American independence and its mythology (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 is upon us, it seems like a good time for socialists to assess this momentous event. Marx, in contrast to his writing on the American Civil War, has little to say about the conflict other than that he saw it as progressive but unresolved until the North’s victory over the South in 1865.

Although we have little interest in the international and internecine struggles between members of the bourgeoisie, what of the claim that these events on the east coast of North America constituted a revolution? If so what kind of revolution and was Marx correct as seeing the transition of 13 colonies into a nation-state as a progressive event in respect of the long-term aim of socialism? A cynic might suggest it was the capitalists of both states and their hatred of paying tax that generated the conflict between them. That the early USA was almost entirely dependent on slave labour for its wealth does make the shouts for liberty and justice rather hollow and hypocritical but then the international bourgeoisie have always been masters of myth creation and, as ever, it falls to Marxist socialists to try and separate myth from reality by stripping away the ideological overgrowth.

By 1763 the British had succeeded in expelling their French colonial rivals from North America but in doing so they had all but bankrupted their treasury. To maintain a series of forts to protect the victory was expensive and Parliament resolved to raise the revenue to pay for this by a series of taxes that regulated overseas trade on the 13 colonies. The colonists, on the other hand, thought that they had done their fair share of fighting to help the British defeat the French and saw no reason to pay for the honour. The climax to this came with the implementation of the hated ‘stamp act’ which was the first direct tax imposed by the British.

In 1763 the British had also forbidden any further expansion west because, for one thing, they feared the cost of going to war with the native Americans. However, the colonists saw the west as ripe for land speculation and they proceeded to create a ‘general assembly’ in the same year to oppose these British measures under the slogan: ‘No taxation without representation’. In response London passed a series of ‘quartering acts’ that imposed British troop garrisons in many of the leading towns with the added insult that the locals should provide them with food and shelter. Boston erupted and British ships were confiscated, whilst embargoes were placed on imports and exports to the ‘old country’. This was an act of rebellion against the crown which resulted in an invasion of Boston in 1768. Boston became a hotbed of rebellion with constant tension and violent skirmishes which in 1770 climaxed with the infamous ‘Boston Massacre’ in which many colonists were killed. Riots followed including the famous ‘Boston Tea Party’ where British ships were looted and their cargoes destroyed. By now the Americans had begun to create armouries for what they regarded as an inevitable war. On discovering the location of one of these a British army marched on Concord to seize the armaments but were confronted along the way at Lexington by a colonial militia and the first battle of the war took place.

The war was to last until 1781 when the British surrendered at Yorktown to the Americans and their French and Spanish allies. The colonists had won their independence but what kind of state would they create and was it in any way ‘revolutionary’? The propaganda against Britain had portrayed it as a feudal autocracy when, in fact, the King and his aristocrats (both old and newly created) had been capitalists for a good 100 years before the rise of merchant capitalism in the new world, and parliament was the final arbiter of policy.

The American economy was mainly based on the labour of chattel slavery and people like George Washington lived like ancient Roman patricians on massive slave estates. So in its formative years the republic saw very little change from the perspective of the black slaves and the poor white farmers. Britain was well into its ‘industrial revolution’ and was a much more progressive state than its new competitor. Most of the signatories of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ were slave owners who, apparently, saw no hypocrisy between the claims of liberty and justice for the white elite and the reality of life within for hundreds of thousands of enslaved inhabitants.

Thomas Jefferson began his political career opposing slavery but ended it as a racist bigot of the worst kind. In North America the conjunction of slavery and skin colour became enshrined in the American psyche and even after the ‘emancipation’ at the conclusion of the civil war many of the formerly enslaved became ‘share-croppers’ – in effect, little better than medieval serfs. America had progressed from chattel slavery to feudal serfdom. This kind of racism was to fuel the genocide of the Native Americans and so preserve the racial and political violence embedded deep within the culture which survives to this day. Of course, socialists are not surprised at the depths of bourgeois hypocrisy but the American oligarchs seem to have taken it to another level claiming that they have no empire and that their state violence was always in ‘defence of democracy’. Perhaps the origin of their state is one of the reasons for the US’s continual political backwardness? If 1781 was revolutionary it was an extremely reactionary revolution more akin to the Third Reich and its genocidal and slave-economy policies than to the English and French revolutions.

Many historians regard the relationship between the founders’ support of slavery and their call for liberty and justice as some kind of paradox; they shy away from the truth of the origin of their country being founded on a lie. It can be said that the absence of any mitigating counterforce to the free market capitalism embraced by the oligarchs made it possible for the northern states to invest millions of dollars into industrial technology and so become one of the most powerful economic powerhouses by the end of the nineteenth century – in that Marx was correct; but what he didn’t foresee was that this extremely technologically advanced country would not also enjoy a commensurable rise in working-class political consciousness. Consumerism, religion and nationalism would prevent any important political evolution and has led to the kind of authoritarian ‘king’ figure that America now endures. The world longs for the end of the murderous American imperialism which seems, at last, to be within sight. Its birth in violence, racism and genocide and the malign shadow that has forever haunted America as a result might finally destroy it. No doubt it will be replaced, in the absence of socialist consciousness, by an equally rapacious capitalist global empire of some kind. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ will have to wait until people realise just how to make what was and is now just a platitude into something meaningful and real.

Wez.

50 Years Ago: The class issue in the American Revolution (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What, if anything, does the Declaration of Independence mean? The approach of its 200th anniversary has produced a small deluge of reviews of the saga of American history and the ‘truths’ adopted on 4th July 1776. There must be many who, having read and listened, still wonder why a nation claiming to be founded on ‘inalienable rights’ of equality, freedom of speech and thought and ‘the pursuit of happiness’ manifestly does not have them. The answer is that the Declaration of Independence was framed as the expression of one class’s economic interests…

The greater part of the Declaration of Independence consists of political attacks on George III. In Britain the Georges were supported by the Tory representatives of the landowning aristocracy while the Whigs, standing for the interests of developing capitalism and freedom of trade, were still struggling. In America, still in its early stages, the class issues were confused but the dominant interests were those from which the capitalist class originated: the smuggling merchants, land speculators, and would-be manufacturers. The Tories comprised large landholders, ‘respectable’ merchants, officials and dependants of the British regime, and the Church of England faction…

The War of Independence ended in 1782, one month before the Tory government fell and the Americans’ Whig allies came to power in Britain. This was the beginning of capitalism’s rise to maturity. How much the Declaration of Independence meant, and whom it stood for, can be seen in the fact that in the mid-1780s out of an American population of 3½ million (excluding Indians) only 400,000 were ‘free’ men. Its principles, and the ideas of democracy it embodied, were cast aside almost immediately…

The history books show Independence to have been essential to the emergence of a great modern nation: the creation of a strong central government controlled by the manufacturing and commercial class. The capitalists were a revolutionary class, advancing the capacities of mankind immeasurably. What the Declaration of Independence shows is their inability to fulfil those capacities after two hundred years. Like the aristocracy from whose grip they broke, from a dynamic social force they have long since become an obstruction to mankind. It is time for the next move, to Socialism.

[From the article, The Class Issue in the American Revolution' by Robert Barltrop, Socialist Standard, July 1976.]

Revolution (2025)

From the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Revolution n. In the political sense, a word which inspires dread in those who even passively support the status quo in a society, ie, most people – the rich through fear of dispossession, the poor through fear of violence and instability.

In fact, in history, political revolutions have arguably saved the poor from violence more than they have subjected them to it. Such examples would be where revolution has shortened or ended war, by overthrowing the rulers making the war – as in the case of Russia in 1917, where the mass slaughter on the eastern front was brought to a halt by the action of the soldiers themselves and their fellow workers at home. Disobedience and mutiny, often signs of approaching revolution, have thus saved lives.

