strachey’s “The Coming Struggle for Power,” said "He had established a range of social, intellectual and political contacts which were likely to remain a record.” A range which includes Marxism and Mass-bombing is a record and should remain one.

That Mr. Strachey still accepts the "Marxist” inevitability of war seems to be evidenced in the House of Commons debate (12/3/46). Speaking on the future structure and character of the R.A.F., he said:

"Ultimately it would have to he decided whether the long-range bomber component of the R.A.F. was to be designed primarily for existing types of chemical explosives or atomic explosives.”

It would seem that on many an occasion in the Labour Party a left-wing Mrs. Gamp creates a right- wing Mrs. Harris, not only to give the lady a piece of his mind, but as a useful medium for proclaiming one’s political virtues. As in the case of Dickens’ Mrs. Harris, she becomes after a time an embarrassment to her creator. She is then allowed to quietly lapse into the obscurity from which she emerged. In Mr. Strachey’s case she may have become a war fatality instead—a victim of that mass-bombing from the British, which, from the British side, he supported with such faith and invincible logic.

Ted Wilmott

About Books (1954)

Book Reviews from the July 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

British Trade Unions can be divided, briefly into three categories: unions that cater for workers in one trade only, like the United Society of Boilermakers; unions that embrace all the workers in an industry, like the National Union of Mineworkers and the National Union of Railwaymen; and unions that enrol members from a wide variety of trades, jobs and industries, such as the Transport and General Workers’ Union and the National Union of General and Municipal Workers.

The tendency during the past few decades has been for federations and amalgamations to thin out the ranks of the smaller craft unions and to create, by a merging process, the large organisations that we know today.

This process has created problems of organisation. Unions with hundreds of thousands of members, many of them engaged in different trades and spread all over the country, have had to devise some complicated machinery for the management of their affairs, the formulating and carrying out of national policies. Most of them have constitutions that provide for control of policy by the membership, but in practice, this democratic control does not work out. The majority of trade unionists take no part in the formulation of their union’s policy. Of those that are active the larger number have little, if any, understanding of the society in which their organisation functions and, in consequence, have their ideas moulded by their trade union officials. Thus, the officials are able to impose a policy on the unions.

A book entitled Power in Trade Unions, A Study of their Organisation in Great Britain, by V. L. Allen, has recently been published by Longmans, Green and Co., at 25/-. Mr. Allen examines the constitutions of 127 unions and shows the policy-making process, the power of trade union executives and permanent officers and the disciplinary measures used to ensure obedience from the members.

A similar work was published, in 1952 by George Allen and Unwin, entitled The Government of British Trade Unions, by Joseph Goldstein. Mt. Goldstein limited his study almost exclusively to the Transport and General Workers’ Union and revealed how apathy destroys the application of democratic principles.

Both these authors have collected masses of figures and have compiled many charts to illustrate their revelations. For the student of Trade Unionism both books are worth reading, but if one had to be selected we would recommend Mr. Allen’s.

The History of Trade Unionism, by Sydney and Beatrice Webb, although it does not bring the picture right up to date, is still the classic history of the subject A useful little book that brings the subject right up to 1952, is British Trade Unionism, a Short History, by Allen Hutt, published by Lawrence and Wishart. for 12/6. Mr. Hutt’s political sentiments peep through in places, but his book is a good, interesting, short history.

A less useful, though very interesting book, is an illustrated volume in the Britain in Pictures series, published by William Collins. It is British Trade Unions, by Sir Walter Citrine.

Two books, useful to students, covering a wide study of Trade Unions in a limited number of pages are Trade Unions Today, by Henry Collins (Frederick Muller Ltd., 6/-), and British Trade Unions, by N. Barou. (Gollancz. Left Book Club).

This small collection of books should give a student a satisfactory grounding in the subject and should make him realise the limitations of trade union action in improving the lot of the working class. Capitalism sets the limits and the trade unions, products of that system cannot break outside it. Only by social revolution can the working class escape from the ills which they seek to palliate through trade union action.

W. Waters.

Trade unions and capitalism (1984)

From the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

In their more than two centuries of history the British trade unions have seen it all before. In every generation the same situations, with variations, have arisen and been dealt with in much the same way. Alternatively, trade union law has been relaxed and then tightened up again; governments and employers have tried to suppress them; they have sometimes depended on their own efforts and at others on those of one or other of the political parties, Tory, Liberal. Labour; their membership has grown enormously over the years but with periodic setbacks, and they have never got much beyond organising half the total wage and salary earners.

Laws fixing wages are centuries old and into the eighteenth century workers were sometimes able to petition the Justices of the Peace about higher wages with some success. An account of this is given in the TUC pamphlet Two Centuries of Trade Unions:

"Parliament, still largely controlled by landowners who disliked the “new rich” manufacturers, not only heeded their petitions, but from time to time ordered wages to be raised, limited new processes and even recommended employers to keep men at work during slack periods. This sympathetic response was short-lived. Industrial development moved so quickly that it became impossible for the old machinery of wage-regulation to cope with the rate of change even if it had been fully restored. The unreformed Parliament, too, showed that it appreciated the interests of the new industrialists and of the landowners, now turned manufacturer. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it had become clear that for the redress of their grievances the members had to rely on themselves alone."

The employers naturally resisted the unions and Parliament passed a scries of Acts prohibiting them. Then in 1799 and 1800, fearful that British workers might be influenced by “revolutionary” ideas from France the Combination Laws were passed making all workers’ organisations concerned with wages “illegal”, under threat of savage penalties. In spite of all this the unions managed to survive and some employers found themselves compelled to have dealings with them.

By 1824 ruling class fears of “revolution” had subsided and Parliament was induced to repeal the Combination Laws. One of the mistaken beliefs of those who pushed repeal through was that, when Unions became legal, most workers would accept the view of economists that trade union action was powerless against market conditions and would therefore leave the unions. But repeal in 1824 was followed by a wave of strikes, helped by a trade boom. In 1825 a new Act took back some, but not all of the concessions of the 1824 Act.

Then the boom collapsed and employers and the government mounted a concerted attack on the unions.

