Society and Morals. Part VII. The Morals of Capitalism. (1918)

From the March 1918 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part VI.

The industrial system which prevails to-day, and which has moulded social institutions along lines rapidly becoming world-wide, is known as “capitalism” because, under this system, the wealth used in production takes the character of “capital.” By “capital” is to be understood wealth which is neither used directly for consumption, nor yet, primarily, for the production of articles for their own sake, but wealth which is specifically employed for the purpose of yielding a profit or interest upon which the owner of the capital can live without necessarily consuming or diminishing the sum of capital itself.

Apart from the undeveloped forms—usurer’s or merchant’s capital which preceded the dominating “industrial capital” of to-day, this process of profit yielding is made possible because, in contrast to the possessors of capital (the capitalists) there exists a far larger class who possess no wealth upon which they can live. These propertyless persons must, therefore, undertake to work with the means of production owned by the capitalists on condition that in return they receive the means to enable them to feed, clothe, and shelter—in a word, maintain themselves.

This transaction between capitalist and worker takes the form of a purchase and sale of the worker’s labouring energy, for upon yielding this power to the capitalist for a stipulated time the worker receives a sum of money or a wage—the price of this energy. This price, whilst varying like that of any other commodity according to the relations of supply and demand, is determined by the cost of producing the commodity—in this case the maintenance of the labourer’s energy, of his life and that of his family at the customary standard of comfort and fitness.

Under capitalism practically everything that is produced is for sale in the markets. The capitalist does not desire to use the goods his employees produce for him ; it matters not to him even what they are, whether they be battleships or bootlaces, so long as he can obtain their equivalent in money by selling them. It is in their sale that he realises the profit he is all along out for. He obtains it from the value given to the goods by the labour of his employees, during their production, in excess of that which merely balances the wages he pays out. Obviously then, under these conditions practically all the benefits of increasing powers of production are reaped by the capitalists, who as a consequence become more wealthy, while the great mass of producers remain in a permanent condition of poverty.

The wage-worker under capitalism, therefore, is in a similar position to chattel-slave and to the serf, whom we have previously dealt with. He is a compulsory worker and he is exploited of the wealth produced by what we have hitherto referred to as surplus energy—that energy resident in man after labouring sufficiently to secure self maintenance.

Such, then, omitting details, are the primary features of the capitalist mode of production, a system which has profoundly modified all human institutions, ideas, and moral relations. To trace these changes it is essential to briefly outline its historical development.

The Coming of Capitalism.

In feudal Society there was no class of labourers who worked permanently for wages. Individuals may have done so, but there was no such class in the sociological sense. As we have seen, the serf, providing he abided by the customs of the age, was, by these customs, guaranteed normally, a secure livelihood. He was not a landowner in the modern sense, but he did possess certain rights in the land. The craftsman too, easily acquired the tools and materials used in his work. Neither, therefore, was under any economic necessity to sell his labour power to an employer for wages. Before such could become a social phenomenon the link which united the producer with the means of production had to be severed. This severance, the historic premise of capitalism, was accomplished in several stages, the details of which can be read in Gibbins’ “Industrial History of England,” or Marx’s “Capital.” Here we need only say in brief that as the old village community was gradually undermined by economic changes, such as the substitution of money rents for feudal services or payment in goods, the landed nobility were enabled by their control of the State to enclose the land of their estates, thus depriving large numbers of the peasantry of their only means of existence by ejecting them from their allotments. Many became petty craftsmen independent of the guilds, others flocked to the towns to form the germs of the urban proletariat.

Capitalist production began when wealthy merchants, instead of buying commodities from independent craftsmen, found it more profitable in order to meet the growing demands of the expanding international markets to gather numbers of these dispossessed workers into factories of their own, providing them with materials and supervising their work. In England many such factories existed in the 16th Century in “industrial villages” outside the Guild towns.

Soon division of labour introduced into the workshops made the workers more and more dependent upon their capitalist employer, a dependence which was made complete towards the end of the 18th Century by the revolution brought about by the advent of steam-driven machinery.

This dependence of the workers upon those who own the gigantic and above all, expensive machine plants, which while increasing their productiveness lessen the skill required of the producer, soon became general because, in the last century and a half, the machine process has been taken up in every branch of production.

In their evolution the capitalist class or bourgeoisie (so called because its first elements were , townsmen, inhabitants of the “bourg”) found it necessary to attack with a view to their abolition, all the institutions reminiscent of feudalism, which were a hindrance to the full satisfaction of their interests.

The merchants, who were the fore-runners of the industrial capitalists, had been materially aided by the favour extended to them by the Crown, to which they were a rich source of revenue and a powerful counterpoise against the baronage, who, with their petty armies and traditional prestige, were always a menace to the supremacy of the king. But after the military power of the nobility had been broken and their descendants had become mere land-owners and courtiers of the king, the growing bourgeoisie were oppressed by all manner of tolls and duties hindering the freedom of trade—Crown monopolies, a heavy taxation, and a political system which excluded them from any share in the government.

Against such conditions the capitalists rebelled. They became revolutionary, that is, they desired the abolition of the social institutions which had been adapted to feudal conditions of production, but which, now that feudalism was a thing of the past, were obsolete and a fetter to industrial progress ; and in their place they determined to establish new institutions suitable to capitalist production and thus to their own interests.

Their intellectual leaders developed new social theories, in which the conditions of the past were condemned as unjust, tyrannical and unreasonable. By contrast, the aspirations of the new class appeared as the very embodiment of Justice, Liberty, and Reason. Their great watchword was “Freedom” : freedom of commercial competition ; a working class “free” to sell its labour-power to any purchaser and to move from place to place with the shifting centres of employment. Previous forms of exploitation, now obsolete and a bar to the free operation of capitalist methods, were condemned. Chattel-slavery became a “crime against humanity.” Serfdom was declared a violation of the “Rights of Man.”

New religious conceptions arose in antagonism to the reactionary Roman Catholicism—the ghost of feudalism, the mental despot. “Freedom of conscience” and of faith were demanded. The “divine right” of kingship was stoutly denied. Puritanism, an extreme reaction against all things “Roman,” became dominant in England. It supplanted the authority of the Church with that of the Bible ; condemned the extravagant, sensual, and gay lives of the aristocracy ; raised to an ideal the miserly, money-seeking habits of the bourgeoisie, and substituted for the many boisterous feasts and holy-days of the past, possible with the agrarian economy of feudalism, the more regular, but meaner and dull, Sabbath.

In France the intellectual movement took the form of a crude but highly critical materialism under Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists. Natural science, discouraged in the feudal period as likely to lead to heretical opinion, was looked on with favour by the bourgeoisie. It aided them both in navigation and in industry.

Many new conceptions of law and morality were formulated. For instance, ancient law says practically nothing in relation to “contract,” which, as everyone knows, plays a great part in modern jurisprudence. In communistic and early feudal times the organisations of production—in agriculture the village commune, in industry the guild—persisted from generation to generation, and the relations of the members of them were fixed by customs often of immemorable antiquity. But with the rise of capitalist production, industry becomes a matter of the private enterprise of individuals. The capitalist set up his factory, purchased hia materials and labour-power, and thus founded a productive organisation which was the result of a perfectly well known agreement between men. Contracts thus became of importance in the basic relations of men, and they were made binding by the “law of contract.” The early bourgeois sociologists, such as Rousseau, regarded “contract” as of such fundamental importance that they accounted for the origin of human society by their theory of the primaeval “social contract.”

Enlisting the support of the discontented peasantry and proletariat by their “democratic” slogans, the bourgeosie at length broke the power of the Crown and the nobility ; capitalist production triumphed ; capitalist ideas and morality became supreme and their tenets were embodied in the law of the State.