However, revolution in the popular imagination (mostly drawn from the violence and turbulence of the minority revolutions of France and Russia, which freed the capitalist minority class from the restraints of feudal and semi-feudal monarchy) is not what socialists mean by the word revolution. Indeed, had these minority revolutions not been symptomatic of revolution in the economic basis of society, but merely political, socialists would not even call them revolutions at all.

Hence, whereas the French and the Russian, and the English, revolutions were revolutions, the so-called American Revolution was not, but merely a war for the independence of the colonial capitalists from the British capitalist state. It did not change the basis of colonial society, which remained capitalism. This is also true of national uprisings miscalled ‘revolutions’ which are simply the result of capitalist quarrels between national factions or between colonial and national factions for the control of capitalist loot.

All revolutions hitherto have been minority class revolutions, and hence marked by violence, as former classes of society have been expunged and others become ascendant. The revolutionary minority in all cases have made use of the majority in order to seize power, but the majority has yet to make its revolution.

With only two classes remaining in society, the 1 percent capitalist class who exclusively own the means of production and the 99 percent working class who are thus compelled to work for them, the socialist revolution will be the revolution of the majority of humankind. Since this can only happen when the majority are conscious and desire it, violence will not be necessary, unlike the minority class revolutions of the past.

The means for peaceful majority revolution have long existed in parliamentary bourgeois democracies, namely the ballot.

This political act will be the formality that will liberate the transformation, already long since waiting in the wings, of the economic basis of society in the interest of all – hence, real revolution.

A.W.

Freedom as non-domination (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The historical influence of republicanism upon socialist thinking has been somewhat obscured, though recent works such as William Clare Roberts’ Marx’s Inferno and Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx have done much to help bring this relation back into the light. What is distinctive about the republican tradition is its conception of freedom, which differs from the one most commonly used today. Republican ideas about freedom were picked up and adapted by early socialists.

Freedom from and freedom to

Introductions to political or social freedom often start with Isaiah Berlin’s essay Two Concepts of Liberty. This article will follow the convention and begin here, not because there is anything uniquely faultless about Berlin’s essay, but because it has become the paradigmatic statement of the modern view of liberty. Berlin distinguishes between two ways of thinking about freedom, which he labels ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. In secondary texts this distinction is sometimes explained as being the difference between ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’, but this does not really capture two distinct concepts just two different ways of talking about the same thing – for example, the ‘freedom to’ enjoy a quiet space is also at the same time the ‘freedom from’ the interference of noisy neighbours.

While freedom in the negative sense can straightforwardly be understood as an absence of constraint or interference, Berlin’s positive freedom is a little harder to pin down. If we think of positive freedom as being about self-mastery of our internal life, we still have something that can be collapsed into negative freedom. The mastery of physiological compulsion can still be thought of as the overcoming of interference or constraints, and so a type of negative freedom. Instead of being about self-mastery we can think of positive freedom as being about self-realisation and self-perfection. Positive freedom can be understood as overcoming the constraints or barriers that obstruct us from the realisation of our own full potential. Only by living the most fulfilling version of ourselves do we become truly free. On this account, freedom is not an absence but an end-state or achievement. As summarised by Quentin Skinner in A Third Concept of Liberty:

‘… what underlies these theories of positive liberty is the belief that human nature has an essence, and that we are free if and only if we succeed in realising that essence in our lives. This enables us to see that there will be as many different interpretations of positive liberty as there are different views about the moral character of humankind. Suppose you accept the Christian view that the essence of our nature is religious, and thus that we attain our highest ends if and only if we consecrate our lives to God. Then you will believe that, in the words of Thomas Cranmer, the service of God “is perfect freedom”. Or suppose you accept the Aristotelian argument that man is a political animal, the argument restated as a theory of freedom by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961). Then you will believe that, as Arendt maintains, “freedom . . . and politics coincide” and that “this freedom is primarily experienced in action”.’

Berlin, who was writing during the Cold War and in opposition to Stalinism, highlights how this positive conception of freedom could be open to abuse. It leaves itself open to paternalistic and authoritarian interpretations. If freedom amounts to the achievement of our true potential or real interests, the question arises as to what these ‘real’ interests really are. If real interests do not have to be something that an agent is conscious of then the coercive interference from a higher social power could be a way of forcing people to be free. Says Berlin:

‘… George Orwell is excellent on this. People say “I express your real wishes. You may think that you know what you want, but I, the Fuhrer, we the Party Central Committee, know you better than you know yourself, and provide you with what you would ask for if you recognised your “real” needs.’

This is not to say, as is sometimes claimed, that Berlin thought that every use of the concept of positive freedom was a concealed attempt at manipulation and that we should therefore only use the negative conception. His claim was that historically the positive conception had been misused more often and with more devastating results. The negative conception of freedom was also open to misuse:

‘…Negative liberty is twisted when I am told that liberty must be equal for the tigers and for the sheep and that this cannot be avoided even if it enables the former to eat the latter if coercion by the state is not to be used. Of course unlimited liberty for capitalists destroys the liberty of the workers, unlimited liberty for factory-owners or parents will allow children to be employed in the coal-mines. Certainly the weak must be protected against the strong, and liberty to that extent be curtailed. Negative liberty must be curtailed if positive liberty is to be sufficiently realised; there must be a balance between the two, about which no clear principles can be enunciated. Positive and negative liberty are both perfectly valid concepts, but it seems to me that historically more damage has been done by pseudo-positive than by pseudo-negative liberty in the modern world.’

Ancient Rome

Having a grasp of these two common ways of thinking about freedom we can now introduce a third conception, which is commonly referred to as ‘republican’ or ‘neo-roman’ freedom. This way of thinking about freedom has been bought back into the public consciousness largely thanks to the work of historian of ideas Quentin Skinner and the political philosopher Philip Pettit. It can be thought of as ‘freedom as non-domination’ or ‘freedom as independence’. This republican concept of freedom can be directly tracked back to the Digest of Roman law. Here it is stated that ‘the fundamental division within the law of persons is that all men and women are either free or are slaves’ and that ‘Slavery is an institution of the law of nations by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominion of someone else’. From this we can get a definition of what it means to be a free person within a society. A free person is someone who is not under the dominion of anyone else and can act on their own accord. As Livy, the Roman historian who served as an inspiration for Machiavelli and other 16th century Florentine republicans, put it – to be free was ‘to be in your own power’ and not dependent on the will of anybody else.

The key difference between republican and negative freedom can be illustrated in this way: On the negative conception of freedom a slave who is not interfered with, and left to do as they please, is free. While on the republican conception what makes someone free is not the absence of interference but the absence of domination. Even though a slave may be left to go about as they please, at any point they could be interfered with according to the arbitrary whims of their master. The knowledge that arbitrary interference can be applied at any point is enough to be a restriction to liberty, behaviour and comment must continually be self-monitored so as to avoid the sanction of the master. On the republican account, freedom is a status relation within a society that makes it impossible to be the helpless victim of arbitrary interference. As Sidney wrote in his 1698 Discourses Concerning Government, ‘he is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands, and depends upon his will.’

In the English Civil War, disputes between Crown and Parliament drew upon this language of dependency and dominion, drawing upon common-law texts which had their basis in the Roman Digest. The effect of Royal prerogative was that those living under the king were reduced to a state of servitude. This was not because of any actual or threatened interference, but because the continuation of rights and freedoms was dependent on the goodwill of the King, and this could be withdrawn at any point. It was this state of dependency, of being under the dominion of the King, that was the threat to freedom. When King Charles was executed, the charge was that he had ruled arbitrarily and so tyrannically. The Act that abolished the monarchy declared that the effect of prerogative had been ‘to oppress and impoverish and enslave the subject’.