As early as 1830, Peel, the retiring Tory Home Secretary, had pointed out to the incoming Whig, Lord Melbourne, that Trade Unions were a grave danger. In 1832 the Duke of Wellington, as Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, had complained of these dangerous bodies, saying (quite untruly) that half the labourers in the country were Unionists. A closely reasoned report of Nassau Senior, the once famous Whig economist, reinforced the Tory Duke’s appeal and urged the total suppression of the Trade Unions. The Government was merely awaiting a convenient time to strike.

(The Common People, Cole and Postgate, p267.)

This was to result in the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Six farm labourers from the Dorset village of Tolpuddle were charged with administering an oath to workers intending to join Robert Owen’s Grand National Consolidated Union. They were not even charged with striking, but were sentenced in 1834 to the savage punishment of seven years’ transportation to the penal colony in Australia. It was a big setback for the Unions (Owen’s Grand National was one of the casualties) but they did not disappear and resumed their growth when trade revived.

Unions are always less effective in trade depressions and always lose membership. They lost over three million members between 1920 and 1926 (from 8,337,000 to 5,219,000) and possibly two million members in the present depression. They were, however, very different organisations in the first half of the 19th century. Unlike the modern permanent bodies the early unions often had only a short existence. Marx and Engels were interested observers of the trade union scene and it is instructive to see how their views changed as unions developed. Writing about the position in 1844 Engels said:

The history of the Unions is a long series of defeats of the working man, interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour-market. Hence, the Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence the relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly, and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves.

(The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Progress Publishers edition, pages 253-4). Marx put a similar view in Wage Labour and Capital (1849).

Marx and Engels based their pessimistic view on the belief that in a depression, with the unemployed competing for jobs, nothing could prevent wages falling. But when, in 1892, Engels wrote a new preface to his book, surveying the changes that had occurred in the intervening half-century, he noted: “the remarkable improvement in the condition of the workers in the great Trade Unions". The change was brought about by the ability of a well-organised union to prevent, or at least curb, the competition of the unemployed from depressing wages. Helped by trade union unemployment benefit, unemployed members did not offer to take jobs at less than the union rate. The change was illustrated by what happened in the Great Depression. Industrial Relations, published by HMSO in 1961, had this to say:

A period of trade depression followed the year 1875 and lasted almost twenty years. During this period Trade Unionism lost some of its strength. Strikes were common and were almost invariably unsuccessful (Page 6).

This is correct, but misleading. If, during the depression, unions made claims for a wage increase and did not succeed, it would be registered by the Government Department concerned as an unsuccessful strike. But it happened that prices were gradually falling: in twenty years a fall of 28 per cent, so that though the average of all money rates rose by only 5 per cent, there was an increase of real wages of over 40 per cent in twenty years.

But wages did not take the same course in 1920-21. Following the Government’s decision to reverse war-time inflation prices were brought down, not over twenty years, but suddenly and drastically (a fall of 34 per cent in eighteen months) and wages went down by almost the same percentage. With such a drastic cut in company income there could be no question of employers continuing wages at the old level, let alone raising them.

Prices continued to fall after 1922, though more slowly, and wages had stabilised by 1925, in which year the Government decided to revert to the pre-war gold standard. In 1926 the General Strike took place, when some two million workers stopped work for nine days in support of the miners. The Baldwin government had given a nine-months subsidy to the coal owners, who were in financial difficulties over falling sales and falling prices, and in the meantime a Commission was studying the coal industry. Like other workers the miners had had to put up with big reductions of pay since 1920 during the fall of the cost of living, but with the end of the subsidy the coal owners asked for a further wage reduction and some increase in the hours of work. The miners stayed out for another five months but eventually had to admit defeat.

The General Strike had a sequel in the passing of the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act. remarkably like the restrictive trade union laws of the Thatcher Government. It declared illegal any strike which had any object other than, or in addition to, the furtherance of a trade dispute “within the trade or industry”, in which the strikers were engaged and also illegal if it was designed or calculated to coerce the government, either directly or by inflicting hardship on the community. The Act restricted picketing, compelled Civil Service unions (including the Post Office unions) to sever their affiliation to the TUC and Labour Party and international trade union organisations. It replaced the existing law, which required a union member who did not wish to pay political levy to contract out, by requiring those who wished to pay to contract in (this to hit at Labour Party funds). It also compelled Local Authorities to abandon closed shop agreements with the unions. The 1927 Act was repealed by the Labour Government in 1946 and the Labour Party is pledged to repeal the measures introduced by the Thatcher government.

While union membership has grown more or less continuously the number of unions has been steadily reduced by amalgamation. The 1,576,000 trade unionists in 1892 were in 1,233 unions. The number fell to 1,024 in 1938 and to a present figure of about 500. The extent to which unions get involved in strikes depends of course on external factors, but the evidence suggests that strikes occur less frequently and do not last as long as they used to. In the six years 1897-1902 the average annual loss of working days through strikes was 6,487.000 with a trade union membership of about 1,750,000. In the six years 1921-1926 with a membership of about six million the average annual loss of working days was over 49 million. In the six years 1977-1982 the average number of days lost per annum was just over 12 million; out of a membership double that of 1921-1926 and eight times that of 1892-1902.

Looking back over the long history of the unions prompts the questions, where are they going?; and indeed, whether they are going anywhere. It was an issue raised by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their History of Trade Unions. In the first edition in 1894 they defined a trade union as a “continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment”. In later editions they altered “of their employment” to “of their working lives”. They gave as reasons for the change that the first wording implied “that trade unions have always contemplated a perpetual continuance of the Capitalist or wage-system” and. on second thoughts, the Webbs accepted that “trade unions have, at various dates during the past century at any rate, had aspirations towards a revolutionary change in social and economic relations”. In the present trade unions there is little evidence of development of aspirations towards a revolutionary change in society. They still accept capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Here and There: Is Hitler a Socialist? (1939)

The Here and There column from the November 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is Hitler a Socialist?