In particular was the right of private property elevated to an inviolable position. Whilst, under tribal society, personal ownership of wealth, had been almost negligible and even under feudalism extremely restricted, with the first flush of the bourgeois triumph it became almost absolute. The doctrine was formulated that private property was a “natural attribute” of man and his “eternal right.” Accordingly, infringements of the laws of property, now dominant in the legal code, were severely punished. In England a century ago the death penalty was enforced in cases even of petty theft.

All legal restrictions on trade and production were now abolished—the reign of free competition and free exploitation opened.

Competition and Psychology.

The industrial competition which made capitalistic production and exchange so distinctly different from all previous forms has had a profound influence upon the mental life of Society. It became so intense that Engels likened it to the “struggle for existence” in the biological world. This unremittant war of “each for himself and the devil take the hindmost” fostered to the utmost the natural egoism or selfishness in men, and necessarily hampered the expression of their artistic feelings and social impulses.

The business man who loved “his neighbour as himself,” who cared at all for the welfare of his competitors, would be ruined financially and cast into the proletariat. Even the wage-worker, whose existence depends upon his getting a “job” cannot but fight his competing fellow-worker in the labour market, especially when, as is usually the case, the job-hunters out-number the jobs.

Competitive capitalism weakened social bonds and made men’s actions as anti-social as they well could be and retain their social organisation at all. But so much is the horizon of man’s thought limited by the conditions under which he lives, that competition appeared to the bourgeoisie as the basis of all progress, as the only “natural” condition of production. Any interference with its constant sway was regarded as a calamity. “Individualism,” having the “rights and liberty of the individual” as its dogma and Herbert Spencer as its greatest exponent, became the “philosophy bourgeois” par excellence. That the proletariat never completely assimilated this teaching is due to the fact that, very early, the workers learned the great law that combination, where possible, is more effective than strife—a lesson which the capitalists were not to learn until much later, as we shall see.

The prominence which the capitalist era has given to individual egoism is, no doubt, largely responsible for the general acceptance of the view that selfishness is the natural inclination of man, altruism being super-human, i.e., of supernatural origin—a view which has led to the ethical argument for the existence of God. As we have seen, however, concern for the welfare of others, equally with selfishness, is a product of the animal evolution of man.

The bourgeoisie’s steadfast belief in the gospel of competition was based upon the theory that out of the seeming strife and anarchy of the struggle came order and harmony through the inexorable workings of the economic laws of supply and demand. These laws were supposed to regulate production and distribution with the utmost possible exactness and to apportion the wealth produced with the greatest justice attainable. Consequently the bourgeoisie were bewildered by the periodic crises in history which were due to the over-production largely a result of the industrial anarchy prevailing. Their leaders sought the cause of crises everywhere but in the right place, even in the spots on the sun.

That the owners of capital should receive the largest share of the wealth produced was only “right and natural,” for, reasoned the economists, did they not “risk their capital” ; and was not this, in the first place, the outcome of their thrift and diligent industry ; and further, was not their organising and business ability at the root of the efficiency and success of their productive concerns ?

True, the mere landlords were wealthy also, and these surely enough were social parasites, the useless remnants of a bye-gone age. If the workers were poor, declared their theorists, what was to blame but their own thriftlessness and lack of intelligent effort ; the very laws of the “survival of the fittest” and of the ratio of population to food supply were against any other result.

Such was the tenor of the social theories prevailing during the classical period of capitalism. Translated into the political practice of the “Manchester School,” they meant the non-interference of the State in private industry. The individual capitalist could exercise his boundless avarice unfettered even by the wider interests of his own class. Men, women, and children toiled wearily day and night in the feverish hum of unhealthy factories, workshops, and mines. In Green’s “Short History” we read : “Women toiled in coal-mines, chained like beasts of burden to carts which they dragged on all fours through the long galleries, traversing from seventeen to thirty miles a day. Children from five years old were sent into the darkness of the mines. In the model mill of David Dale children from five to eight worked from. 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., after which they went to school, . . . . Children might be seen lying on the factory floors at night to be ready for work in the morning.” (Page 840.) Such conditions were justified by the morality of capitalism. Verily, in those days, as Marx has put it, “capital celebrated its orgies.”

When laws were passed to ameliorate such frightful conditions of exploitation it was due principally to the political opponents of the manufacturers—the land-owners—who were, of course, uninjured by the restrictions. To these “Factory Acts” the industrial capitalists were doggedly opposed. John Bright, their spokesman, denounced the Ten Hours Bill as “one of the worst measures ever passed in the shape of an Act of Legislature.” (Gibbins’ “Industrial History.”)

Nor were these the only “benefits” which flowed from the reign of free profit competition. As goods were produced, not that they should be used by their producers, but only to be sold at a profit, the quality of the articles was of little concern to the manufacturer so long as the purchaser could be deceived. The sale of adulterated food-stuffs, for instance, spread to proportions which would have seemed incredible in the “simple age” when people prepared food to eat. Bright declared adulteration a “legitimate form of competition.” Rubbish, in our civilised age, is sold as food, poison as drink, and the all-producing proletariat are clad in shoddy clothing and in paper boots. Fortunes are built up by the sale of quack “patent medicines” and “cures” for every imaginable ailment. The advertising of goods has become an art in itself, an art of lying and deceit. Every article is pronounced from a hundred glaring posters to be better than all its competitors. Under capitalism it has become impossible to separate lying from the most every-day economic relations. The worker lies to his boss about his qualifications ; the manufacturer and salesman lies to his customers from the hoarding and the Press, by his agent, or over the counter. The “business lie” has become “not a real lie at all,” a mere convention which everybody expects and everybody sees through.

Such are some of the glorious results of free competition and the “rights of the individual.”

R.W. Housley

(To be Continued.)

Labour under Liberal Rule. (1911)

Book Review from the October 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

What the Workers owe the “Great Liberal Party”.

L. T. Hobhouse, M. A., Professor of Sociology at London University, is the author of a book on Liberalism (Home University Library). The book coming from a well-known supporter of the Liberal party, many may turn to it expecting to find a serious examination of the aims and methods of Liberalism. The capitalist Press has been profuse in its praise, but those who seek a knowledge of Liberalism will get little direct information therein.

Our Liberal apologist indulges in a long academic dissertation upon Manchesterism, Benthanism, abstract ideas, and absolute rights, and throughout the book there runs the hypocritical plea that Liberalism, from its inception to the present day, has carefully guarded

THE INTERESTS OF THE WORKER

and made his lot better and brighter.

The real position and interest of rising Liberalism is not dwelt upon, but an understanding of it is essential.

The Liberal Party represented the developing manufacturing class, the merchants, etc., who found the progress of their order hindered by the old forms that had survived from feudal days. The landowners, the nobility and the clergy had placed various restrictions upon the trading class—the bourgeoisie. It had imposed taxes and tariffs, and made the trader and the manufacturer bear the greatest part of the expenses of carrying on the various wars.

The Liberal Party arose an a protest against the prevailing semi-feudal institutions. Representing, as it did, the manufacturers and middlemen, it objected to any interference by the landowning legislature. In its battle against them it was aided by the workers, but when the Liberals had won their battle they spurned and betrayed those whom they had beguiled into helping them.

Laissez-faire, the gospel of the Liberals, was a policy conceived in the direct interest of the industrial capitalists.

It believed that no limits or restraints should be put by the State to the rate at which they could pile up wealth and

MURDER THE TOILERS

and their children in the process. Our author says:

“The condition produced by the new factory system shocked the public conscience and as early as 1802 we find the first of a long series of laws out of which has grown an industrial code that year by year follows the life of the operative in his relations with his employer into more minute detail. The first stages of this movement were contemplated with doubt and distrust by many men of Liberal sympathies.”

