That Blessed Word : Unity ! (1908)

From the July 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard 

(Con)Fusion in America.

A few years ago the question of Socialist unity engaged the attention of the two “Socialist” parties in this country. Votes were taken of the rank and file and large majorities voted in favour of fusion, but as the leaders did not desire fusion they did not allow it to come to pass.

Similarly the cry for “unity” has been raised in America, and again those first in raising the cry have been the smallest of the parties concerned.

As in England a knowledge of the mental make-up of the parties enabled many to see through the fake proposal, so will similar knowledge of the American “fusionists” enable us to value their “unity” cry for what it is worth.

In 1896 the Socialist Labour Party of America declared for the “new” Trade Unionism, and started the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance, a union affiliated to the Socialist Labour Party, and out to smash the “pure and simple” trade unions. This caused a “split” in the Socialist Labour Party, a large section leaving and, with the “Social-Democracy” of Eugene V. Debs, forming the Socialist Party of America.

A fight then commenced between the two, most of the fighting being done by the Socialist Labour Party, who long and loudly denounced the prominent members of the latter party— Debs, Carey, Mother Jones, Simons, and so on—as “freaks,” “frauds,” and “fakers,” while the Party as such was in turns termed the “Multi-cocoa Party,” the “Kangaroos,” in fact, anything but a Socialist party, and no Socialist Labour Party member was allowed on their platform except in opposition.

After some nine years of this fighting, and at the same time attempting to organise the working class in the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance, the membership was found to be declining at such a rapid pace that something had to be done.

Mr. F. Bohn, organiser, visiting Chicago, found himself among the “freaks,” “frauds,” and “fakers” that the S.LP. and the S.T. and L.A. were fighting—Mother Jones and A. M. Simons among them—and without instruction from either the S.L.P. or the S.T. and L.A. (his paymasters), he joined with them in signing a manifesto calling for a new union to be formed. In thus proclaiming the failure of his own union Bohn was supported in the Weekly People by such writers as Olive M. Johnson and Dan. De Leon. The Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance was thus crucified, betrayed by the leaders of the S.L.P. into the hands of the “freaks,” “frauds,” and “fakers,” and a new union—the Industrial Workers of the World—was formed. This new union, having for its object the organising of the workers to “take and hold” what they produce, enrolled a large membership, including men of all shades of political thought and of none. Those who had been “freaks” and “fakers” now became honest and earnest comrades on the economic field ; and to hide political differences politics were relegated to the rear, economic organisation and action being given the place of prime importance, and Mr. De Leon, editor of the American Weekly People, “discovered” that Marx had in 1869, said somewhere, sometime, to some one, that “only the economic organisation could set on foot the true political .party of Labour.”

Did Mr. De Leon know this before he helped to form the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance, and before he joined the Socialist Labour Party, or is it now that he is wangling ? As there is no evidence that Marx ever made such a statement, I beg to answer the latter question in the affirmative.

But in case Marx is not sufficient, Engels is dragged in, and one need not be surprised if at any time we are told that Christ talked Industrial Unionism in the Sermon on the Mount, or that even if he did not, what he did say may be “adapted to American conditions.”

When, as a result of capitalist persecution, W. D. Haywood had become the momentary idol of thousands of American workmen, and, while still in prison, was nominated by the Socialist Party as candidate for Governorship, the S.L.P. found itself in a dilemma. Haywood was member and nominee of the “rotten” Socialist Party —yet he was a member of the pure I.W.W. According to the S.L.P. rules they could not support him, but could they risk opposing the popular Haywood ? Eventually the Colorado State Executive decided to call upon every member of the S.L.P. in Colorado to withdraw from the Party until after the election, so that they could vote for Haywood ! This remarkable wangle was supported by O. M. Johnson and Mr. De Leon, and we were told the S.L.P. refused to oppose Haywood politically because they were supporting his “economic side” !

On his release from prison, however, Haywood toured America for the Socialist Party. This roused the ire of the S.L.P., who then denounced him as a coward and a craven.