As well as being central to the English revolution, these ideas would surface again a century later in the French and American revolutions. The central idea was that it was only possible to have individual freedom through being a citizen of a self-ruling republic. To live under the dependence of a monarch, or in the American case under a colonial power, is to be reduced to the status of a slave. This understanding of freedom as being a state of independence left some controversy as to the normative status of industrial production and wage labour in the early years of the American republic. Wage labour was seen as being a state of dependency and so a form of unfreedom which was degrading to the moral health of the nation. ‘Free labour’, either in the form of small-scale production where the producers also owned their means of production or that of independent homesteaders was seen as being more conducive to building a strong and resilient nation.

Freedom as emancipation

Reaction against revolutionary and democratic movements in France and America saw the development and spread of the idea of freedom as non-interference. This, together with the irresistible rise of international commerce with its permanent dependence on wage labour, saw a decline in republican ways of thinking about freedom by the late 18th century. The concept of negative freedom, in the form of voluntarist ideas about freedom of contract, was one that was more suitable for the needs of the capitalist class. Though republican ideas about freedom would continue to persist in the labour and nascent socialist movements.

‘Something of slavery still remains… something of freedom is yet to come’ wrote the labour republican Ira Steward in 1873. Early socialists would continue to use the language of ‘wage-slavery’, ‘self-emancipation’ and other tropes drawn from radical republican heritage.

But they did not just adopt republican ideas wholesale; they responded to and critiqued them. Republican language focussed on an undifferentiated ‘people’ as the basis for a self-governing republic, socialist language on the proletariat as the group-agent capable of changing society. The first English translation of Communist Manifesto was in a newspaper entitled The Red Republican, and here the difference between radical republican and socialist ideas can be seen in contrast side by side. Labour republicans, such as the Knights of Labor, sought to lessen the dependence of the working class through the development of workers co-ops, etc. Marx’s Capital can be understood as an intervention within the labour movement against the prominence of such ideas. Socialist critique argued that it was not enough for individual groups of workers to separately own their own enterprises, market competition would still present itself as a form of impersonal domination.

Understanding freedom as non-domination provides a rich foundation for criticising capitalist society. The formally ‘free’ contract that the wage labourer enters into turns out to be a one-way ticket into a relation of dependency. Employers impose the same kind of arbitrary interference upon workers as kings on their subjects. The importance of non-domination in the foundations of socialism is why it has to be a movement for collective self-emancipation and why authoritarian attempts to impose it on an unwilling or passive population would be doomed to failure. Rather than being the ‘real interests’ of the proletariat imposed by an authoritarian state, freedom as non-domination is a collective good. The extent to which it is achieved depends on the extent to which it has been secured for others.

DJP

Who are the ‘People’? (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The People, n. with def. article: a term that arose with the war of independence of American property-owners from the British crown and which came into general international use with the bourgeois revolution in France, where it referred to the ‘Third Estate’ – a general term for those neither of noble nor ecclesiastical aristocracy, but applying specifically to the revolutionary bourgeoisie, or capitalist (middle) class, as applied to themselves.

‘The People’ was therefore a capitalist term and indicated that class’s political and economic interest. It was mistakenly adopted by the nascent French working class of the French Revolutionary period, in ignorance of the fact that it was their masters’ watchword. It is still used today by non-class conscious members of the working class, and also by the representatives of capital desiring to blur the class struggle and keep the workers believing we share one entity with our exploiters, ie ‘The People’ of Britain, ‘The People’ of the United States, ‘The People’ of China, of Ukraine, of Russia, of Japan, of France, etc.

The People does not exist. There are two classes under present conditions: the capitalist minority and the working class majority. Each of us belongs to one or the other.

Only with the expropriation of the capitalist class by the working class will people come into existence, the people of Earth, no more under nation-states, but a real humanity.

A.W.

Marxism: Past and Present – pt.2 (1955)

Book Review from the September 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

Marxism: Past and Present by R. N. Carew Hunt. (Published by Geoffrey Bles)

Nothing more crucially establishes contrast between Marx and Lenin than their views on the nature and function of class-consciousness. Marx saw it as a development of class-awareness of the true position in a system based on antagonistic productive relations. Lenin viewed it as the intellectual prerogative of a political intelligentsia. Marx and Engels never tired of proclaiming that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. Lenin never tired of denying it. Marx and Engels came to hold that long and patient work was necessary to fit the workers for the task of social transformation. Lenin lived in the hectic expectation of “imminent revolution” and “the psychological moment.”

Lenin, like many “intellectuals” and certainly all dictators, had a naively sublime faith in the powers of leadership. It was the Bolsheviks, in fact, who classically taught the “leader principle” which later produced star pupils like Mussolini and Hitler. While Lenin in his more expansive moods spoke of the masses being the historic instrument for the achieving of Socialism, he never relaxed his iron belief that only an élite could provide the intellectual and organizational means for its accomplishment. To the workers he never conceded more than a trade-union consciousness as the upper limit of their mental development. “The mass,” he contended, “have no independent movement of their own.” (Collected Works, Vol. IV. Part III pp. 222 and 235.) He also said: “Left to themselves, the masses become enslaved to bourgeois ideology.”

Marx and Engels saw the working class as the representatives of a new and larger aspect of mankind. Lenin regarded them as political raw material which the Bolsheviks would work up into the finished article. Docile acceptance of Bolshevik plans Lenin taught as the cardinal virtue for the workers. When they demurred, the Kronstadt incident, among others, was a reminder that Bolshevik authority was not something to be lightly disregarded. “Lenin knows best” was the phrase he wanted to hear lisped most from the lips of the infant Russian working class.

Not even so accomplished a literary ventriloquist as Mr. Carew Hunt can make Lenin a convincing mouthpiece of Marxism. Actually he was a mouthpiece, but a mouthpiece of certain social forces in Russia making for a bourgeois revolution. Politically Lenin was not a Marxist but a Jacobin revolution-monger. Not unjustly did a contemporary dub him “the Russian Marat.” It is not surprising, then, that he so earnestly studied “the Jacobinic dictatorship” of the great “French bourgeois revolution” in order to discover techniques for his own. That he veiled his Jacobinic pretensions with Marxist phraseology has deceived shrewder observers than Mr. Carew Hunt.

Essentially Lenin’s dictatorship theory was an inflexible belief in the dictatorship of a party or a State. In spite of his dialectical pose, this constituted an absolute political principle applicable at all times and all phases of economic development. This is in flagrant contrast to the principles of the Communist Manifesto, which states: “the practical application of the principles will depend everywhere and at all times on existing historical conditions.” This political premise of Lenin is still enshrined in Communist doctrine, for we are asked to: believe that everywhere Russian domination extends “Socialism” has come into existence.

Little wonder that Lenin declared: “Majority rule is a constitutional myth.” (“Constitutional Illusions,” Aug. 1917, Collected Works, Vol. XXI, Book I.) At the first All-Russian Soviet Congress, where his party was but a fraction, he announced their readiness to take over immediately. He added: “Maybe we shall hold power a few weeks and then die at the barricades”—a whimsical notion, for Lenin, intended to be no martyr à la Thomas Müntzer. Power at all costs was writ large in Bolshevik belief.

Many, out of piety to Lenin, believe he forsook Marxism when he thought the end of the first world war would see the end of capitalism and that a Socialist, not a bourgeois, revolution, would be the order of the day. But such a view was always implicit in Lenin’s political theory, as we have seen, even if at times it conflicted with assumptions derived from Marx’s economic doctrines. In line with his Jacobinic assumptions, he had always held that it was possible to seize power during the course of a bourgeois revolution in Russia and by holding it control its corresponding economic phase and “steer” it in a Socialist direction. Even as far back as 1908 he said: “The victory of the bourgeois revolution will as a victory for the bourgeoisie be impossible.” (Collected Works, Vol. XII, p. 252. Quoted from Bolshevism. R. Sprengler, International Review Publishers.)