Thus cowardly and cunningly does the Professor of Liberalism hide the savage ferocity with which the members of the “Great Liberal Party” opposed all attempts to improve the conditions of the Capitalism’s insatiable greed.

The Legislature had enclosed the land, driven the labourer from the soil, and confiscated his cottage. The artizan found his simple tools and plant superseded by the giant machinery and factories that had arisen all around him. These propertyless workers were forced to seek work from the Liberal manufacturers, who took a fearful advantage of their outcast condition. These manufacturers piled up huge wealth by the unlimited toil of men, women, girls and tiny children. They used every subterfuge to prevent any legal limits being placed to the crushing slavery even of tender little ones. In the forefront of this great army of industrial murderers stood the champions of Liberalism, John Bright, Richard Cobden, C. P. Villiers, W. R. Greg, and W. J. Fox. Bright and Cobden are the revered pioneers of the present Liberal party, and the book under review is lavish in its praise of these

PIOUS PURITAN HUMBUGS.

Hobhouse says to the Liberals: “Rather we want to learn our supreme lesson from the school of Cobden.” The history of the attitude of the Liberal party toward the awful sufferings of the working class in those early days has more than a passing interest for workmen. Their record in opposing factory legislation, trade unionism, manhood suffrage, etc., is pregnant with significance. For insight into their actions then, helps to show the true nature of their motives and methods in the present.

We have the following admission grudgingly made (p. 88):

“It is true that in the beginning factory legislation enjoyed a large measure of Conservative support. It was at that stage in accordance with the best traditions of paternal rule, and it commended itself to the religious convictions of men of whom Lord Shaftesbury was the typical example. It is true also that it was bitterly opposed by Cobden and Bright.”

But our Liberal apologist seeks to water down their opposition and lead the workers to believe that it was a very transient one.

No more damning indictment of Liberalism could be penned than a bare description of the awful condition of the workers in the days when the Liberal manufacturers were uncontrolled by factory laws. The toilers’ Inferno has been truly described in the pages of Engels’s “Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.”

Richard Cobden owned print and cotton works at Manchester (R. Cobden & Co.), and his life, written by that Czar of India, Morley, is replete with

DETAILS OF HIS VILLAINY.

Speaking of Cobden’s opposition to the legal shortening of the working day, Morley says, p. 68,

“What he maintained was that all restrictions, however desirable, ought to be secured by the resolute demands and independent, action of the workmen themselves, and not by the intervention of the law.”

But when the workmen did try to obtain shorter hours and better conditions, what did Cobden say ? Listen to Morley (p. 68) :

“Singularly enough, while he thus trusted to the independence of the workmen, he objected to workmen’s combinations. ‘Depend upon it,’ he wrote to his brother, F. W. Cobden (Aug. 16, 1842), ‘nothing can be got from fraternising with trade unions. They are founded upon principles of brutal tyranny and monopoly. 1 would rather live under a Dey of Algiers than a Trades Committee.’”

Cobdcn’s co-worker, John Bright, was a Rochdale cotton manufacturer (John Bright and Bros.) He was highly esteemed by the Liberal party, was a member of their Cabinet, and acted as their champion against the struggling wage-slaves. His biographer, C. A. Vince, the leader of the Birmingham Liberals, says of one occasion (“John Bright,” p. 19) :

“In August 1842, a general strike or, as it was then called, a turn out, was organised in Lancashire. Bright issued a long address

TO THE WORKINGMEN OF ROCHDALE,

urging them to return to their employment. ‘Neither act of Parliament nor act of a multitude can keep up wages. You know that trade has long been bad, and with a bad trade wages cannot rise. If you are resolved to compel an advance of wages you cannot compel manufacturers to give you employment. Such attempts must always fail in the end and yours must fail.’ ”

This was always the cry : “Bad trade !” Yet they were running their mills day and night, and gaining huge profits. These were truly the days when “Capital celebrated its bacchanalia.”

Yet present-day Liberals delight to talk of the “Hungry Forties,” and identify the landlords alone with the horrible sufferings of the people. Vince, speaking of Fielden’s (M.P. for Oldham) Bill to limit the labour of women and young persons to 60 hours per week, says :

“This Bill was opposed by Peel, Cobden, Bright, and Mr. Villiers, and rejected by a small minority. . . . Bright had already successfully resisted a proposal made by Lord Ashley (afterwards Lord Shaftesbury) two years earlier. His speech on that occasion had of necessity been acrimonious.”

The method of the Liberals was to claim that the condition of their workpeople was better

THAN THAT OF THE TORY LANDOWNERS’ TENANTS.

But it wasn’t true, as was easily proved.

Bright urged against the Bill of 1844 for limiting the labour of children under 13, that it would mean shortening the hours of adults too. And Vince says (p. 33)

“That this was the intention, as well as the effect, of the Bill, was proved by the refusal to accept an amendment of Bright’s to allow the women to work in relays”

He declared that if the Bill passed they would have to close their factories ! This was the cunning way of these past masters in trickery. They opposed the reduction of children’s hours by talking of its effect upon men’s hours. ” ‘Most of our evils,’ says Bright” (quoted Vince, p. 34) “‘arise from legislative interference,’ and this maxim, eminently characteristic of the Manchester school, continued to approve itself to him to the remainder of his career. . . . The same principle led Bright a few years later to throw cold water over Sir G. Forster’s Bill to strengthen the Truck Act. ‘Under the present condition of labour in the country there can be no permanent, continuous and irritating tyranny such as has been described by the promoters of the Bill, which the working classes are not perfectly well able to correct without coming to the House of Commons for a new measure !’ Finally, in 1855 he successfully resisted an attempt of J. M. Cobbett to improve the Factory Act.”

Thus did the Free Trade leader look after his pocket interests. He was not above raising the good old cry: “I’ll take my capital out of the country !” On page 36 Vince quotes Bright as saying :

“If I thought the elements of discord were again to be stirred up, I should myself be glad to leave the country and to

GO SOMEWHERE ELSE

where Capital and Labour are allowed to fight out their battles on their own ground without legislative interference.”

Vince further tells us that Bright “was also an enemy of any possible scheme of national education.”

The history of the fight for the Factory Acts is a record of the war of Liberal manufacturers against the slightest reduction of their enormous profits. The children—boys and girls—were semi-starved, flogged and brutally ill-treated for the slightest slackening of their terrible toil. Lord Shaftesbury, the Dorsetshire landlord, after long and bitter straggles, succeeded in getting a Bill passed during the Liberal administration of 1833. Bat it was such a hollow fraud that the battle continued for over 20 years longer. The Act of 1833 and other Acts were passed as a result of protracted warfare, but it was many years before the Government would vote a halfpenny to provide inspectors to see them carried out. The Acts long remained a dead letter. Even afterwards Leonard Hornerer and Alexander Redgrave—the best factory inspectors the workers ever knew—bitterly complained that when they brought cases into court they found the magistrate was the

LOCAL MANUFACTURER HIMSELF

and, of course the workers lost.

The Act of 1834 permitted 8 hours to be worked by children under 13, and young persons between 13 and 18 were allowed 12 hours actual work per day, but these regulations were not to come fully into operation till 1836. The Liberal Government with a majority of 307 refused Shaftesbury’s amendment to improve the Bill.