A good deal of our time as a propagandist organisation has unfortunately had to be devoted to denouncing false ideas about Socialism as well as to explaining what Socialism really means. This has led us to strong criticisms of the Labour Party and other parties claiming to be working-class parties, which have very frequently been grossly misunderstood. Our position is a simple one regarding these parties. It is, briefly, that they do not stand for Socialism, that is to say, the common ownership by the whole of society of the means and instruments of production and distribution, and their democratic control by and in the interests of all. Some supporters of the Labour Party and others bristle like Christians rebuked for lack of faith when the position is stated thus. Yet that is the position. And the evidence of Labour Party programmes, newspapers and conferences provide overwhelming evidence of the fact. Worse—many thousands who describe themselves as Socialists have so vague an idea as to what Socialism means that they would not, so to speak, recognise it if they saw it. In a recent issue we commented on the report from Labour sources that the Nazi movement gained considerable support among workers in S.E. Europe because of Hitler’s skilful exploitation of anti-capitalist phraseology and the fact that his movement describes itself as National Socialist. The danger to the working-class movement through lack of sound knowledge, as in this example, should need little emphasis. Moreover, when that lack of knowledge is evident in quarters where “leadership” is looked for from the less informed, the danger can have tragic results. Witness Hamilton Fyfe in Reynolds’s (October 15th, 1939):-

  “Suppose Hitler were to make his National Socialism a reality ? Rudolf Hess, who is his closest friend, declared in public the other day that the Fuehrer would rather go Bolshevik than yield to the democracies. Was it a knowledge of this thought in Hitler’s mind which impelled Thyssen, the once-powerful German capitalist, to bolt when war began? He is now in Switzerland, I believe.

  Hitler has certainly shaken off the capitalist yoke. He climbed to power on the willing backs of financiers and industrialists. They thought they could keep him in order by threatening, if he defied them, to withdraw their shoulders and let him down. But, when he felt himself strong enough, he stamped on them; it was they who found themselves in the mud. Will he take the further step of finishing them off by making the Reich Socialist ?

  By doing this he would set up a strong claim to the assistance of Russia in a war against the capitalist Powers (Britain, France, Italy).”

Observe the reasoning: “Hitler has certainly thrown off the capitalist yoke.” (Note the emphasis, certainly.) Observe the process culminating in the view that Hitler would have “a strong claim to the assistance of Russia in a war against the capitalist Powers (Britain, France, Italy).”

How much further need such reasoning go before it justifies a holy “Socialist” war against capitalism. It is tragic to reflect this comes from one of the “profound” minds which influence the Labour Party following. Yet it bears out our lifelong case against the Labour Party—that State ownership or State control is not Socialism. And that is what Mr. Hamilton Fyfe sees in both Germany and Russia, hence, in his mind, the ease with which they might come together.

Such ideas, such men, are dangerous.

* * *

A New Role for the Communists

An interesting item of news from the war zone:—

   “Communists are coming to the fore again all over Germany, according to reports received from Swiss sources.

   Goering, Hess, Funk are backing them feeling that victory against the Allies cannot be achieved without their aid.

    Nazi speakers are now allowed to proclaim publicly that radical reforms to bring Germany into line with Russia are being prepared. All capitalism will be suppressed.

  The revived Communist Party is being renamed ‘the Popular Party’.”—(Evening Standard, October 21st, 1939.)

It may not be true. Nevertheless it could be true: in which case it would illustrate how small the real differences are between Germany and Russia. “All capitalism will be suppressed” would mean no more than centralisation in the hands of the State of the means of production on Russian lines. The move might deceive German workers for a time, but they would more than likely suspect it to be an astute move by the German Government to arrest criticism and discontent with the war. Anti-capitalist propaganda is likely to have unpleasant results for German capitalism later on.

* * *

Sour Grapes

The Daily Herald (October 10th, 1939) quotes from the Italian newspaper, Corriere Padano, the following: —

  “Voroshilov (Soviet Defence Commissar) and his companions, like all carrion in Bolshevik Russia, do not interest us in the slightest.

  We refuse a grain of esteem or an ounce of sympathy to the Bolsheviks, who are models of gross bestiality—living monsters who are serving the most infamous undertaking of human deceit, cruelty and degradation ever recorded.”

“Bolshevism” is about as popular with the Italian capitalist class at the moment as it will be with the German capitalist class later. The explanation, of course, has nothing whatever to do with the “ideological” differences of Fascism, Bolshevism or Nazism, but the clash of national interests.

Russia’s expansion into Poland has perhaps to a large extent neutralised the influence of Italy in the Balkans.

* * *

Long Live Poland—Communist Version

From Humanité, August 30th, 1936.

“LONG LIVE POLAND !”

By MAURICE THOREZ, 

Gen. Secretary of the C.P. of France.

  “Arriving in Paris this morning is General Rydz-Srnigly, Inspector-General of the Polish Army, and the most powerful man in his country. General Rydz-Smigly was the disciple and the comrade in arms of Marshal Pilsudski, founder of an independent Poland, who chose him to continue his work, and before dying commanded that “all the State functionaries, from the President of the Council downwards, were to render him respect and obedience. …” Although the interior regime in Poland is far from being a liberal democracy, and also General Rydz-Smigly once occupied Kiev, and defended Warsaw against the Red Army, we are none the less happy in saluting this morning France’s eminent guest. . . . Communists and Republicans consider that the continued independence of Poland is a guarantee of Peace in our troubled and anguished Europe. Deeply concerned regarding the future of our own country, attached passionately to the cause of peace, we observe with sympathy the efforts of the Polish people, who wish to preserve the independence of their country. . . .

We above all desire—and this is our reply to those who libel our Communist Party by maintaining that we are favourable to a “sacred war of the democracies against Fascism”—that Franco-Polish friendship should be guaranteed in order to preserve world peace, whatever may be the interior regime in Poland, that Poland which is, and must remain, independent.

And that is why this morning, in the name of the working people, in the name of the Communists in France, saluting the arrival of General Rydz-Smigly, we cry with all our heart “Long Live Poland.”

And now Poland has been “liberated” with the assistance of the Russian armies. Far from being “independent,” that country is now under the mutual “protection” of the German and Russian Governments. Socialists are not shocked. It is all in the dirty game of capitalist politics. If we register any feelings at all about the business it is only in bitter protest that the name of Socialism has been dragged into it by the Communists.

There is only one independence that is in line with working-class interests, and that is the independence which flows from the overthrow of their masters—the capitalist class.