It might also seem that when Lenin identified State Capitalism with Socialism he sought to hide from himself the cruel historic truth of the limits of his own revolution. Yet again this identification was always implicit in the views he held as to the role his party would play in the Russian scene, culminating in a bourgeois revolution. When he said “State capitalism run in the interests of the whole people is nothing but Socialism” The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat it (Sept. 1917), it was Lenin who first perpetrated the myth of “Socialism in one country.” He thus finally revealed himself as the anti-Marxist adherent of that Bolshevik prototype, the Narodnik. It was these old Russian national revolutionaries who maintained that Russia would bypass capitalism and achieve a uniquely Russian Socialism. Stalin’s formulation of “Socialism in one country” via Lenin’s state capitalism, itself a by-product of Narodnik political influence, was under its ideological trappings but Russian nationalism come to ripe maturity.

Ironically enough the Russian “February Revolution” caught the Bolshevik élite on the wrong foot. It was the workers who took the initiative, not they; just as it was the ordinary soldiers who encompassed the fall of the reactionary Miliukov government. But the small, relatively backward working class of Russia could not decide or direct the course of the revolution where 80 per cent. of the population were peasants. It was the upsurge of the black discontent of the latter, coupled with the adroitly unscrupulous tactics of the Bolsheviks, which swept Lenin into power.

The Bolsheviks did not and could not represent the interests of the Russian working class. Even if they had vainly sought to do so, Engels had a word for them in envisaging a situation much more favourable than the Bolshevik seizure of power. In The Peasant War in Germany he expressed himself thus: “The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to take over a government in an epoch where the situation is not ripe for the domination of the class he represents … in the interests of the movement itself he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class . . . with the assertion that the interests of an alien class are their interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.”

While Marx’s and Engels’s writings show apprehension as to the reactions of the ruling class to any threat to their social privileges, to darkly hint, as the author does, that they were ruthless politicos incipiently formulating the techniques of modern dictatorships seems to show that the edge to his criticism can only be sharpened on the whetstone of malice. Yet even a cursory acquaintance with the works of Marx and Engels reveals a social vista incomparably superior to the motley crowd of purblind politicians and ideologists who clutter the band-wagon of “Western Democracy.”

The author assumes that Marx and Engels held that Socialism would automatically, even naturally, convert the Capitalists into a depressed minority. We have found no evidence for this in their writings. Mr. Carew Hunt might do well to ponder on capitalism’s own long and odious record of minority treatment.

The author refers to the role of force in Marx’s political doctrine, but only in so far as to vaguely equate it with insurrection and civil war, leading possibly to political terrorism. Marx and Engels certainly saw their “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a force—not, however, a destructive physical force but a socially organized power of a politically mature working class. If they argue that an enforcement of that power may be needed to implement a majority decision, this is not inconsistent with democratic precept.

Moreover, Mr. Carew Hunt’s objection to the force of socially organized power is inconsistent with his support of capitalism. Capitalism as a system of private property relations generates class conflicts which require the force of the State, with its control of the armed forces to provide the physical sanction for its continuance. Are we to conclude that the author’s acceptance of this makes him anti-democratic? Again, the present order produces the most pernicious form of force in the shape of the organized violence of war (latent in re-armament; actual in war itself). If Mr. Carew Hunt’s ideological defence of western capitalism is extended to military defence as well, must we rate him as a ruthless ideologue? And if he supported the last war and consequently “our glorious ally Russia,” was not he, even if for the period of war only, a supporter of Stalinism? We do not suggest this: it is merely a sample of the author’s own logic.

The rest of Mr. Carew Hunt’s book is pointless pin-pricking. This is his second book on Marxism. We wonder why. Cold print often produces chilling doubts. He may yet try again on the assumption “third time lucky”!

Ted Wilmott

(Concluded)

Perverted History. The “Socialist” Countess’s Twaddle Exposed. (1917)

From the June 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Little more than half a century has passed since in Japan the Samurai surrendered their privileges into the hands of the Mikado, and with their sacrifice the new Japan was born…. Suppose that our aristocracy, as a class, were to emulate the Samurai, that they were to place at the disposal of the State the Mother Earth that belongs to the State by right. They might reasonably accept a moderate recompense, something that would provide for them and their children on the scale of modest living that will become the rule when we begin to meet the price of war . . . How far fairer it would be for us to recognise and accept the truth and go as the Moors went from Spain, where they too had become an anachronism, though the beauty that made their sojourn remarkable lingers to this day. If we would make the supreme sacrifice of our traditions we could trust the common sense of our countrymen to see that no plutocrats stepped into the place we had vacated ; we could make our bargain with the State that it should be the supreme landlord spending the rent to make the lovely countryside at least as valuable to national life as the ugly town. We who came into the high places of Europe with the false halo of conquest would retire from them in the real halo of renunciation, and our act of supreme sacrifice would be a better memorial than the best of us could have hoped to gain.”

The above is from an article by the Countess of Warwick which appeared in the “Daily Chronicle” of April 12th, 1917. The article is entitled “We Must Go.” The “We” is the “hereditary landowners,” to whom the appeal is made to hand over their land to the State, in the interests of greater productivity, and in justice to the workers, who have bled for it.

How the latter can benefit in any way from the proposed surrender of lands is made no clearer by the Countess than by any of the Fabian or I.L.P. treatises on the same subject.

State ownership of land, or, indeed, of any of the means of wealth production, solves no problem for the working class. Only common ownership with democratic control can do that. State ownership, that is, collective ownership by the capitalist class, as with the Post Office, for instance, leaves the workers still wage-slaves. The introduction of labour-saving machinery would therefore have the same effect as it has to-day. The countess, like many another reformer, overlooks this fact, though it should be obvious. She says: “The country has great needs, and if it is to remain solvent the united work of one and all following the latest developments with the most complete equipment will be inevitable.”

This policy in the past has resulted in increased unemployment for the working class ; its extension, therefore, can only result in greater poverty, arising from still further increased unemployment. State ownership of the land excludes the working class from the soil, except in the capacity of wage-workers. They are mere subjects of exploitation to those who provide with their capital the “most complete equipment,” and the rent to be paid to the State for the use of the land.

The fallacy of State ownership, however, has been so often exposed in these columns that we can afford to leave it for the present and deal with the other fallacy contained in the first quotation—that a ruling class has ever in the past renounced, or is likely in the future to renounce, its privileges and power unless compelled to do so by superior force. There is no record in history of a ruling class abdicating in favour of a class weaker than itself. Nor is there any record of a ruling class so imbued with a moral sense of justice and consideration for the class it governed, that it would, knowingly and willingly, sacrifice the meanest of its privileges to assist that class to its emancipation. The ruling class in capitalist society is stronger in its determination to maintain its rule and possesses more powerful weapons than any previous class in history. Its barbarity, as every contest with the workers testifies, equals and its hypocrisy exceeds, that of any previous ruling class.

But, the reader will ask, does not the countess give actual examples from history where a dominant class voluntarily abdicated? Both these examples are misrepresentations of the actual facts. Take the case of Japan. In that country the system of society previous to 1868 was similar in its essential features to the Feudal system of European countries. The Samurai were the military class, composed of territorial nobles, called Daimios, and their vassals or retainers. Strictly speaking, however, the term Samurai applied to these latter only. They and their families were kept by the Daimios, or had lands assigned to them for which they drew the rent, as under the Feudal system in Europe. This applied to the Daimios as well, who numbered about 255, and whose incomes varied between 10,000 and 1,027,000 koku of rice per annum.