Shaftesbury introduced his 10 hours Bill (for young persons) in 1838, and the Parliament with a Liberal majority of 51 threw out the measure. Lord Melbourne was Prime Minister, and “The Times” (June 25, 1838) said :

“The public attention cannot be too forcibly directed to the scandalous conduct of the Melbourne Ministry with regard to the factory question. It was not that Lord Shaftesbury had been mocked and deluded by the broken promises and callous feeling of a mercenary and jobbing clique, but that laws of our making have been left unenforced and the unfortunate children unprotected, and that all the representations and remonstrances made to the members upon the subject had been treated with total neglect and contempt.”

It shows the unspeakable hypocrisy of the Liberals when we recall that it was this same Parliament with the largest majority of any in the 19th. century, that allowed children under 13 for years after to be employed for

72 HOURS PER WEEK

while in the “Emancipation” Act it limited the hours which adult Negro slaves could be worked by the planters to 45 per week !

The 10 Hours Bill came into force (partly) on May 1st., 1848, but the manufacturers rose up in a body against it. Karl Marx well says (“Capital,” chap. 8):

“The working class was everywhere placed under a ban, under a virtual law of suspects. The manufacturers had no need any longer to restrain themselves. They broke out in open revolt, not only against the 10 Hour Bill, but against the whole of the legislation that since 1833 had aimed at restricting in some measure the “free” exploitation of labour-power.

“It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature, carried on for over two years with a cynical recklessness and terrorist energy all the cheaper because the rebel capitalist risked nothing but the skin of his ‘hands.'”

The methods they pursued are beyond description, but they can be read in the factory inspectors’ reports for the years that followed. Sufficient to say here that they practically nullified the Acts. How well they carried out the nefarious work may be gathered from the speech of Mr. Ferrand in the House of Commons (27th. April, 1863):

“The cotton trade has existed for 90 years. It has existed for three generations of the English race, and I believe I may safely say that during that period it has

DESTROYED NINE GENERATIONS

of English operatives.”

In urging the claim of the Liberal party to working class support, Mr. Hobhouse says (p. 84): “Trade Unions gained the first step in emancipation through the action of Place and the Radicals in 1824.”

The fact is that the workers found the chief opponents of trade union combination in the Liberal-Radical party. The ferocity with which the workers were treated by the Liberal Government reminds one of the worst incidents of Russian rule. In 1824 Francis Place, the tailor, and Joseph Hume “smuggled” a law through Parliament annulling the Anti-Combination laws. But directly the workers sought to actually combine for defensive purposes the law pounced upon them. The presence of more than two workmen together laid them open to the charge of conspiracy, and in the reign of the strongest Liberal Government (1834) six Dorchester labourers were sentenced to seven years transportation for the “crime of combination.”

And again, under Liberal rule in 1838, five Glasgow spinners were condemned for the same term under the charge of illegal combination and conspiracy. Lord Melbourne and “the historian,” Lord Macaulay, were members of the Cabinet, and they did all they could to support those who were coining millions out of the blood and tears of women and children. They acted as in a panic and appointed numerous commissions to enquire into methods to

COMBAT AND SMASH WORKMEN’S UNIONS.

Bright, Cobden and Gladstone in their day were prominent enemies of working-class combination.

After long years of strife and suffering the workers got the Liberals to pass the Trade Union Act of 1871. This was proclaimed the “charter of the trade unions.” But it was so futile that the masters and the Courts still carried on a bitter war against the workmen. The following year (1872) some London firemen engaged at gasworks were charged with striking and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment.

Of Gladstone Mr. Hobhouse says (p. 103):

“He was not sympathetically disposed towards the ‘New Unionism’ and semi-Socialistic ideas that came at the end of the ’80’s, which, in fact, constituted a powerful cross-current to the work he had in hand.”

Right up to the present day the same class legislation in trade union matters continues. The Liberals claim to have legalised peaceful picketing by their Act of 1906, but it lies with the carefully selected judge to interpret this clause.

Hundreds of convictions have occurred since the Act was passed. The London polishers, the Newport dockers, the Hull seamen, the Belfast dockers and the agricultural labourers of Norwich—all have been fined or imprisoned for picketing amongst possible strike-breakers.

The Liberals, despite our author’s claim, in fact acted just as fraudulently

OVER THE SUFFRAGE

as on other issues. No mention is made of the long, terrible struggle on the part of the workers for a share in the franchise under Liberal Governments. Nothing is said about the ferocious fight the Liberals waged against the Chartist pioneers for simply advocating Manhood Suffrage. The trickery and treachery of the Liberals over “Household Franchise” in 1867 is completely passed over.

“The most striking victory of Liberal ideas,” Mr. Hobhouse tells us, “is the establishment of Free Trade,” and he points out that “the battle is one Liberalism is prepared to fight over again.” This shows the essentially capitalist character of Liberalism, for Free Trade is the manufacturer’s panacea, though it was obtained by deluding the working class and winning them away from Chartism by telling them, in the words of Cobden (Morley) : “Is it not clear that if capitalists were free to exchange their productions for the corn of other countries, the workmen would have abundant employment at enhanced wages ?”

Listen to Cobden’s appeal to his capitalist brethren (Morley’s “Cobden,” p. 74) : “Let us,” he said, “invest part of our property to save the rest from confiscation.” And he further says:

“At one meeting in Manchester one man after another called out’in quick succession, ‘A thousand pounds for me,’ ‘A thousand pounds for me,’ until 60 thousand pounds had been subscribed on the spot. They were spending £10,000 per week. . . . ‘ I am afraid,’ said Cobden, ‘that most of us entered upon the struggle with the belief that we had some

DISTINCT CLASS INTEREST IN THE QUESTION.’ ”

Vince, in his life of Bright, says (p. 28): “The battle of the corn laws was a contention between the middle class and the aristocracy.” How hypocritical the agitation for repealing the Corn Laws was we may gather from the report of the Inspector of factories for 1849, where we learn that wherever the circumstances permitted the manufacturers reduced wages 25 per cent. upon the introduction of Free Trade.

Nearly 65 years have passed since Free Trade was introduced. Mr. Hobhouse tells us that “the 19th. century might be called the Age of Liberalism” (p. 214); and the National Liberal Federation, speaking of the period since 1832, says (“The Work of Liberalism since the Great Reform Act”): “It has been in the main an era of Liberal administration. The Liberal Party has had practically unfettered control of the interests of the country in foreign, colonial, and financial policy.” Yet after all this what is the position of the worker ?

After detailing the high claims made by the pioneers of Free Trade our author says :

“The actual course of events has in large measure disappointed these hopes….. the prospect of a complete and life-long independence for the average workman upon the lines of individual competition, even when supplemented and guarded by the collective bargaining of the Trade Union, appears exceedingly remote. The increase in wages does not appear by any means proportionate to the general growth of wealth.

“There appears no likelihood that the average manual worker will attain to the goal of that full independence covering all the risks of life for self and family, which can alone render the competitive system really adequate to the demands of a civilised conscience. The careful researches of Mr. Booth in London and Mr. Rowntree in York, and of others in country districts, have revealed that a considerable percentage are actually unable to earn a sum of money representing the full cost of the barest physical necessities for an average family.”

Of industrial competition he says : 

“That system holds out no hope of an improvement which shall bring the means of such a healthy and independent existence as should be the birthright of every citizen of a free State, within the grasp of the mass of the people of the United Kingdom.” 

But what is the remedy ? Surely not more Liberalism and Free Trade ! Despite the above admissions of the

FAILURE OF CAPITALISM,

Mr. Hobhouse devotes many pages to attacking what he calls “Mechanical Socialism” and defending the present system of society. He defends it, though his leader, Mr. Lloyd George, told us (Swansea, Oct. 1, 1908): “No one can really honestly defend the present system.” Mr. Hobhouse ignores the great combinations and trusts the workers have to fight by making this statement (p. 99):

“It is possible under a competitive system for rivals to come to an agreement. The more powerful may coerce the weaker, or a number of equals may agree to work together. Thus competition may defeat itself and industry may be marshalled into trusts and other combinations for the private advantage against the public interest. Such combinations, predicted by Karl Marx as the appointed means of dissolving the competitive system,

HAVE BEEN KEPT AT BAY

in this country by Free Trade.”