Poland, as an independent State, was a product of the last war, the result of the collapse of three great Empires, by which it was previously surrounded. By the very nature of capitalist development its position as an “independent” State became difficult when those Empires regained their old strength. It may re-emerge again if and when the capitalist States which surround are too weak to resist it. And so the old game goes on, a game which has parallels in other parts of Europe and the capitalist world. A game which holds no interest for the workers and leaves unsolved the fundamental problems of working-class life, poverty and wage-slavery. Whichever capitalists dominate in Europe or elsewhere, those problems remain.

Socialists criticise the Communists and Russia because the latter has entered the capitalist cockpit.

Socialists aim at working-class independence, and instead of taking sides in the quarrels of the capitalists, work for the ending of capitalism.

* * *

Mr. Brockway and Socialism

Mr. Brockway, in the New Leader, tells his readers that he wrote “to the Webbs for contributions to the ‘N.L.’ symposium on the war.” He received a reply from Mrs. Webb, in which she excused herself on the grounds of “old age.”

Mr. Brockway comments thus: “They may feel blacked-out by age, but not even war will black out their Socialist work.”

Can we take it, Mr. Brockway, that the hoary Fabianism for which the Webbs stood and for which you express your appreciation as “Socialist work,” can be used as a measure of the “Socialism” the I.L.P. stands for?

Harry Waite

Progress and pauperism. (1927)

From the April 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is now over nine years since the Great War ended, and, in spite of the feeling aroused in the minds of many that capitalism was staggering to its doom, the machinery of production, or perhaps it would be better to say the organisation of capitalism, appears to have practically recovered from the many dangers that threatened it during the perilous period of changing over from war to peace conditions.

How marvellous the recuperative powers of capitalism must appear to those who are carried away by the seductive theory that we have only to sit tight and await the working out of the “blind forces of production,” which are supposed to be driving the system to an undesired grave, without the assistance or intervention of the human element” ! The advocates of this view lug poor old Marx in by the scruff of the neck to support their erroneous ideas, on the plea that the Materialist Conception of History is the basis of the theory. The two men who worked out the Materialist Conception of History—Marx and Engels—were tireless in pointing out that in the process of human history there were two fundamental factors—man and his environment—and that it was human beings who struggled, and not environments. It is the action of shackling environment upon man that gives the punch, forcing man to act; the pressure of slavery, for instance, that urges the slave to free himself.

However, this is not quite what I intended to write about when I sat down. Sidney and Beatrice Webb have just published a volume on “English Poor Law History,” and Clifford Sharp, reviewing it in the Daily News (11/3/27), makes some observations that are interesting and also startling to those who are not acquainted with the earlier history of this country.

It is interesting to note, for instance, that destitution, in the sense that we moderns so bitterly know it, was practically unknown in the Middle Ages, that not until the beginning of the commerce that has made some people so wealthy, was it necessary to codify by statute the various methods of helping those who were poor. Perhaps the quotation itself would be more informing than a few remarks upon it—so here it is :—

  The chief fact that is likely to strike the unlearned reader of this story is that once upon a time there was no Poor Law at all in England —or anywhere else for that matter. The poor were “God’s poor,” and their needs were dealt with by the Church and by personal alms. So it was in this island from the Middle Ages down to the time of the Tudors. There was, of course, then practically no such thing as “destitution” in the modern sense, for the poor were mainly serfs or villeins, and had feudal lords who employed them and provided for their ordinary needs (!); and it was only sick folk and unattached travellers or vagrants, who were ever actually destitute.

Of course, farther back still, before the feudal lords so kindly employed the serfs and villeins, there was a time when the people employed themselves and, with the limited means at their disposal, saw to it that no one was destitute except when accident or famine or something similar occurred, in which event all went hungry together.

But is it not remarkable that learned professors and politicians should boast loudly of the enormous strides made during the last few hundred years in productive methods, when there has grown up in our midst a poverty problem of an appalling extent. When one sits back and thinks, the position appears in a comical light— there was little destitution in England until England became wealthy and prosperous ! Then one reviews one’s own life, with the struggles to keep the wolf from the door, and begins to wonder who or what is the “England” that has become wealthy. A little further thinking and wondering, and at last the realisation dawns upon the wonderer that it is only the few who “own property” that have become wealthy. The mass who produce the wealth are poorer than they were, in the sense that they have to struggle harder for what they get, and that the actual amount of destitution is proportionately greater.

Since its beginning in the time of Elizabeth, the Poor Law has answered its purpose : it has kept the hungry multitude from doing anything that would seriously endanger the system that provides wealth and comfort for the few out of the blood and tears of the many. And as long as the capitalists are far-seeing enough not to be too niggardly with their “almsgiving” schemes, the system might stagger on for an indefinite period.

This brings me back to the idea underlying the remarks I made at the beginning. In spite of all that the employers do, and may do, to throw dust in the eyes of the workers, the shoe pinches, and sooner or later the workers, being intelligent human beings, will have a look at the shoe to see what the real trouble is. Slowly but surely the idea is taking root that the cause of working-class misery lies in the nature of the modern system of wealth production, and sooner or later, owing to the fact that they have brains which draw upon their experience for thoughts and ideas, the workers will grasp the fundamental fact that they must exert themselves to transform wealth production from a basis of private ownership to a basis of common ownership in the means of producing wealth. The slumbering Chinaman is stirring : it is time for the West to awake !

Gilmac.

The case for industrial unions (1970)

Book Review from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

British Trade Unions and the Problem of Change, by Will Paynter. (George Allen & Unwin. 16s.)

In the case of trade union development the unions have taken many forms—craft and grade unions, general unions of “unskilled” workers, local and national unions, local federations (Trades Councils), industrial unions, and so on to the international federations of “Trades Union Congresses" and the international trade secretariats of unions in the same trade.

Alongside these practical adaptations to the needs of the workers and to changes in the organisation of industry there has been a continuous flow of ideas propagated by groups of enthusiasts designed to harness the unions to wider aims going far beyond wages and working conditions; from the short-lived Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of the eighteen thirties, to the IWW the One Big Union Movement and Syndicalism.