The revolution that abolished this system was not of the same sanguinary character as the bourgeois revolution in France in 1689, or the English revolution in the time of Charles the First. “The two parties,” says Arthur Diosy, “were too unevenly matched for the struggle to become a severe one.” Therein lies the secret of its relatively peaceful consummation. The Daimios were between the devil and the deep sea ; they submitted to the inevitable—on the best terms they could obtain. They received from the State an annual income equal to one-tenth of their former income, and were relieved of the responsibility of maintaining the Samurai, who were taken over by the Government to form the nucleus of the Army and Navy. Those who held hereditary incomes were given the opportunity to sell their rights to the Government for half cash and half Government bonds.

Unlike the revolution that broke up the Feudal system in Europe, the Japanese revolution was projected, or rather accelerated, from outside the nation. Attempts to establish trading relations by occidental powers, sometimes, as in the American expedition under Commander Perry, involving a display of naval forces, rudely awakened the ruling class from their feudal sleep. The Mikado and his nobles were forced to recognise that they must establish their rule on Western lines, or they would speedily become a vassal State to one or other of the great Powers that, with increasing impatience, knocked at her gates with wares for sale—and with heavy artillery to batter them down if their admittance was long delayed.

In these circumstances the Mikado and his nobles, after consultation, and not without military opposition from some of them, took the only possible course to maintain their independence as a nation. They proceeded to organise the nation on the model of their capitalist neighbours, their first care being to establish a fighting force on land and sea, capable of warning off belligerent intruders and guaranteeing a share in the world’s markets to Japanese capitalists.

This action, taken in defence of their independence and based on a compromise or bargain between the nobles and their legitimate ruler, is what the countess describes as a sacrifice.

So much for the first example quoted by the Socialist (!) countess ; now for the second. The Moors entered Spain in 711 A.D., and in three years had “conquered the whole country, except the almost inaccessible regions of the North-West.” The Spaniards, according to their historians, waged almost uninterrupted warfare against them for nearly eight centuries. They gained the upper hand late in the fifteenth century, and then commenced a long period of religious persecution against the Moors, who were finally all converted to Christianity by burning, torturing and other methods approved by the Inquisition.

But their religious opinions were suspected by the clergy under Phillip III, who ordered their expulsion from Spain. “How far fairer it would be for us to recognise the truth and go as the Moors went from Spain, where they too had become an anachronism” says the countess, as though their going was a voluntary act of abdication.

They went, “about one million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain,” says Buckle, “were hunted like wild beasts. Many were slain as they approached the coast, others were beaten and plundered, and the majority, in the most wretched plight, sailed for Africa. During the passage, the crew, in many of the ships, rose upon them, butchered the men, ravished the women, and threw the children into the sea. Those who escaped this fate landed on the coast of Barbary, where they were attacked by the Bedouins and many of them put to the sword. Others made their way into the desert, and perished from famine.”

The Moors ruled in Spain with the same arrogance that characterises every ruling class. Their rule became “an anachronism” because their power was broken and for no other reason. What childish nonsense, what a wilful perversion of history, to pretend that theirs was a voluntary act of renunciation. Yet it is on statements such as these that capitalist tools, wearing the Phrygian cap and waving the red flag of Socialism, gravely inform the workers that the shuffling, grabbing and hypocritical capitalist class will lead the working class, step by step, to its emancipation.

As in Japan, so in every European country—feudalism succumbed before the revolutionary power of the capitalist class. The fact that a compromise was afterwards effected, by means of which, feudal traditions and lineage were preserved, made no difference to the ultimate nature of society. Capital alone had voice. Was it not by means of capital that the wealth-producing class was exploited, and the national exchequer provided with the funds that maintained the fighting forces ? Lords and Barons might flaunt their heraldry, but the capitalist built his State on physical force and allotted monarchy and aristocracy their places in the capitalist State. The aristocracy were absorbed ; they became capitalists themselves and henceforth their interests were identical with those who had accomplished a revolution against them. For all practical purposes landowners and industrial capitalists form but one class—there is no serious friction between them. They control the executive power in the full determination—rarely expressed because so well understood—to maintain the existing system of society, and neither the prayers of morbid countesses nor the groans of their millions of starving victims will ever shake their resolve.

Only the organised might of the working class can break the power of capitalism and bring emancipation. If the capitalist class were imbued with the moral and sympathetic qualities they profess, the poverty and the toll of lives under their system, even in peace times, should have been sufficient incentive for them to exercise those qualities. Not so, however. Their efforts were always in the opposite direction—how to intensify exploitation.

Even the tragedy and devastation of their latest crime, with all the added misery it brings in its train for the working class, has never once caused the question to be raised—except by the Socialist—”Is not the system itself wrong ?”

And let the workers make no mistake, though every capitalist nation took sides and fought to the last man, till every vestige of civilisation were destroyed, the ruling class would never raise that question.

That question must be asked and answered by the working class. At present they are exploited, dragooned, bluffed, trained and educated to the status of wage-slavery. Thus with their intelligence warped, though the largest in numbers, they are the weakest. Let them strip themselves of the capitalist shroud which envelops their minds and they will at once become the strongest class in society. The capitalist class will then lose the opportunity, which they have never shown the slightest inclination to embrace, to win a “halo of renunciation” because working-class emancipation will be accomplished by the working class itself.

F. Foan

Correspondence. (1917)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

F. A. H. (Leicester.)—Taking your points in the order in which you give them we append our criticism.

“(1) That social development takes place through the action and reaction of economic and political power.”

This question assumes that there is an “economic” power apart from political power, but this assumption is incorrect. Actually “economic” power is a misnomer, and is merely a term for actions of an economic character which take place under the shelter and protection of the political power.

To take a well-known historical instance : It was not until the merchant class—the forerunners of the modern capitalists—had gained a large share of political power that they were able, effectively, to fight against and finally overthrow, the feudal rulers.

Fundamentally social development takes place because of the continued discoveries and inventions in the methods of producing and distributing wealth. When these changes reach a certain stage in their growth they come into conflict with the social arrangements and order that were made to suit the older methods. To continue in existence society must alter its form and order, that is, re-adapt itself to the new conditions. Obviously the class whose material interests are bound up with the old methods will endeavour to retain and preserve the old form and order of society, while the class whose interests are connected with the new method will endeavour to bring about a change. The power to make this change—since the institution of private property in the means of life—rests in the control of the political machinery, that is, the machinery under which laws are made and the force raised to carry them out. Hence as Marx says: “Every class struggle is a political struggle,” because it is only by obtaining possession of political power that the new rising class can establish the social forms in harmony with the economic changes. History shows this in every change that has taken place in the forms of society since private property was established.

“(2) That each developing class takes the line of least resistance, which is to say, of course, that it takes the one that is open to it.”

Not until a series of struggles and experience’s have shown them the error of various ways do the developing class find the right road—which is really the line of least resistance—for the object in view. Over and over again a developing class has been deceived and misled by the ruling class of its day into taking a road quite contrary to its (the developing class’s) own interests. How often have the modern working class been, misled in this way !

“(3) That the difference of the coming revolution from previous ones lies in this, that some measure of political power must first be acquired, and this results from the fact that in the movements which have previously led to revolutions it was not necessary at their inception to visibly deprive the then ruling classes of property, this being effected by the development of the means of production or the property forms themselves.”

As shown in the answer to No. 1, the idea in the first portion of the above statement is wholly incorrect, and the reason given in the second portion is equally erroneous. To go back no further than the French Revolution of 1789, the feudal owners were completely dispossessed of their property, which was handed over to the peasants under conditions laid down in the Code Napoleon. When chattel-slavery was abolished in America it meant the confiscation of a huge amount of property—for, of course, the chattel-slave was property in every sense of the word—from the slave owners. And this has been true of every revolution in history.

“(4) When the S.P.G.B. is attacked for not defining in detail the method of organisation and procedure, am I right in saying that if their general principles are correct efficient organisation will naturally follow; and to a certain extent the details must be dictated by circumstances yet to arise. Also that their organisation, will be, by its very nature, sufficiently pliable to meet all the needs of the revolution ?”