Meanwhile the I.W.W., which for a time had proved a happy hunting-ground for S.L.P. literature sellers, had had a serious split. Most of its original founders had left it. E. V. Debs, had joined the staff of the Appeal to Reason, an anti-I.W.W. paper, and those who were left were largely inclined towards the Socialist Party. This not suiting the “fighting” S.L.P., who, not content with fighting the “cravens” like Haywood, outside, and the “physical force-ists” like Williams, inside, wanted a new excuse for a declaration of war on the Socialist Party, up went the cry for Socialist “unity.”

The E.C. of the S.L.P. invited the Socialist Party to consider proposals with a view to fusion, knowing they would be rejected. They were rejected, and now the S.L.P. can forget the fond embraces indulged in with the “freaks,” “frauds,” and “fakers” at the funeral of the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance, and clears the decks anew for hostilities.

Had the “unity” proposals been accepted bj the Socialist Party and a juncture fixed up, splits would, of course, immediately have followed; but the chance would have been taken. and the S.L.P. would have been scuttled and swallowed up in a new party, with the consent and approval of its friends, as was the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance in 1905.

In either case it was a wangle on the part of the S.L.P. leaders, a case of heads I win, tails you lose, but the Socialist Party leaders declined to enter the game.

It will thus be seen that, as in Britain, so in America, the “fusion” trick is but a move in the long game practised by faction leaders at the expense of the principles they are supposed to be advocating. It is therefore, up to the rank and file, as the Americans would say, to checkmate the players, to overthrow the “leaders,” the “intellectuals,” to act on the truly Marxian dictum that “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.” When they will place principles above personalities, and understand the difference between capitalist reform and social revolution, they will find there is but one party for them. Here it is The Socialist Party of Great Britain ; in America it has yet to be born.

A. W. Pearson

Peace amongst the Nations. War between the Classes. (1907)

From the September 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

The months of July and August were full of interesting events.

The Daily News of July 31st referred to one of these in its leading article, headed “The Palace of Peace.” Its language was sublime. “The foundation stone of Mr. Carnegie’s Palace of Peace was laid yesterday at the Hague to an accompaniment of oratory which does credit to the optimism of the great” and the poster it issued on the same day bore remarkable evidences of the peaceful intentions of British capitalists, who were represented at the Hague. As the events which that Contents Bill had reference to will one day play as important a part in working-class politics as, one day, the Featherstone massacres will, let us reproduce it:

MILITARY

& MAXIMS

POURING INTO

BELFAST

____________

RAILWAY CRISIS

Since then, the power of the master class has been demonstrated in the usual manner. Controlling “the machinery of Government, including the armed forces of the nation” those armed forces have been used, as they must always be, “to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers,” and at time of writing, the hospitals are filled with wounded wage-slaves while preparations are being made for the interment of the killed. 

Two days previously, this same organ of British Nonconformity admitted, in its leader on the Idaho trial, that—

“The trial . . . more and more became a class struggle between capital and labour,”

and that—

“From the beginning the question has been complicated by the fierce prejudices of a kind of smoulder-class war. . . . The whole movement , . . has illustrated the insecurity of authority in America, and the profound scepticism concerning the identity of law and justice”.

The American Commercial Appeal said in the course of an editorial reviewing the Idaho trial:—

“Now, however much we may dislike disorder, we are bound as fair-minded citizens to abide by the evidence adduced in a case. Much disorder was started on both sides. The mine owners were guilty of more infamous crimes than were ever charged against the miners. They had judges and other officers driven from their posts. They had merchants who leaned toward the miners’ side deported from their homes. They bought up the legislature to overturn the will of the people. Peabody stole the governship of Colorado, and then, his nerve weakening, he turned the office over to the lieutenant-governor. The supreme court of Colorado, in league with the mine owners, took charge of the state election and helped to steal the state for the Republican party.

Colorado and some other Western states have been in recent years about as bad as Russia. The source of the trouble has, of course, been the defiance of all law and order by the mine owners. Very few people realise just what these people have done and just what provocation to violence they have given the miners. They corrupted the legislature to kill the eight-hour law that the people had voted for by a large majority. They established the bull-pen, in which hundreds of innocent people were herded like cattle. They had the writ of habeas corpus abolished. They had men driven from their homes and business not only because they were union miners but because they were merchants who sympathised with miners. They threatened to hang judges and other officers if they did not resign. They violated all the prerogatives of American citizens.”