When they wrote their History of Trade Unionism over fifty years ago, the Webbs hoped and believed that the Unions were moving towards the idea of one union for each industry, both on grounds of greater effectiveness and in pursuit of the Webb’s doctrine of workers’ control. Will Paynter, former member of the Communist Party and General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers and now a member of the Commission on Industrial Relations, set up by the Wilson Government, carries on from the Webbs. He presents an argued case for the Unions to remodel themselves on industrial lines in order to meet the growing concentration of capitalist industry and what he believes to be the permanent tendency of governments to intervene in wage fixing in the form of income policies and possible changes in Trade Union law. He supports his ease with much evidence of the harm resulting from the fragmentation of British trade unions, and from inter-union rivalries.

The Webbs hoped that one Union for each industry would emerge from amalgamations but in fact very little progress has been made since they wrote. The amalgamation have indeed taken place; in 1900 there were 1244 separate trade unions, now reduced to about 500, while T.U.C. affiliations have dropped from 184 with a membership of a million and a quarter to 155 unions with a membership of 9 millions. But the biggest growth has been in the conglomerate unions such as Transport & General Workers, the General and Municipal Workers and others with membership spread over numerous industries, with the result that from the standpoint of industrial unionism the position is as far as ever from what the Webbs expected. The TUC has on many occasions studied the problem but has always shied away from the task of trying to compel its affiliates to remodel themselves, knowing well that it cannot hope to compel the biggest unions to give up members. The TUC has also stressed the practical difficulty of defining what is an industry.

There are of course examples from other countries of what can be done. The Swedish Trade Union Confederation manages with only 37 affiliated National Unions and in Germany, where the trade union movement was rebuilt from scratch after the second world war, the Trade Union Federation has only 16 unions to cover the whole of industry.

Paynter accepts that what he advocates would be possible only if the TUC General Council acquired controlling authority over the Unions, something on the lines of the Swedish model which makes the central body the effective one for negotiating with the employers’ central organisation; at present the British TUC has no such powers.

What Paynter advocates comes up against two major problems. The first is that if trade unions are to be democratically controlled by their members, it is the members who have to be convinced that it is in their interest to adopt a new industry- based structure with effective authority handed over to the TUC, i.e. to a body ever more remote than their own union executives and officials.

The second is that any idea of trade unions pursuing wider social aims is limited by the fact that the great majority of members have, as yet, no revolutionary outlook embracing a complete change in the structure of society.

Paynter warns against what he thinks is another possibility, that the Unions, through close involvement with the employers and the government, may find themselves more or less government controlled, with, as its ultimate end, the corporate state of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Franco’s Spain. (For some reason he does not mention Russia, where the “unions” are also in effect government agencies.)

Which brings us to the interesting question of Paynter’s own outlook. He makes many references to the class-struggle basis of trade unions, and the “socialist” aims of himself and some unions, and he chides "left” trade union leaders who are die-hards in their resistance to change. Yet he confines his proposals to “unionism under capitalist conditions in Britain”, though in the same context he writes of the purpose of trade unions applying “equally in a capitalist or a socialist society”. What he really means when he uses the term “socialism” is nationalisation, or state capitalism as in the nationalised industries. He supports the Labour Party.

He admits that coal nationalisation has made little difference to the miners:

  “The relations between management and worker remained the same, the union still had to fight hard to get improvements in wages and conditions and little in the daily lives of the men reflected the change that had taken place.”

He admits too that nationalised industries are “expected to operate as commercial undertakings, generally on strictly business principles characteristic of capitalism”.

He is however candid enough to confess that he was one of the people who understood so little about what was going on as to display “a naive and immature judgement” at the time the mines were nationalised. He writes:

  I remember the morning of January 1st 1947. the first day of operations with nationalised mines — standing on the top of a train of coal at one of the collieries. I served as a union agent, making an enthusiastic speech about ‘the dawn of a new era’, of the significance of the day being one where the ‘workers were moving forward to the control of their own destinies’, and that we were at the beginning of the process where capitalism would be replaced by Socialism.

The Communist Party now has no time for Paynter but it is interesting to see that at a time when he was one of their trusted leaders he had no more comprehension of what capitalism and Socialism are all about than he has now.

Edgar Hardcastle

Soviet Capitalism (1936)

Book Review from the April 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?” by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. 2 vols. 1174 pp. (Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd. 35/-.)

The present writer is unable to join in the chorus of flattering praise that has heralded the appearance of the above volumes. The title of the work is misleading. Even Stalin has not yet had the impudence to declare that Communism, as a system of society, has been established in Russia. The plan of the book is bad. The second volume goes over the same ground as the first from an angle which, though slightly different, does nothing to improve the perspective. Finally, the contents show a complete lack of any sense of the relative importance of the various aspects of the subject. For sheer question-begging assumption, tedious repetition and the wholesale sacrifice of inner understanding to formal description it will be hard to beat. A fascinating and important subject of widespread interest has been subjected to the typically superficial treatment one has learnt to expect from the Fabians, with the result that instead of enlightenment all one gets is a headache.

The authors ask us to contemplate an economic and historical miracle. They profess to depict a society which has liquidated capitalism without first developing, in anything approaching fullness, the productive forces which that system calls into being. We are expected to believe that in Russia there is a large and growing class of wage-receivers without a corresponding class of wage-payers, that profits are made, but that no one makes profit, that capital is accumulating at an unusually rapid pace, but that no one owns it, and that while no one dictates, the workers and peasants are, none the less, most effectively dictated to. The present scribe remains incredulous.

The Webbs occupy over four hundred pages describing the formal relations which are supposed to exist between the elements of the constitution, such as the Soviets, the trade unions, the handicraft co-operatives, the collective farms, consumers' co-ops., and the Communist Patty. In their entirety these are organised into a “pyramidal hierarchy" (the authors’ expression) at the summit of which stands the Council of People’s Commissars, consisting entirely of Communists. At the base of the pyramid, however, in the soviets of the cities and villages (the only directly elected bodies) the Communists are in a decided minority. The collective farmers are not as such represented, although they and their dependants form, roughly, half the population, while the Communist Party is “outside," (or should it not be above) “the law and the constitution ” (p. 430).