Your answer generally is right, but it may be noted that a real understanding of correct principles is necessary for sound and efficient organisation. Then the direction of such organisation will be retained in the hands of its members, who may vary its details to suit circumstances.

—Ed. Com.

Might is Right (2007)

From the January 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everybody is talking about “human rights” these days but what are they and will they always need protecting?

Socialists have a problem with “human rights”. Not of course that we don’t think individuals shouldn’t have free speech or shouldn’t be free from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. It is the concept of “rights” in general that is the problem.

We are materialists and so don’t like to deal in vague abstract ideas such as Justice, Freedom – or Rights. For us, these are reflections of material circumstances. We take the view that “might is right”, not in the sense that this is how things should be but in the sense of how things are. Without the power to enforce it (“might”) a “right” is just an ineffective, abstract concept.

Take the “right to strike”, for instance. What this means is that it is not illegal to go on strike. But the state only made strikes legal after the workers had demonstrated that the law wasn’t going to stop them striking. In other words, the state’s recognition of the “right” to strike was the state accepting that the workers had already acquired the “might” to strike.

This is not the case with individual “human rights” in countries which don’t recognise them. When Amnesty criticises the lack of human rights in China or Burma or Iran or wherever, they are merely appealing to an abstract idea since there is no might to back them up. No wonder the governments concerned don’t take much notice of these appeals (unless they want to make some gesture in order to obtain some diplomatic advantage).

The most that we as materialists can accept regarding the concept of rights is as a description of what is in the legal code of some state, i.e. as a description of what the law actually says rather than as an abstract idea existing independently of the law. So, we can say that the “right to free speech” or “the right to a fair trial”, etc exist in some country when this is provided for in the legislation of that country. On the other hand, if the law or the practise in China or Burma does not allow for free speech then this means that, as a matter of objective fact, no “right” to free speech exists there.

Any other definition of “rights” than what is set out in the law creates all sorts of problems, not least as to what exactly they are. Most people would associate human rights with free speech and freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment but why are they restricted just to things like these? Why, for instance, isn’t it a human right to have enough food or to be housed decently? On what basis, in fact, is something considered to be a human right? In the end, it can only come down to a question of political preference – it’s what the people making the claim consider desirable, not something objective that can be discovered. It’s an expression of what they think is right. Nothing more.

Origins

All the same, “human rights” – or “The Rights of Man” as Tom Paine entitled his famous 1791 polemic in defence of the French Revolution – do have a history. What, then, were human rights originally, when the concept was first introduced?

For this we need to go back to the end of the 18th century when two key documents were adopted within two years of each other: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens by the National Assembly of France in 1789 and the first 10 amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America, known as the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791.

The “rights” in the two documents are basically the same (which was no accident of course since there was a cross-fertilisation of ideas between both sides of the Atlantic): the individual has the right to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom for arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and a fair trial before an impartial jury.

Talk of the government emanating from the “nation” and governing with the consent of the governed might lead to the conclusion that the right to vote, i.e. to say who makes up the government, would also be regarded as a “human right”. But in both documents such a “right” is conspicuous by its absence – and this is very revealing.

What it reveals is that both the American and the French Revolutions were revolutions carried out largely by, but in any event, in the interest of property-owners, large and small, who wanted to remove the obstacles to their accumulating more property. But there were conflicts between the larger and the smaller property-owners, between what in France were called the “bourgeoisie” and the “petty bourgeoisie”. One of the disputes between them was precisely over the right to vote.

The richer property owners were afraid that, as they were not themselves in the majority, the less well-off would vote to take away their property. In both America and France, they got their way and arrangements (restricted franchise and/or indirect election) were made to keep power out of the hands of the majority. Which is one of the reasons why we call these revolutions “bourgeois” revolutions. The “rights of man”, now known as “human rights” were first proclaimed by these bourgeois revolutions.

Economics

Marxists who have analysed these bourgeois revolutions have explained the “rights of man” as an ideology accompanying the development of the market economy which these revolutions both reflected and encouraged (see, for instance, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism by C.B. Macpherson). On the market, especially the ideal free competitive market, all commodity-producers are equal in the sense of the market not according special privileges to any of them (hence the call for the abolition of all titles of nobility); they are also free agents in the sense of making their own decisions independently of each other about what and how much to produce and sell; the market, the outcome of these decisions of the free and equal commodity-producers, operates independently of the government (hence it is the duty of the government to accept that all men are free and equal).

It is not only Marxists who associate “human rights” with the market economy. So do advocates of the so-called “free” market. Here’s what the Cato Institute, a free-market think-tank in America, had to say in a document put out in 1996 (opposing trade sanctions against China for its bad “human rights” record):

Free trade is itself a human right and rests on an individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property – rights the U.S. Founding Fathers regarded as inalienable and self-evident ( . . .). The proper function of government is to cultivate a framework for freedom by protecting liberty and property, including freedom of contract (which includes free international trade) – not to use the power of government to undermine one freedom in an attempt to secure others. The right to trade is an inherent part of our property rights and a civil right that should be protected as a fundamental human right. The supposed dichotomy between the right to trade and human rights is a false one. Market exchange rests on private property, which is a natural right. As moral agents, individuals necessarily claim the right to liberty and property in order to live fully and to pursue their interests in a responsible manner. The freedom to act without interference, provided one respect the equal rights of others, is the core principle of a market economy and the essence of human rights.” (http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj16n1-5.html)

This association of human rights and political democracy generally with the market economy and private property is the official policy of the US government. When it criticises the human rights record of Syria or Iran or North Korea (or, less stridently these days, China), what it is criticising is not so much the imprisonment of dissidents as the fact that these countries have state-run economies which don’t allow US corporations free access to invest and buy and sell.

That the US government uses “human rights” to try to impose its form of capitalism on other countries must be an embarrassment to organisations such as Amnesty who are interested in these rights for their own sake. It allows the governments they criticise to dismiss them as tools of US and Western foreign policy. Which objectively – even if quite unintentionally of course – they are.

Lowered sights

This wouldn’t be the criticism we would make of them. We would criticise them for having set their sights too low. In confining themselves to only taking up individual cases, they are missing the big picture. There’s nothing wrong with writing to prisoners (any prisoners, not just political ones) and taking up their case with the authorities. This will ease a little the lot of the prisoners chosen, but can’t really be called political action.

We would of course like Amnesty and the others involved in this sort of humanitarian work to work for socialism. Or even, to work for the coming of political democracy to those countries without it, as the best political condition under capitalism for the development of the socialist movement. But the various human rights organisations have deliberately chosen not to do this. This is not just because it would close all channels of communication with the political authorities they have to deal with to have any chance of achieving something in the individual cases they take up. It is also because they, either implicitly or explicitly, regard working for something bigger such as political democracy (let alone socialism) as to set too unrealistic a goal in the sense of something not likely to be achieved in the near future.

Human rights organisations are not the only ones to take up this position. In the last thirty or so years it has become the general position of people concerned about some problem or other thrown up by capitalism. In the past such people would have joined the Labour Party or the Communist Party to try to solve the problem by national political action. Now they have given up on this and dispersed into hundreds of single issue organisations (Amnesty, Shelter, Greenpeace, Child Poverty Action, etc, etc.). It is as if they have accepted that capitalism is here to stay and have adopted the tactic of merely trying to make things a little less bad in the field of their particular concern. It’s a reflection of the pessimism that has resulted from the failure of reformism, in which so many people had previously placed such high hopes.

No doubt such people gain some satisfaction when they make progress in a particular individual case, but can they really be satisfied with the prospect of endlessly having to fight such cases again and again? Can they really be happy seeing the future as capitalism continuing for ever with them trying to stop it stamping so hard on people?