A week later the Daily Telegraph’s Amsterdam correspondent wrote :

“Another war between capital and labour . . . is on the tapis . . . Organised labour is being met by organised capital, and the lesson which Sir George Livesey taught many years ago, when the gasworkers of South London went out on strike, has evidently not been lost upon the Shipping Federation, who seem to be adopting a similar course . . . by drawing free labour from England to replace the strikers if necessary. . . . The Labourers’ Union claims to be a powerful body, but the Shipping Federation is still more powerful, having the support of capital as well as the law of the land !”

International Peace is in the air, but War, the Class War, the inevitable war between capitalist and labourer is on the Earth. And the capitalists are prepared to use any means, like Carnegie, to crush their wage-slaves, and the capitalist governments who are most ready to send troops to shoot down workers in revolt like America, and France, and Russia, and last but not least, Great Britain, play the foremost parts in the farce of international peace “doing credit to the optimism of the great.” Even before the peace conference closed its doors, and as a commentary on the Liberal Premier’s famous peace oration, Great Britain has decided to lay down “almost immediately” three more battleships of the Dreadnought type with improvements.

Without entering into the details of the Belfast dispute, one or two matters may be noted. It is “loyal Ulster” that is the scene of this seething discontent, the portion of the Emerald Isle which has always been held up as a shining example to the remainder. Agrarian outrages are not prevalent and although a feud exists between the Protestants and the Catholics the present struggle is not between these. Christian no longer hurls bricks at Christian as such ; Loyalist no longer pursues Nationalist, or vice versa. No, all these minor differences are forgotten in the greater struggle, that between Capital and Labour. “The line of division,” says the Daily News Parliamentary representative, “is not Catholic and Protestant or Nationalist and Orangeman, but, simply, Labour and Capital.” And here, before the echoes of the oratory at the foundation stone laying of the Palace of Peace have died away, (dimmed somewhat by the noise of the French bombardment of the Moorish towns), the new short rifle of the British Army has been tested in real earnest—in the interests of Capital as against Labour, just as the first Lee-Metford bullets found their human billets at Featherstone in 1893. And a Liberal Government is in office now, as then. Here at home, then, with a “wise and good” monarch, with a Liberal Government, with Free Trade, with a Labour Party in Parliament, with working-men magistrates and working men knights, the class war exists and until the cause of it has been removed no peace is possible. In “protectionist and prosperous America,” then, and in “loyal” Ulster, the “smouldering class war” breaks out into open conflict, as in all other parts of the world.

The ordinary wars for the extension of markets, or for taking away the attention of the people at home from social evils, (the present “military operations” of the French against the Moors have probably been undertaken with both objects in view, considering the recent trouble in the Midi), pale into insignificance beside the War of the Classes which has yet to be prosecuted in grim earnest by the workers all over the world. The mouthers at the Hague Conference may discuss their arrangements for the struggles for the “swag” in which they from time to time engage, with members of the working class as the active participators and sufferers, but the time is rapidly approaching when they will sink their petty differences and unite as the forces of International Capital opposed to International Labour. There can be only one end to the War of the Classes—the abolition of the classes. As the Manifesto of the S.P.G.B. points out: “In the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, therefore the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.”

Speed the day.

Adolph Kohn

Editorial: The Passing of De Leon. (1914)

Editorial from the June 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of Daniel De Leon in America recalls the controversy over so-called Direct Action by the working class. Joining the S.L.P. when it was nominally, as well as actually, a reform party, De Leon also affiliated with the corrupt Knights of Labour, and as a result of the secession of some elements the Socialist Trades and Labour Alliance was formed to act in co-operation with the S.L.P. But a union of opposing elements could not succeed. In spite of the claim that by economic unity political unity would also be established, a split soon took place, and the Socialist (!) Party of America was formed.

In 1905 “Industrial Unity” was again the cry, and once more it was urged that by uniting economically, political harmony would be secured.

De Leon, Debs and other political enemies came together in the I.W.W., which taught that Industrial Unionism would establish Socialism. Politics was but a reflex or an afterthought, so to speak. Anarchists as well as “Socialists”, reformers as well as others, came together in the Industrial Workers of the World. Some of them believed in politics, while others did not.