This arrangement, ascribed to the genius of Lenin, is called by the Webbs, “multiform democracy.”

After having patiently waded through the above-mentioned four hundred pages, the reader is confronted by the confession of the authors that the constitutional structure changes so rapidly as to be difficult to define (p. 418). A further thirty pages have then to be traversed to discover whether or not the government can correctly be described as a dictatorship. The Webbs decide not, but the fact that no organised opposition to the government is tolerated is not even mentioned. Not until we reach page 586 do we encounter the significant statement, quoted approvingly from the work of an American engineer, that “Without the G.P.U. there would be no Communist Party in Russia to-day, no Union of Socialist Soviet Republics."

In other words, the secret political police, one of the worst features of Tsarism (marked down for abolition by the pre-war Bolsheviks when they were still advocating a democratic republic), is the chief prop of their present rule. The supremacy of the Communist Party is based, as they have so often told us, not upon the consciously organised majority of the population, but upon an instrument of terror designed to protect them, at once from the plots of ambitious rivals and the revolts of the discontented.

This survival of semi-mediaeval methods of government requires to be explained, and it is characteristic of the Webbs that they have given us the very minimum of historical background. They devote so much space to the details of the superstructure that, in spite of the size of the volume, they skip over important points with mere passing references. Thus, if one wants information concerning “the liquidation of the capitalist,” one finds two or three isolated pages, in the course of which one learns that although “Lenin would have waded through seas of blood ” to achieve this object (p. 535), it actually occurred “very largely by accident” (p. 612) owing to the need for evading, if possible, certain stipulations by the German Government with regard to the execution of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. We are given the bare information that on or about June 28th, 1918, “a decree was issued declaring all enterprises having a capital exceeding 200,000 roubles to be the property of R.S.F.S.R.” There is nothing concerning the extent to which this capital was previously in the possession of foreigners, nor how the decree affected Russian holders. Neither are we told how the lesser concerns came to be nationalised. For information of this description one is obliged to go to less pretentious volumes such as “Economic Trends in Soviet Russia,” by A. Yugov, or Mr. M. Dobb's “Russian Economic Development. ’ ’

Apparently the Webbs have never heard of the huge new Russian National Debt, though government bonds are occasionally referred to. The subject of taxation is dismissed in a few sentences. For some obscure reason the State taxes its own industries, though “the assessment is mitigated in various ways, in favour of the collectivised concerns,” whatever that may mean (p. 117). One gathers, however, that though the workers get about two hundred roubles per month on the average, some people make up to 24,000 roubles in the same period. Even when their income tax is paid they are many times better off than the skilled worker. According to the “U.S.S.R. Handbook” (Gollancz, 1936, p. 310), the tax on higher incomes has been reduced since the Webb’s book was published.

How are wages determined? “According to social value,” reply the authors (p. 186), which turns out upon examination to be nothing more than a new name for our old friends, supply and demand, or in other words the relative scarcity of certain grades of skill. Devotion to the piecework system of payment is transformed in these pages into a “socialistic” virtue, taking the place of profit as a lever for achieving industrial progress. The accident rate is not mentioned, but, apparently, even American mechanics, accustomed to the driving methods of Ford’s factory at Detroit, have been compelled to protest against piece-work in the tool-room (p. 709).

The Trade Unions bit the dust about six years ago as independent defenders of wage-rates (pp. 170-2), and have been saving the government the expense of a separate department for administering sick-pay, etc., since 1933. The soviet trade union “is not formed to fight anybody, and has no inducement to prevent the competition among workmen for particular jobs ” (p. 173). Its chief concern apparently is now the speeding up of production. Trade Union officials act as rate-fixers (p. 188), and help to keep the wheels of industry working smoothly by discouraging strikes. Communists in other countries have called this sort of thing by hard names, but Russia has become, in a more sinister sense than ever before, the land of holy idol worship.

The rank and file of the Communist Party play a similar role. Forty per cent. of the membership are salaried officials (p. 352). The rest see in their skill at leading non-members in increasing production, the high road to promotion. Even the very cows on the State farms recognise the touch of their authority, yielding five litres of milk to them as against four to non-members (p. 361). Can it be that they have replaced the old peasant milking songs with a chant of the theses of the Third International? Of their loyalty there can be no question, however; they do not even ask their leaders to issue a balance sheet for the 50 million roubles which is subscribed annually as membership fees (p. 371).

The State Trusts and Combines controlling the various large-scale industrial establishments (compulsorily amalgamated during the period of civil war) are not departments like the Post Office (or the Railways in certain countries), but rather, bodies comparable to the United States Steel Corporation or the Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., with their respective boards or commissions of directors appointed by the People’s Commissar in each case (p. 110). They in turn appoint the general managers of the separate factories or plants. Management by committees elected by the workers in the factories established by decree in November, 1917, was definitely deposed by a decree of June 28th, 1918, placing each enterprise under the control of a single manager (pp. 604-9).

This triumph of bureaucracy over a mild form of anarchy naturally pleases the Webbs, but they fail to point out that the entire situation demonstrated the absence of any organised working-class ready to establish Socialism by democratic methods. In spite of formal trustification, however, we are told on p. 772 that “thousands of separate employers are actively competing with each other in their search for this or that kind of skilled worker, whilst each is habitually struggling against all the rest for an adequate supply of unskilled and even raw peasant labour.” In view of this fact, the forcible collectivisation of two-thirds of the peasantry, involving as it did the expropriation of hundreds of thousands, takes on a new light. The dispossession of peasants is the historical capitalist method of increasing the supply of labour-power for industry.

"Each enterprise is responsible for all new and additional capital invested in its undertakings, and for the actual repayment of loans and the payment of bank interest, with a system of accounting of great strictness and complexity” (p. 781). In spite of this, however, Molotov, President of the Council of Commissars (p. 782), complains that "we have cases in which those who direct trusts, co-operative organisations, factories, or soviet farms, sell their produce more profitably, upsetting the fixed prices, and fail to meet their obligations to the State, taking in reality the unclean path of speculation.” Thus, in a land where scarcity, not over-production, is the rule, control from above fails to prevent the assertion of economic laws which enable individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of the State in whose service they are nominally engaged. Curiously enough, the Webbs do not give any examples of these people being shot by the G.P.U. "Counter-revolutionaries” appear to be drawn mainly from the lower official ranks, the so-called technical intelligentsia. And even clerks and shop assistants, foremen and stationmasters, train conductors and book-keepers fail to acquire "soviet incentives.” Indeed, the Webbs saddle this section with responsibility for the fact that in the U.S.S.R. “the project or plan is always superior to the execution of it" (p. 798).