Hopefully not. Hopefully they will eventually come round to realising that it makes more sense to work for a world in which there will be no violation of human rights since there will be no governments representing the interest of minority ruling classes with an interest in violating them to protect their privileges and rule. In other words, a classless, stateless world based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life by and in the interest of all the people, in which there would be no market as there’d be production directly for use.

In such a world the whole concept of “human rights” would be part of the in-built democratic nature of a classless society (whether as procedural rules or as spontaneous behaviour patterns). There would be no minority ruling class or armed political centre against which people would need protection – no institutionalised might against which a counter-might would need to be exercised.

Adam Buick

Capitalism and the Illusion of Freedom (1995)

From the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The right to vote may be taken for granted by many workers today but it should never be forgotten that we had to struggle for it in the past

In Britain ideas concerning freedom, liberty and democracy can be traced all back to the 17th century. Between the 1640s and 1688 the propertied classes struggled to free themselves from the economic constraints imposed upon them by an absolutist monarchy.

The English Civil War was a class war and despite the rhetoric of the leaders of the parliamentary army that they were fighting for the liberty of the individual against an unjust government their major purpose was to establish a measure of self-government for the propertied classes. It was the men of property who gained new freedoms in the 17th century . Christopher Hill states what these freedoms were and who most of them were at the expense of:

“The men of property won freedom freedom from arbitrary taxation and arbitrary arrest, freedom from religious prosecution, freedom to control the destinies of their country through their elected representatives, freedom to buy and sell. They also won freedom to evict copyholders and cottagers, to tyrannise over their villages, to hire unprotected labour in the open market ” (The Century of Restoration 1603-1714, p. 265).

The mass of the population failed to make any gains either political or economic. The Duke of Albermarle is quoted as saying that “the poorer and meaner people have not interest in the commonweal but the use of breath".

The capitalist class, their representatives and spokesmen in the 17th and 18th centuries at least made no pretence of applying liberty, freedom and the right to elect governments to the mass of the population. These rights were restricted to property-owners and a conscious link was recognised between property and the role of government. John Locke, for example, argued that the executive would forfeit its rights if it endangered the stability of property, for its very existence rested on its role to maintain property.

Glorious for some

The reforming political grouping of the late 17th and early 18th centuries was the Whigs, in opposition to the Tory ideology which argued for a monarchy standing above the law. The Whigs wanted government under the Rule of Law by a parliament consisting of Monarchy, Lords and Commons. They were not democrats and did not advocate political democracy for the mass of the population.

After the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, and the receding of the threat of an absolutist monarchy, the Whigs became less reforming. When confronted by the idea of an extension of the political franchise to the so-called lower classes the Whigs were quite clear as to who they considered had the right to decide on who formed die government: those who owned freehold property. Thus one Whig argued: “It is owned that all governments are made by man and ought to be made by those men who are owners of the territory over which the government extends. It must likewise be confessed that the FREEHOLDERS of England are the owners of the English territory, and therefore have a natural right to erect what government they please ” (Quoted in H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 86- 90).

By the late 18th century', and following the French Revolution, the property-owning class showed what they thought of democratic movements. Both inside and outside parliament many favoured the imposition of repressive measures to prevent the spread of radical ideas. Several showed their contempt for ideas concerning the sovereignty of the people. Edmund Burke argued:

“The sovereignty of the people was the most false, wicked, and mischievous doctrine that ever could be preached to them . . .  The moment that equality and the sovereignty of the people was adopted as the rule of government, property would be at an end, and religion, morality and law, which grew out of property would fall with it."

The useful majority in society had a long time to wait before their struggle for democratic rights would make some progress. Until 1867 in fact, when the Reform Act added 400,000 borough voters nearly doubling the borough franchise (but women, paupers and farm labourers were still denied the vote).

Safe to extend the vote

The question is why was it at this point that the franchise was extended to a large section of the working class? The early part of the 19th century had seen militant working class agitation both industrially and politically. This period saw the Luddite risings and mass demonstrations seeking political reform, including the famous Peterloo massacre of 1819. Following several unsuccessful strikes by various groups of workers in the 1820s the idea of general unions also began to gain ground.

The failure of the 1832 Reform Act to give the working class the vote added further momentum to ideas about general militant industrial organisation. This movement culminated with the formation in 1834 of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. For Bronterre O’Brien the aim of general unions was to bring about: 

"an entire change in society—a change amounting to a complete subversion of the existing order of the world. The working classes aspire to be at the top instead of at the bottom of society—or rather that there should be no top or bottom at all."

The 1830s also saw the development of the largest and most important working class political movement up till then. Chartism. However the defeat of Chartism in the 1840s signalled the incorporation of militant organisation into the mainstream labour movement which was itself being integrated into capitalist society.

Thus the 1850s saw the development of the so-called “New Model Unions”, more centralised, bureaucratic and more eager to protect their funds than to engage in militant action. By the 1860s the leaders of several of these trade unions had set themselves up at the head of the movement. This group, known as the “Junta”, sought acceptance for the trade unions into the capitalist order. In 1862 they formed the Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association declaring: 

“Let our advocacy be firm, intelligent and persistent, not a sowing of the seeds of discord, but a promotion of the growth of union; not an exciting of class against class; but an endeavour to extend the welfare of all."

Therefore by 1867 the extension of the franchise to sections of the working class was no longer fraught with danger. In fact with fresh agitation breaking out in 1866 for parliamentary reform many members of the ruling class felt that denying the working class the franchise was providing workers with an issue to unite around. A further consideration was that granting the franchise to a section only of the working class would divide and weaken them.

Real democracy

Political democracy and the law developed from the seventeenth century according to the needs of a property and developing market economy. In other words, they developed in line with the interests of the property-owning class and had nothing to do with anything like the moral superiority of democracy over dictatorship.

The extension of the vote to the working class was not “given” but was won by years of struggle. It was conceded, even if only partially, only at a point when it would probably have been more dangerous for the ruling class to continue to deny it and at a time when large sections of the working class had been integrated into capitalist society.

Extending the vote to workers under capitalism is not the same thing as establishing real democracy. Meaningful democracy in a world where the means of producing and distributing the things we need to live are owned and controlled by a tiny minority is at best a sick joke. Real democracy under capitalism is an illusion. The limited democracy we do have can however be used as a tool to bring about a worldwide system where the Earth’s resources are owned and controlled by its inhabitants. When that goal is achieved, and only when it is achieved, can we start to talk about living in a true democracy.

Ray Carr

From ideology to humanity (2023)

Louix XVI, 1793, not on his best day.

From the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Humans make history, but, up to the present, they have made it largely unconsciously – which rules out, really, any so-called ‘conspiracy theory’. They respond to social evolution ideologically, which is not the same as saying that ideology alone motivates action. Ideology is part of the conscious motivation of a largely only semi-conscious (in socio-economic terms) mass of people. This was truer in former times than it is now, at least in the advanced industrialised countries, when today we have mass communication and information bombardment on an unprecedented, global, scale, which unites people from all over the world in real terms as never before – even if this yet evades the consciousness of the overwhelming majority.

The bourgeois revolution in Europe alone took a multitude of ideological forms, therefore, from Humanism to Calvinist puritanism, from democratic puritanism to the deism and atheist-materialism of the Enlightenment, from Luther to Lenin, all depending on the epoch and the social circumstances in which people found themselves. All these different ideologies expressed an unconscious movement out of feudalism and into capitalism – that is the real, but unconscious, motivating factor. The conscious factors are the ideologies, religious and political, finding expression through polemics and philosophy, literature and art, and also through militarism and (following the emergence of nation-states) the rise of nationalism.