Such fictitious unity could not last, and soon it was found that, instead of uniting, it made those it embraced more divided than ever. It was not long before Debs and his “Socialist” Party friends were outside the I.W.W. Soon arose the question of what Industrial Unionism meant, some contending that politics were unnecessary and others that they might be useful, and so on.

The arrival of Wm. Haywood from jail soon caused a split among the unity-hunters of the I.W.W., and we were faced with two I.W.W.’s – one forced to give some vague recognition of the value of political action, and the other, embracing Haywood, Bohn, Ettor and Giovannitti, yearning for sabotage, physical force, and such moonshine.

The closing years of De Leon’s life were practically a sea of troubles on this “industrial action” question. One after another his lieutenants went over to the so-called Socialist party, or to the rival I.W.W. Frank Bohn, James Connolly, Trautmann (who has now come home to the I.W.W. fold), and even his own son, Solon De Leon, making tracks for that ark of confusion, the S.P. of A.

Verily the Industrialist rubbish spelt Nemesis for the S.L.P.

There is a lesson for the workers on this side of the Atlantic to leave the suicidal policy of Industrial Unionism severely alone.

Cooking the Books: Value, Creation and Extraction (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Writing in the Guardian (19 January) in an article subtitled ‘Talk of a fairer capitalism is just hot air unless we rehabilitate and reward the idea of value creation,’ economics professor Mariana Mazzucato quoted Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners and later the IWW as saying: ‘The barbarous gold barons do not find the gold, they do not mine the gold, they do not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belongs to them.’

She used this as an introduction to her case that capitalism today is more concerned with ‘value extraction’ than ‘value creation’ and that this needs to be corrected to avoid further financial crises. ‘Restraining the power of value extraction,’ she wrote, ‘requires a theory of value – an area once hotly discussed in economics, but no longer,’ and went on:

‘This is because a century ago the notion that labour creates value (central to the work of classical’ economists like David Ricardo and Karl Marx, and measured by objective factors like productivity) was replaced by the ‘neo-classical’, subjective notion that satisfaction and ‘preferences’ create value.’

This is a valid point. In fact, modern bourgeois economics has gone further and dismisses the whole idea of ‘value’ as a useless concept, arguing that all you need is a theory of price. This enables it to obscure the obvious fact that wealth, as something useful to human life, can only be created by people working. In their theory labour becomes reduced to just one element, along with land and capital, of cost and so of price.

Marx’s theory of value was that a commodity (as a good or a service produced for sale) was determined by the amount of ‘socially necessary’ labour expended on its production from start to finish. By ‘socially necessary’ he meant the labour that had to be expended to produce it by an average worker of average skill working with average equipment; in other words, not necessarily the actual labour expended, otherwise a slower than average worker would create more value.

Marx was not talking just about the labour expended at the last stage of production of a good but of all the labour expended on it from start to finish.  That included labour expended on mining or growing the materials, constructing the machinery, supplying the energy, and making the semi-finished products, i.e. the past labour incorporated in the fixed and circulating capital.

According to Marx, ‘value creation,’ to use Mazzucato’s terminology, took place when workers produced a commodity. The workers transferred existing value from the raw materials, machinery, etc. to the product but at the same time created new value.  However, what they produced was not theirs but belonged to the capitalist owner who employed them. A part of this did go to them as their wages, but most went to the capitalist as ‘surplus value’. This legalised robbery (Haywood‘s ‘weird alchemy’) could well be described as ‘value extraction’.

But this is not what Mazzucato means by the term. She is not as radical as might at first seem. Her case is not against capitalism as such, but only against present-day capitalism which she sees as biased in favour of finance and against industry. Her ‘production theory of value’ is a plea for, as she put it, ‘reinvesting profits into areas that create goods and services’ instead of financial juggling.

But, as Marx explained, ‘value extraction’ occurs at the point of production. Financial juggling is not extracting value from the producers but from those who originally extracted it from them: the mining, manufacturing and service capitalists who employ them. Mazzucato is taking sides in a thieves’ quarrel.