This is a fitting statement for a capitalist Professor of Sociology to make. Anyone, without propertied interests to defend at all hazards, can see all around him the existence of great combinations and trusts. From the Imperial Tobacco Company to the gigantic Coats Cotton Trust; from the Salt Union Ltd. to the United Alkali Manufacturers, Ltd., they thrive and flourish even under your Free Trade.

One of the leading members of the Free Trade Union (Mr. J. A. Hobson) points out in his work “The Evolution of Modern Capitalism,” that Great Britain is honeycombed with trusts and combines ; and recently the great Birmingham Free Trader, Mr. Arthur Chamberlain, told us that rings and combines were necessary to the capitalist and inevitable even under beloved Free Trade !

A. Cleveland

The over-population myth (1948)

From the September 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

In orthodox economics the population theory of Malthus, British Economist, 1766-1834, has long played the role of “The fat boy.” With certain modifications successive generations of economists have sought to “make our flesh creep” from the dismal conclusions he drew from it. To-day there are still many who would seek to give us Malthusian goose-pimples.

The substance of Malthus’ “Essay on Population” was a shameless plagiarism of earlier writers like Townsend and Dr. Wallace. He contended that population always tended to increase faster than food supply. This created a vicious circle. Increased wealth only brought even greater increases in population. Too many people meant too little food. Famine and a high death rate then came automatically into operation. As a result population sank below the level of food supply: then the cycle began all over again.

Malthus’ remedies for this alleged population “evil” was small families, late marriages and abolition of all forms of public assistance.

In view of all this his controversy with Ricardo in which he defended the consumption of the wealthy land-lord class on the grounds that it offset the effects of capital accumulation and thus helped to prevent gluts is not without certain sardonic implications.

Incidentally his “Essay” was an attack on the proposed Poor Law reform of Pitt whereby the Tories were attempting to cope with the dislocation arising from the passing of feudal society and the emergence of a new social order. It was also shrewdly aimed at the Utopian thinkers who under the stimulus of the French Revolution had carried to its most optimistic conclusions the doctrine of utilitarianism—“The greatest happiness of the greatest number,” by an advocacy of an ideal based upon equality of property and sex.

To say that increases in population tend to out-run food-supply is of course the merest of truisms. It would only have force if the productive powers of society were themselves incapable of progressive improvements. Such has not been the case: Indeed since Malthus lived all evidence has gone to show that wealth has tended to increase at a faster rate than population.

Ironically enough it has been these very increases in population which Malthus apparently dreaded so much that have contributed so decisively to making large-scale production, and the enormous increases in wealth production that went with it, possible. For it is clear that only when population has reached a certain level can that co-operation of mass aggregates of labour-power, working and organised for a given end, take place. It is in fact, as Marx points out, this very form of large-scale co-operation basic to capitalism that brings in a new economic force, the social productive power of collective labour. “When the labourer co-operates systematically with others he strips off the fetters of his individuality and develops the capabilities of his specie.” “Capital” (Vol. 1, p. 319, Kerr Edition.)

At the same time this large-scale power-motivated form of production has produced its own type of inventiveness and specialised forms of scientific application and technical skill. Moreover the capitalist greed for more and more surplus value has acted as a perpetual spur to increase the productivity of workers by seeking to constantly revolutionize technically the existing means of production. Such things of course would be impossible in a smaller society based upon agriculture and handicraft.

For Malthus, however, and those who followed him, poverty and pauperisation were simply the product of a growing population which provided more mouths than could be fed from the extant cultivated soil.

The shallowness of the contention that overpopulation is exclusively a cause of poverty and pauperisation is evidenced by the fact that the pauperisation and proletarianisation of large sections of the English population were taking place at a rapid rate during those centuries when the population was relatively static or at least increasing very slowly.

In Malthus’ time forcible evictions due to land enclosures reached a peak never before attained in the long history of land enclosures in England. It was the elimination of the peasant and small-holding section of the community, coupled with the ruin of the handicraft workers in face of the superior productive powers of industrial capitalism, that the condition indispensable for modern capitalism was fulfilled. The latter half of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century were the culmination of that long historic process which divorces the labourer from his productive means and converts his working energies into a commodity—labour-power. It was these large masses of the dispossessed which formed the “surplus” population which provided the human raw material for a rapidly expanding capitalism.

Although the population during the industrial revolution was many times greater than that in the Tudor period yet such was the demand by employers for ever fresh layers of labour-power that women and children, lunatics and paupers, plus heavy emigration from Ireland, were means by which the capitalist sought to increase the working population.

Density of population is of course no proof of over-population. One country may be densely populated, yet in no sense could it be said to be over-populated. On the other hand another country could have a sparse population without being under-populated. Note also that Ireland has suffered heavy depopulation due to a high rate of emigration. Yet there is extreme poverty in Ireland and also a surplus agricultural population.

Professor Carr Saunders, in “World Population” (p. 142) says that Germany and Italy have approximately the same density of population. There was, however, before the war a vast difference in wealth producing capacity between them. Obviously the possession of essential raw materials and the scope and efficiency of their respective industrial organisation, both economic factors, were responsible for this. In the same book (p. 142) Professor Carr Saunders says that there is no proof that the industrialised countries of Western Europe are over-populated.

Increases in population have never occurred in the absurd way Malthus suggested they did. Modern research points rather to the fact that increases in population since the latter half of the 18th century have been due to a declining death rate rather than any absolute increase in fertility.

History has also dealt Malthus and the neo Malthusians a shattering blow. Before the war it was rather a question of Malthusianism reverse. Then publicists, politicians and newspapers were prognosticating gloomily not on the dangers of a rising rate of population, but on a falling one. Many are still prognosticating gloomily about it to-day. In fact they assure us that if the population decline continues the optimum level of population will be seriously disturbed, i.e., according to them the best possible level of population which at a given time is most efficient for maximising wealth production. As a result they say productivity might decline, there would be less opportunities for capital investment, the standard of living lowered and unemployment possibly intensified.

Marx rejected the Malthusian doctrine in toto. He called it a libel on the human race. For Marx “Each specific mode of production had its own special law of population historically valid within its own limits.”

Capitalism, as Marx says, has a law of population peculiar to its mode of production. It is this law of population which reveals that poverty and unemployment exist, not because human labour is unable to wrest a sufficiency from nature-given materials, but because exploitation in the form of wage employment extracts unpaid labour or surplus value.

To put it simply, the capitalists are concerned with reducing costs of production. The most potent method of achieving this is to economise on the wages bill by the introduction of labour-saving machinery. This leads to the discharging of redundant workers. The net result of all employers seeking to do this is large-scale dismissals. Thus a relative surplus population comes into being. Should, however, an acceleration in production be such as to warrant additional supplies of labour power, then this surplus population, or as Marx terms it, ” reserve army of labour,” becomes a source of recruitment for the capitalist. Thus the expansion and contraction of employment is but a corollary and consequence of the expansion and contraction of the productive forces of capitalism. Added to this is the effect of crises which, because profit anticipation is lowered or threatened, leads to a sharp decline in productive activity and precipitates wholesale and widespread unemployment.

It is then this surplus population which, because of its active competition in the labour market, serves as a continuous downward pressure on the wage level.