Where these people are exceptionally scarce, such as experienced engineers, some curious incidents occur. Thus the Webbs found in "the best room in the best hotel in an important city, a Russian specialist who had been sentenced to a long term of imprisonment for counter-revolutionary activities. He had served only a small part of his sentence when the president of the trust for which he had worked, feeling severely the loss of this expert service, obtained the favour of his release” (p. 582). They also quote a case (given by Ella Winter in "Red Virtue" p. 76), in which "Four men in a civil aviation factory were arrested for wrecking. They were given ten-year sentences. A year later they were all amnestied, given 10,000 rouble bonuses for good work done, and sent back to work without a stigma ” (p. 583). Seemingly, it pays in Russia not to be a mere Kulak or other recalcitrant.

In the sphere of distribution, shops run by the trusts vie with shops run by the State directly on the one hand, and the co-operative stores on the other. Of the latter we are told (p. 326) that "There have been more speculators and embezzlers, thieves and bureaucrats in the co-operative system than any other branch of soviet enterprise"; evidently there is still a fair amount of scope in Russia for primitive accumulation. One cannot help wondering if those who get away with it invest in government bonds. Municipal pawnshops come to the rescue of those who cannot make ends meet in this way (p. 331), but stay, we have omitted to mention that the situation is likely to be relieved some time this year, by “the opening of 'one-price stores’ after the model of the Woolworth establishments in the American and western European cities" (p. 330). Now let who will declare that the Soviet Government is not looking after the interests of the workers!

The struggle between the peasantry and the government has been practically’ incessant. The latter appear to have won, with the approval of the Webbs. The peasants, generally, are far too poor to purchase the expensive modern types of agricultural machinery now being produced; nor is the government now in the position to give them away. The plan, therefore, has followed the line of establishing machine and tractor stations for the purpose of ploughing the land of the collective farms, and threshing the crop in return for a proportion of the yield. This proportion has been the basis of dispute, in addition to the general distrust of the government’s methods. So the authors tell us that "What the Soviet Government was faced with from 1929 onward was, in fact, not a famine, but a widespread 'general strike' of the peasantry, in resistance to the policy of collectivisation" (p. 265). One expression of this "strike” was the destruction of livestock, which was reduced from 270 million head in 1929 to 118 million in 1933, i.e., to less than half. The reply of the government was wholesale deportation. By the hundred thousand the “recalcitrant” peasants were removed from the villages and put to work on roads, railways and canals, cutting timber or mining ores. Defending this action, the Webbs contend that as the soil was national property, the peasants were merely occupants who were under an obligation “to produce the foodstuffs required for the maintenance of the community” (p. 268). Was this what Lenin meant when he broadcast the slogan, “The land for the peasants"?

It is interesting to reflect that when it was pointed out in these columns, in the early days of the Soviet regime, that the peasantry were unlikely to take the Webbs’ views of their duties, we were derided by the British champions of the Bolsheviks, who imagined in their simplicity that the Russian mujik would have no difficulty in understanding the principles of Socialism.

Forming three-quarters of the population, the peasantry has no more political power than is represented by the village meeting (p. 22). Legally, the village soviet has wide powers compared with an English parish council, according to the Webbs; but they appear to have overlooked that the poverty of the peasantry is an effective barrier to any attempt on their part to use these powers. Thus the government has to prod the local councils into action rather than to check their extravagance.

It is from the peasantry that the Red Army is mainly recruited by compulsory service. We are told, however, that “many who are not conscripted actually volunteer for service. They find the army conditions, in fact, superior to those of the independent peasant or the miner, the factory-operative or the worker on the oil-field" (p. 125). How reminiscent of capitalism elsewhere! A further attraction appears to be that “The peasant who is serving in the army can always command a hearing. Many are the instances in which a son who is a Red Army man has been able, by intervening from a distance, to obtain redress for his father and family who have been suffering from some petty tyranny or injustice at the hands of a local official.” What happens to those who are not fortunate enough to have a son in the army?

The Russian authorities have for centuries preferred to deal with the peasantry collectively. Taxation in any form is thus easier to raise. The Bolsheviks, however, have a further motive. The fall of the Romanovs is a standing warning to them not to rely upon an antiquated agriculture for food supplies, especially in war-time. The same remark applies to their whole policy of planning. The Webbs admit this on pp. 637-8. "Every government has to plan for national defence. But to the Soviet Government the danger of war has hitherto been a constant pre-occupation. . . . This fear has from the first lent a strategic object to the planning. It has seemed of vital importance that . . . the U.S.S.R. should make itself substantially independent of the outer world, not only in all the means of waging modern warfare, but also in all indispensable commodities. Hence the exceptional concentration of the First Five-year Plan . . . on a rapid expansion of the "heavy industries,” by means of which things can be made, or troops transported, instead of seeking directly to increase the making of the household commodities desired by the people.” So this is Socialism!

The new civilisation looks remarkably like the one we are all too well acquainted with. Even the extensive State control is in no sense new for Russia. Towards the latter end of the last century “ The government was not only by far the largest landowner in Russia, it was by far the greatest capitalist and the greatest employer of labour. Its railways, its mines, its factories of many different kinds, were in every part of the country ” (“Economic History of Russia,” James Mavor, vol. 2, p. 152, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.). Going still further back the same author tells us, “When Peter (the Great) came to the throne there were no large factories in Russia; when he died there were 233 State and private factories and foundries. These establishments were either founded by the State and managed by the State officials, or they were subsidised by the State, and afterwards were handed over to private firms. Throughout the 18th century, the great industries in Russia were carried on primarily for the benefit of the State ” (“Economic History of Russia,” vol. 1, pp. 124, 535).