The socialist revolution will be the first – in emancipating the last class to be emancipated – to require full majority consciousness, in that, because of its requirements, it cannot be achieved (unlike former social revolutions) by a minority leading others, but has to encompass a broad population that is fully conscious of its socio-economic tasks. The end of class society therefore marks the end of ideology as currently understood, and the emergence of humanity. Ideas in socialism will be the expression of individual thought, choice, and action. Where there are no classes, thinking will come into its own, as there will be no class to keep others in an exploitable position through the imposition of an ideology. Classlessness necessarily leads to individuality, as Wilde predicted. Under these conditions, art and literature, and science, will blossom as never before, benefiting from each person’s unique and individually rooted contribution.

A.W.

Stumbling blocks. (1905)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some questions asked and answered. 

Mr. H. J. Priest (Islington) sends the following five questions, which we answer.

1. Should all reforms be opposed by the members of the S.P.G.B.?

Our members oppose no reform which benefits the working-class.

We, however, resolutely decline to barter our Socialism for some vague promise of reform that resembles the proverbial pie crust. We decline to support an enemy, who is utterly opposed to us on the most important points, because he promises some minor measure.

Further, practically the whole of the so-called “reforms” at present proposed would not, under present class rule and economic conditions, materially benefit the workers if obtained.

2. Are the reforms for which our forbears fought, useless—e.g., The Factory Acts, Free Speech, and the Education Acts ?

The reforms to which Mr. Priest refers are not useless and have never been characterised as such by the S.P.G.B. They are, however, all echoes of the last class struggle.

The passing of the Factory Acts (particularly that of 1847) was largely due to the Tory landed aristocracy in revenge for the Corn Laws, and in vain attempt to stem the rising tide of manufacture, to stop the desertion of the land for the factory, and to hinder the mill owners in competition with the agriculturists for the available supply of labour power. On the part also of the more far-seeing manufacturers and Tories alike, it was to prevent the loss to the ruling class that would follow the utter degeneration of the working-class goose that laid the golden eggs. How near this was may be judged from Engels “Condition of the Working Class in 1844.”

For long the Factory Acts were rendered practically inoperative by the manufacturers, until they slowly discovered that, in moderation, the Acts did not diminish, but rather increased efficiency, output, and profits. We counsel our friend to examine the present Acts and their working; he will not find much to be proud of.

Free Speech and Education Acts were essential to the development of Capitalism, and were the work of the modern capitalist class on its advent to political power. Free Speech as a necessary corollary to free competition and the development of trade ; Education Acts, in order that the wage slaves should be more efficient and therefore cheaper.

Just as capitalist development renders Socialism inevitable, so also do many of the measures which were indispensable to Capitalism, prepare the way for Socialism in spite of the interests which promoted them.

3. Are the people in Russia fighting for phantoms in fighting for reforms?

This question hangs closely to the previous one, and the subject has been dealt with in No. 6 of this journal. Historically the people of Russia are fighting the battle of middle class emancipation. They are fighting precisely the same battle that our forefathers fought: and this is the secret of capitalist sympathy for Russian revolutionists.

It must not be forgotten how backward Russia is in economic development. Only 12 per cent. of her population live in towns, whilst commerce and great industry are largely in foreign hands. Hence the Russian industrial capitalist has still his emancipation to achieve. Though the populace is (in the towns) largely leavened with Socialist teaching, economic development is not yet ripe for Socialism, whilst it is largely a cloak for middle class aspirations. The freeing of the growing Russian industry from the strangling grasp of autocracy is the next step in social advance, and necessarily compels the support of the Russian working-class. Let our friend notice also that the work is being done by a revolutionary movement, out for the abolition of Czardom, not for its reform. Showing thereby that a revolutionary movement is far more efficacious even in the obtaining of concessions than is a timid reform movement. But reform cannot satisfy modern Russian conditions, for so long as Feudal Czardom is left in control, so long will it use its power in its own interests against the other classes in the state. Nothing but the deprival of the Russian feudal class of the control of the machinery of government can meet the present needs of Russia.

This means revolution ; it means the advent to administrative control of a new class : a class thrust forward by economic development. It means Bourgeois supremacy, leavened, (let us hope), by working-class influence.

What Mr. Priest calls reform in Russia really spells revolution ; the rise of a new class to the helm of the State, and the breaking down of the barriers to the untrammelled development of industry in that country; the inevitable, but let us hope brief, precursor of the Socialist Commonwealth.

The bloodshed and disorder which too often accompany revolution are due to desperate efforts of the ruling class to cling to power, to retain their domination over society, in their own interests in spite of the changed conditions and the will of the people.

The victory of the third estate in Russia, accomplished necessarily with the aid of the workers, will doubtless find a strong Socialist party on its feet to keep pace with the ever more rapid economic development, profiting by the experience of the more advanced countries, until the time arrives for proletarian triumph, when class distinctions are abolished, and the people come by their own.

4. Are not well fed, well leisured, well educated proletarians more useful to Socialists than anaemic, underfed, ignorant workers without leisure to read or think ?

From social history one fact stands clearly out ; that great political movements do not depend for their success upon the actual prosperity or otherwise of their participants, but upon far deeper economic causes. Thorold Rogers points out the frequency of great social discontent in prosperous times, and gives the Peasants’ War in England as an example whilst we know numerous instances of great political changes which have been effected by the people in times of direst distress. It can hardly be said that the organised and determined movement of the Russian people is connected with a surfeit of food, education and leisure.

But is it at all probable that the modern proletarians (i.e., propertyless) will become well fed well educated and leisured, persons, otherwise than by their emancipation from wage-slavery ? Is it not true that there is an alarming and continued growth in lunacy, degeneracy and pauperism ? Is not toil daily becoming more intense and employment more insecure ? Are not wages on the decline, and is not the modern worker worn out at an earlier age than his forefathers ?

There is, unfortunately, but little hope that the conditions of the working-class can materially improve under capitalist rule. The ruling-class will secure that the amount of their rent, interest and profit shall not dimmish by being expended unprofitably to themselves upon the means by which their wealth is created; and the growing intensity of competition nips in the bud any attempt at genuine aid to the workers by even the most kindly disposed. The growth of the unemployed side by side with the intensification of toil and decline in wages, are features inherent in capitalist development; and the ruling class cannot deal with these without committing social suicide.

The more capitalism presses upon the proletariat, the more nearly is the remedy placed within reach. Taught discipline in the factory, the workers will be forced to discipline themselves into economic and political organisations: whilst the concentration of wealth into fewer hands, the trustification of industry, the growing gulf between, the two classes, increasing wealth in face of spreading poverty, declining wages in face of greater productivity, all make the issues clearer to the workers and show to them that the way out of their misery is to take and hold the vast means of producing wealth, and so transform these from instruments of public oppression and private profit, into social instruments for social well-being.

Through Socialism alone can education, leisure and a material existence worthy the name become a possibility for the workers, and their physical, mental and moral uplifting a reality.

In face of the growing contradictions, and ever more glaring anomalies of capitalist society who can doubt that the toilers will, like Jonathan in the day of battle, “taste of the wild honey in the wood and find their eyes enlightened” ?

5. Are Socialists, who, while admitting that it is not Socialism, yet support reforms purporting to improve the condition of the workers, to be considered decoy birds and traitors to Socialism ?

This question is answered in our reply to No. 1. We have only to add that those who realize the truth of our principles, yet who attempt to wheel the workers into line on some petty issue behind one section or other of the capitalist party, are traitors to the working-class and should be branded as such.

ff the workers are content to support capitalism and capitalist candidates for the sake of “reforms” that are useful to capitalism (and a capitalist government will grant no other unless by fear of extinction), then, we say, the removal of the cause of working-class misery is indefinitely postponed.

The degradation and impoverishment of the workers are due to capitalist exploitation, and this, no mere reform can end. Our supreme aim must therefore be the abolition of the system of robbery.

It is less difficult to convince the average worker of the necessity for Socialism, than it is to convince him of the necessity for some dozen ineffective reforms ; while it is infinitely more useful.