In this way Marx indicated the mechanism which operates to keep wages in check and thus guarantees the appropriation of surplus value to continue and capitalist accumulation to go on.

Thus is the Malthusian population myth exploded. There is no “surplus” population in the sense that it is unable to contribute to wealth production. There is only a relative surplus population, relative, that is, to the needs and requirements of capitalist production itself.

The Marxian law of population remains then the most fruitful way of looking at the population problem, not from the restrictive standpoint of population growth as such, hut from the standpoint of sufficient increases in the working population to sustain and maintain the growth of capitalist accumulation.

It can also be shown then that the Marxian law of population is independent of the postulates of various population theories. Should the natural increases of population be such as to make labour-power relatively plentiful and cheap there will be less stimulus for the capitalists to introduce labour-saving machinery. On the other hand, should a decline in population rates bring about a diminution of the available, labour-force then there will be a strong incentive for the capitalists to replace men by machines, and so help to restore a situation more favourable to themselves. As a result of a diminished labour-force the acceleration of labour-saving devices will intensify the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Over-production, under-consumption, crises and unemployment will still be normal and recurring features of capitalist society. Marx’s law of population can then be shown to work with the same validity in an increasing or declining population.

The existence of unemployment is not in any way a test of over-population. In the first place the growth of population can be shown to have been steadily ascending. On the other hand unemployment has occurred in sharp and violent fluctuations. It is obvious then that there is no sign of any relationship between population growth and the appearance of a labour reserve army. Anyone who thinks that periods of continued and widespread unemployment are due to excessive numbers in the Malthusian sense must hold that this and other capitalist countries have been over-populated every few years. Following the same logic we must also conclude that in times of boom, when there is a demand for labour-power, they are under-populated.

Again in the U.S.A. there arc only 50 persons per square mile as against 700 in England. What is more the United States is highly favoured over its capitalist rivals in natural resources and geographical location. There cannot be any question of over-population in America. Yet unemployment has in recent years been more severe in America than anywhere else in the world. It is obvious that only the Marxian law of population can adequately account for this phenomenon.

Recently Sir John Boyd Orr told us that soil erosion and exhaustion and the waste of labour and materials on armaments threatens the world with famine. This then is due not to the niggardliness of nature but to the colossal misdirection of human effort, which because of capitalist imperialist rivalries is building up a mighty war machine instead of “applying,” as Boyd Orr said, “the world’s steel and industrial production to conserving the land.” Clearly it is capitalism and not nature that threatens the world with, famine and destruction. Clearly it is capitalism that must go if we are to remove that threat for ever. Alike in agriculture as well as industry, capitalism sows its dragon’s teeth. It is the peoples of the world who will reap its grim harvest.

Ted Wilmott

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.]

Alternatives (2026)

From the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Meet the New Year, same as the Old Year’ to paraphrase Pete Townshend. Which begs the question, will we be fooled again?

Certainly January 2026 seemed to be serving up familiar news items. Putin continuing to pound Ukraine, Trump similarly enhancing his country’s democratic credentials through a military adventure in Venezuela to kidnap their president and his wife. Xi Jinping in Beijing must surely be casting covetous glances at Taiwan while feeling on-trend with his fellow presidents.

Israel continues air strikes on Gaza while, no doubt, Hamas quietly bide their time plotting another blow for liberation, perhaps by killing more kids at a pop festival. Meanwhile Iranian state forces have been slaughtering protesters who are sick of the repressive theocratic regime.

Meanwhile in good old Blighty, the Labour government continues to demonstrate that inequality cannot be taxed away. The Prime Minister, posturing on the international stage, pursues his partial morality by speaking out in condemnation of Russia’s assault on Ukraine while remaining silent over USA’s incursion into Venezuela.

Rather than New Year resolutions, what is required is New Year revolution, initially in people’s thinking. As long as nationalist concepts continue to be entertained to a greater or lesser extent around the world, nothing fundamentally can change.

Wars and armed conflicts will continue to kill, almost without discrimination, huge numbers of men, women and children. Each death utterly preventable. To continue to support, actively or passively, maintaining the present system is to support the killing.

New Year’s resolutions are largely wishful thinking, largely forgotten halfway through the month. However, to make a telling change in the world in favour of the vast majority does require resolution. A resolve that will be challenging and will be challenged. It’s either passive acceptance of the status quo or the active and conscious pursuit of an alternative society.

Early alternatives

Emerging capitalism spawned attempts to bring about political change and establish ideal, cooperative communities. The seventeenth century, during the upheavals of the English Civil War, saw the rise of two such movements.

The Levellers were concerned with political and legal changes via extended suffrage, annual parliaments, religious freedom and equal justice for all. Printed manifestos were the main campaigning device, allied to public debates such as those in Putney. Influential for a while within the New Model Army.

The Diggers focused on economic change through the abolition of private property, common ownership of land, communal farming and the ending of wage labour. Themes that continue to resonate with socialist thinking of the present day.

The difference between the two groups also continues to persist, agitators for political change on one hand, direct action communalists on the other. Little recognition at the time that the two elements are intimately connected.

The political establishment of the day, the Commonwealth under Cromwell, produced its own Agreement of the People marginalising the Levellers. Meanwhile the Diggers were subjected to legal action and violence for their occupation of land.

So the new governing force did what subsequent governments continue to do to the present day, that is defuse radical aspirations through short-term measures that really changed nothing significant in the political and economic relations as experienced by the vast majority. However, the way had been opened for the rising capitalist class to usurp the fading power of feudalism that eventually re-divided the people into two classes, capitalist and workers, a situation that still persists today.

Brutal conditions

The brutal conditions workers had to endure when industrial capitalism was enacting its steam-powered revolution produced an inevitable reaction. Combinations, early trade unions, met with an outright ban initially, while the Luddites faced deployments of soldiers and the hangman’s noose as governments did little to mask their sympathies.

There were capitalist employers who did take a more enlightened view, seeing no benefit in overworked employees living in squalor. Famously, Robert Owen ran the New Lanark manufacturing community on the banks of the Clyde. Reasonable living and working conditions, at least by the standards of the times, along with health and education services were undoubtedly an improvement. The fundamental aim of that community still remained the creation of profit.

Owen demonstrated that the profit motive could be well served, perhaps better served, through a more-or-less contented workforce. This was an early example of welfare capitalism, what would become social democracy on a national scale. As an alternative to the miserable slums in which so many urban workers then existed, New Lanark would have been acceptable. It was not, though, any sort of alternative to capitalism, but an indication of how it would develop as a functioning society.

Owen would go on to become involved with the New Harmony utopian community in Indiana. 20,000 acres along the banks of the river Wabash. He is often credited with being the founder of utopian socialism and the co-operative movement. Perhaps he was also an early syndicalist through his involvement with the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, the attempt to have a national trade union for all workers. An aim of the GNCTU was to use the combined power of all workers to assume control over industry to be operated on their own behalf. A general strike was envisaged as a means to this end. New Harmony, the GNCTU and the co-operative movement patently failed to bring about an alternative society as the whole world continues to be capitalist.

Modern failures

There have, of course, been many subsequent political movements and parties expressing their intention of overthrowing capitalism in favour of socialism. One strand of this has been social democratic gradualist organisations proposing to reform away capitalism. Despite at times succeeding to enact reforms that have achieved significant – usually short-term – beneficial changes, these parties have failed to maintain those improvements and, instead, have largely become managers of society on behalf of capitalism.

A variety of Leninist parties continue to advocate their own revolutionary model. However, wherever their designs have been realised subsequent to the Russian Revolution of 1917, they have only produced state capitalism in one form or another. None have at any time been socialist societies.