What is the difference between the “Socialism” of Stalin and that of Peter? Simply this, that the latter’s undertakings were manned by serf-labour; the former's are based on the exploitation of wage-slaves.

Peter, however, had not heard of Marx, and could not try to cover up his proceedings with a display of “proletarian" phraseology.

Is this to say that no progress is made? By no means. The break-up of mediaeval forms in Russia, as elsewhere, is rendered inevitable by the advance of capitalistic methods of production. That Russia has had a spell of Bolshevik rule is no more surprising than that Britain and other countries should have occasional Labour Governments.

The administration of capitalism by people who have sprung from the working class is not Socialism. It does but demonstrate that within their servitude the workers are developing in the direction of political maturity.

Contemporary conditions in Russia have given a curious twist to the ideas of Marx and Engels, just as conditions in Germany in the first half of the 19th century gave a similar twist to revolutionary ideas from France. The stability of the existing regime in Russia cannot be eternal, and it behoves workers to beware of accepting the assurances of “intellectuals,” like the Webbs, concerning Russia or Socialism. They are authorities on neither.

Eric Boden

In a note to the Editorial Committee of The Socialist Standard, with respect to the review copy, Mr. S. Webb writes: —

  “You may say, if you like, the arrangements might possibly be made presently for a 'limited' edition at the same price (5s.), strictly confined to members of such organisations [of workers as were allowed to have the original 5s. edition], if their executive committees wish to take the matter up, and that, accordingly, anyone wishing to take advantage of such an arrangement should write to his E.C. on the subject.”

Blogger's Note:
By the time these volumes was reprinted in 1937 by the Left Book Club/Victor Gollancz, the question mark in the book title had been dropped, so that it now read “Soviet Communism: A New Civilization” by Sidney and Beatrice Webb

50 Years Ago: Forerunners of Marx (1964)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

The author claims that the great forerunners of Marx—standing between the Utopians and the latter— was an Irishman named William Thompson, who, among numerous notable statements, laid bare the source of value in his work entitled, “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most conducive to Human Happiness”, etc., published 1824, where it is laid down that all labour can be reduced to unskilled labour of the average kind at a given time.

Miss Potter says Marx took his notion of “homogeneous human labour” from Thompson and incorporated it in “Capital”.

The author says, “In the English speaking world the work of this Irish thinker is practically unknown, but on the Continent of Europe his position has long him established'" (p 115)

Now what is common to both Connolly and Miss Potter is the curious fact that neither of them state who established Thompson's position and made him known on the Continent. The uninstructed reader may learn with surprise that the person responsible was—Karl Marx!

Many years ago Dr. Aveling pointed out in a little book called “Darwin Made Easy”, that the various “objections” by ignorant Christians and parsons to Darwin's work were all first formulated by Darwin himself in the “Origin of Species”, and no opponent had ever brought forward any other. So with Marx. All the opponents of Marx who are so loud in their claims to have discovered “forerunners” of his work and ideas are all of them—German, English and Irish alike—indebted to Marx, who first discovered and gave full credit to them in his various works, particularly in the “Poverty of Philosophy” and the “Critique of Political Economy”.

And among others he points out that Benjamin Franklin had already in 1721 stumbled on the secret of undifferentiated labour as the source of value, though he (Franklin) did not work the idea out to any extent.

However, it is the fashion today among the shallow critics of scientific Socialism who are unable to refute the case or show a flaw in the arguments of Marx to pretend to demolish that genius by finding someone who “anticipated” him, and keeping “gradely dark” the fact that the very person they are indebted to for such discovery is Marx himself.

(From the Socialist Standard, June, 1914. Extract from a review of “Labour in Irish History" by James Connolly)

The Silliness of Bernard Shaw and the Webbs (1956)

From the July 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reynolds News (10 June, 1956), in the course of publishing condensed extracts from “Beatrice Webb’s Diaries 1924-1932,” had the following about Beatrice’s disapproval of Bernard Shaw for his admiration of Mussolini:—

  "October 21st 1927. G. B. S. has created something of sensation; be has gone out of his way to certify to the excellence of Mussolini's dictatorship—to its superiority over political democracy as experienced in Britain and other countries. . . .  G. B. S. fortified in his admiration of Mussolini by spending eight weeks and £600 in a luxurious hotel at Stresa; in continuous and flattering interviews with Fascist officials of charming personality and considerable attainments . . ."
 "From the published correspondence in the English Press and still more from a private correspondence with Adler, it appears that G. B. S. puts forward the Mussolini regime as the New Model which all other countries ought to follow!"

Of course later on, in the second world war, Shaw hedged about his admiration for the Italian dictator, but in the meantime the Webbs had made the pilgrimage to Moscow, fallen for the same blandishments and published their massively misguided book “Soviet Communism—a new Civilisation." One of its unintentionally humorous chapters is that on "Is Stalin a Dictator?" “Sometimes it is asserted,” they wrote (second edition, 1937, page 431), “ that, whereas the form may be otherwise, the fact is that, whilst the Communist Party controls the whole administration, the Party itself, and thus indirectly the whole State, is governed by the will of a single person, Josef Stalin.”

They hastened to point out (doubtless remembering their earlier disapproval of Shaw and Mussolini) that Stalin, unlike Mussolini and Hitler, was “not invested by law with any authority over his fellow-citizens. . . .  He is, in fact, only the General Secretary of the Party... ." 

In their solemn-silly way they concluded that there wasn’t any truth in the stories about Stalin!

  "We have given particular attention to this point, collecting all the available evidence, and noting artfully the inferences to be drawn from the experience of the past eight years (1926-1934). We do not think that the Party is governed by the will of a single person; or that Stalin is the sort of person to claim or desire such a position. He has himself very explicitly denied any such personal dictatorship in terms which, whether or not he is credited with sincerity certainly accord with our own impression of the facts."

How Stalin must have laughed up his sleeve at such simplicity; and how his “reformed” successors must laugh at the simplicity of the Webb’s successors.

Of course the biggest deception of the Webbs’ book—a deception still being practised by Stalin’s heirs—was that Russian dictatorship-ridden State capitalism was a “new civilisation." It deserves that title as much as did Mussolini's Italy deserve Shaw’s belief in h as a New Model.

Edgar Hardcastle