A truly socialist society means common ownership of the means of wealth production meeting everyone’s self-defined needs, with people freely contributing their talents and abilities, a society without money, democratically achieved worldwide through the conscious action of the vast majority, the workers.

Capitalism for ever?

Absolutely a huge task, but one that must be undertaken if there is to be an alternative to economic hardship, rationing of resources by ability to pay, and an almost continuous waste of life and resources through war. Otherwise these features of capitalism will simply continue ad infinitum.

The task of motivating a vast majority of the world’s population of 8 billion or so to embrace the concept of socialism and act in concert to realise this concept precludes there being any ready formula concocted by a minority. Those who would be vanguards to act on behalf of that majority are bound to fail. Only by common consent and commitment can the majority identify what needs to be done and institute those organisations required to deal with the process, overcoming obstacles already known and those that will undoubtedly arise.

This requires individual resolution to bring such change about, acceptance of responsibility as there is not, and cannot be, a leader or party who can do it on people’s behalf. Looking beyond those from left, right and centre claiming they have the way forwards.

It is for socialists, however few in number at present, to maintain the broad principles of socialism in the public domain and advance where and when possible. There can be no short cuts whatever others might claim to the contrary. On hearing any such claim, recall the title of The Who song alluded to at the start: ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Take it to heart.

D.A.

Exhibition Review: Manchester and the world (2026)

Exhibition Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The John Rylands Library in Manchester was founded on the basis of profits made from the cotton industry. It is currently staging an exhibition, ‘Cottonopolis: the Origins of Global Manchester’, on until May. A number of books, letters and samples of cloth are displayed (one of the books being Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England).

The population of Manchester grew massively in the 19th century, to over ninety thousand, this increase being mainly in workers in the cotton industry. There were massive increases in production of calico and fustian, especially in the twenty years from 1790, and cotton cloth became Britain’s most valuable export. Inventions by Arkwright, Compton and others increased productivity enormously, and there was sizeable growth in companies that made machines, as well as in companies that output the cotton cloth. Steam power resulted in mechanical mills, and new ways of printing cloth were also developed. Mass production meant that the British weaving industry was able to out-compete manufacturers in India.

But, of course, weaving was only part of the story, as the raw cotton came from plantations worked on by slave labour, in the Caribbean and the American South. Some of the cloths manufactured were poor quality ‘Africa goods’, produced for sale to slave traders to clothe the slaves. One suggestion made in the displays is that the creation of a captive workforce in the colonies changed ideas about how workers in Britain could be exploited under the same industrial machine.

Nor was it just Manchester that profited from the enormous expansion of the cotton trade. Liverpool became an important port for imports and exports, and new canals were built, partly to transport food, coal and so on to the growing industrial hub in the city and its surroundings.

Not a large exhibition, but an informative and interesting set of displays.

Paul Bennett

Analysis of Wealth. IV. Accumulation. (1916)

From the September 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 3.

Capital is an accumulation of surplus-value. Whatever the original capital with which capitalist production started may have been it has long since disappeared, consumed by the capitalist class.

Likewise with the individual upstart. Even if we grant that by “his own exertions” he becomes possessed of a sum of money, this sum does not become capital until he uses it to exploit labour-power. As this process continues his capital comes to consist of accumulated surplus-value, while his original sum disappears in consumption.

Other things remaining the same the accumulation of capital implies an increase in the demand for labour-power ; for capital, in order to remain itself, must grow by the exploitation of ever more labour-power. This in itself gives rise to an increase in the rate of wages, since in the course of time the demand must tend to outstrip the supply as provided by normal increase in the labouring population.

Capital, however, is by no means satisfied with this state of affairs. It sees in the natural limits of population a limit to the rapidity of its own growth. Hence as we have shown in a former article, it exhibits a historical tendency to force on the productivity of social labour by specialisation of individual functions and by the introduction of machinery. Thus it wrings from a given quantity of labour-power a larger proportion of surplus-value. Therefore, along with the accumulation of capital goes an alteration in what Marx calls its technical composition. Its constant portion, i.e., that invested in the passive factors of the labour process, increases at the expense of the variable element which purchases labour-power.

This enables production to be carried on on an ever-increasing scale without the demand for labour-power increasing sufficiently to cause a rise in its price. On the contrary it reduces the demand for labour-power to such a point as to cause a permanent over-supply of workers ; in other words, it creates an industrial reserve army—the unemployed.

The larger the scale on which an individual capitalist does business the more he is enabled to economise and reduce the number of his employees in proportion to work done. The cheaper, therefore, can he sell his commodities (since they embody less labour) and the keener becomes his competition against his rivals. They in turn are forced to economise and to and “extend the scale of their operations as rapidly as possible. In the long run the large capitals become larger while small ones get absorbed or wiped out ; for the market soon refuses to bear the increased weight of goods supplied by this acceleration of production. This centralisation of capital causes further economy and increases the industrial reserve army.

Thus in the process of accumulation we observe on the one hand a tendency to increase the productivity of labour and on the other hand a contraction of the market for its products, seeing that the growth of the unemployed lessens the demand for commodities, both on their part and on the part of those actually employed whose places they are ever ready to take.

These two forces act and re-act on each other to an increasing extent. The competition of the unemployed forces the actual workers to submit to the lowest wages and the maximum amount of work. This increases the accumulation of capital, which in turn intensifies competition among the capitalists for the market, causing further economies and more unemployed.

At one end of the social scale, then, we have the concentration of capital in fewer hands and consequent luxury and idleness ; at the other end, absence of all wealth other than than necessary to secure the workers’ continued existence in a state of overwork, coupled with a deadweight of destitute wretches denied even that questionable privilege. This state of affairs arises inevitably from the very nature of capitalist production, and its special features are aggravated with every step in capitalist progress. Even the statistics compiled by capitalist authorities, governmental and otherwise, bear out this conclusion.

So far we have examined only the growth of capital. It remains for us to consider its origin and destiny. Assuming on the one hand a class with the means of production and on the other a class without these means it is easily seen that the former can exploit the latter to an ever-increasing degree.

The question arises, however, as to how this relationship was established. Orthodox economists and other apologists for things as they are assure us that it is solely due to the virtues of the possessors and the vices of the proletariat. If by virtue we mean work, however, we have already seen that the accumulation of capital by no means bears out this fairy tale. At present and for centuries the workers with all their toil have been unable to accumulate. If the capitalists saved money by work it was an extraordinarily long time ago. We are forced, then, to turn to history for a solution of the problem.

The system of society immediately proceeding the present social system in the course of evolution we know as Feudalism. It consisted of a complex hierarchy of lords and vassals bound to each other by the duties of military support and obedience and the right of protection. As a basis for this system was serfdom. The land was parcelled out among the lords and their subordinates, and while the latter cultivated the land of their lords they had land of their own for their personal use. In the towns chartered freemen carried on handicrafts and commerce. Thus reciprocal obligations existed and were established by feudal law and custom. No man lacked the means of subsistence, or an occupation. The lords exploited their subordinates, but the latter possessed something tho modern wage slave lacks—security!

The decay of feudalism forms the starting-point of capitalist development. In England it was spread over the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. By degrees the peasants and handicraftsmen freed themselves from servile duties and became independent producers, while in conjunction with the growth of trade and the production of commodities arose and flourished the merchant class, who sandwiched themselves parasitically between the producers on either side of the exchange and incidentally fleeced both whenever occasion offered.

The feudal nobility, exhausted, in numbers and resources, by friction among themselves, disbanded their retainers, who thenceforth become propertyless men seeking employment for a living. Large estates passed into the hands of wealthy farmers and burghers, who did not hesitate to evict the tenants in order to convert one-time arable land into sheep pastures. The new nobility also confiscated common land for similar purposes spurred on by the increase in the price of wool. The spoliation of the Church during the Reformation aggravated this condition, and by the end of the 16th century a considerable labour-market had come into being, consisting of expropriated agriculturists, disbanded retainers, and forlorn monks.

The process went on in stages till the 19th century, when the last vestige of the old yeomanry disappeared. At first legislation from Henry VII. onward attempted to stem the tide of usurpation, but in the 18th century the law itself had become the instrument whereby the robbery of the people was effected. Private force was supplemented by the force of the State, which has remained to this day the agent of the plutocrats. From the first it penalised the disinherited for their misfortune : flogging and branding them was its most merciful means of dealing with them.

This, as Marx says, established the “discipline necessary to the wage-system,” and encouraged the new-born proletariat to submit to the low wages and long hours at first legally enforced by the State.

As the workers became habituated and resigned to their fate the severity of the penal legislation relaxed, only to be applied with all its original vigour again when the workers found in combination a means of parrying the onslaught of the masters.

If to-day Trade Unions and strikes are legal it is only because the capitalists have been able to circumvent the determination of the workers by counter organisation, increased economy, and the corruption of the unions themselves.

The labour-market once established, the genesis of the capitalist class followed as a matter of course. In agriculture the farmer, one­-time agent for the landowner, was transformed into an independent exploiter. Whereas the independent peasant had previously produced many of his own requirements, such as clothes, in addition to purely agricultural products, now, as a wage-worker for the capitalist farmer, he had to purchase these elsewhere. Hence arose a domestic market for capitalist industry in the towns. Merchants and money lenders were not slow to take advantage of this. Employing numbers of disinherited peasants, etc., they entered into competition with the independent handicraftsmen of the guilds, and owing to the larger scale of their operations and the division of labour in the workshops which they introduced, they were ultimately able to outstrip the guildsmen in the race. In the face of this competition the guilds went to pieces and added more exploitable material to the labour market. 

At the same time there arose the struggle between the capitalist nations of Europe for world domination. Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England followed one another in rapid succession in exploration and conquest in Africa, America, and Asia, plundering the natives of their wealth and converting them into slaves for export to plantation colonies. The plunder thus obtained by the agents of the “merchant adventurers” helped to form new capital in England and on the Continent for the exploitation of white slaves.

These are the methods, drawn very mildly, by which the modern “respectable” class rose to power. The depths of their historic depravity are in direct proportion to the “loftiness” of their professed ideals. Champions of Justice, Freedom, and Charity, their career is indelibly stained with robbery, slavery, and murder. Need it be added that it shows no signs of improving from the standpoint of the workers ?

To sum up, modern wealth or capital is a product of social labour, past and present, which has been and continues to be monopolised by a small class of individuals, which grows relatively smaller as the mass of disinherited producers increases. In its origin it destroyed the unity which existed between the producers and their products, including the means of production, thus reducing them to social outcasts, having no access to the means of life as provided by nature and society. This relationship it perpetuates and uses as a means of self-expansion at their expense.

Technically, however, it indicates economic progress. In the place of the isolated workers of the middle ages able to produce but a meagre variety of articles of wealth, we have to-day an international combination of producers using a highly complex organisation of machinery, means of transport and distribution capable of providing comfort and leisure for all.

What prevents this desirable consummation of industrial development ? The reader who has followed this analysis will readily see that it is the capitalist character of this social wealth, i.e., its private ownership, which alone stands in the way. The private property of the many workers has disappeared before the private ownership of a few idlers. To return to the former state is neither possible nor desirable. It is not our business to destroy the fruits of centuries of toiling agony, but rather to enter into possession of them ; and as the means of production become ever more concentrated and incapable of control save in the mass, the only alternative to private ownership by the few is common ownership.

This will reunite the producers with their means of production and simultaneously preserve technical progress, for it is this progress which forces on the revolution. It unites them in the productive process and reduces them all to the level of wage slaves for the maintenance of capital. Hence it breeds a community of interest and a common consciousness. Let us speed on the day when they will unite in one organisation with a common purpose. Let us rally them round the Socialist standard, and establish Socialism, the cooperative commonwealth.

Eric Boden

[Concluded.]

Analysis of Wealth. III. Exploitation. (1916)

From the August 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 2.

Just as there are two aspects of a commodity, utility and its exchange-value, so there art two ways of viewing its production, or in other words, the labour process.

At one and the same time the labourer produces a use-value and an exchange-value ; the former by transforming raw material into useful articles, the latter by adding labour thereto.

We have already seen that capital in the process of expansion assumes two forms. Part of it becomes represented by raw material, tools or machinery, etc., the passive factors in wealth production, while the rest is invested in a special commodity, labour-power, the active, value-creating agent. Both these factors are obviously indispensable. Without raw material, etc., the labourer would have nothing in which to embody value ; without the labourer raw material would become useless and valueless. For the only use raw material possesses is to serve as the element of the complete commodity, and its exchange-value only counts in so far as it becomes part of the total value of such complete commodity. Raw material, machinery, etc., lying idle, untouched by labour, rot and rust, and lose their exchange-value along with it.

Hence by transforming them into new commodities the labourer does more than add new value ; he preserves old. In so far as raw material, etc., is so transformed, the labour previously expended upon it counts as part of the total labour necessary in the production of a commodity.

On the other hand, the passive factors in the labour process are incapable of transferring a greater value to the finished product than they already possess. The value of the raw material and machinery does not multiply itself ; it remains constant and is called by Marx constant capital.

In realising the utility of the constant capital the labourer preserves it : that is one aspect of his activities. Let us now turn to his function as the producer of new value.

We have seen in a previous article that the amount of value the labourer adds to the commodity is determined by the length of time he inevitably occupies. Thus in our first example he worked six hours and added a value of three shillings ; in the second instance, by working twelve hours a value of six shillings was produced.

We also saw that the object of the capitalist in purchasing labour-power was to take advantage of its capacity for producing more value than it possessed itself. That in the first case the capitalist realised no surplus-value because the labourer produced no more than the equivalent of his value, but that in the second case the surplus amounted to 3s, the product of the extra six hours labour.

In each of these cases the constant part of capital adds no more than itself to the total value. The amount of the constant capital in the second case is twice that of the first in order that the labourer might work twice as long, but this makes no difference to the result. The new value of 6s. is added by the labourer.

Just as any purchaser seeks to obtain the maximum use-value from his commodity, so the capitalist uses up labour-power to its limit ; seeks to obtain the maximum of value, and therefore of surplus-value, from its exercise. It is the object of the present article to show how this is achieved. One thing must be borne in mind, viz., that the rate of surplus-value is not calculated on the total capital, but only on the part which is expended in the purchase of labour-power. Thus in the above instance, whereas the wages of the labourer were 3s. and the total value produced by him was 6s., the rate of surplus-value was 100 per cent. ; that is to say the surplus was equal to the wages.

When the capitalist speaks of his “rate of profit” he would in this case reckon the 3s. surplus-value in proportion to the total capital advanced, viz., 27s., thus making the rate a little over 11 per cent.

Well as this method may serve him in his conventional dealings, it hides the true extent of the exploitation of labour-power.

We have seen that the capitalist obtains his surplus by prolonging tho labourer’s work beyond the time necessary to reproduce a value equivalent to his wages. It is, therefore, to the capitalist’s interest, to extend the working day as much as possible. The limit in this direction is simply the physical capacity of the labourer.

In order to exert his powers the labourer must have time to eat and sleep and recuperate, but beyond this the capitalist, having purchased these powers, has sole right over their exercise during the period for which he has purchased them. The only difference, in fact, between the wage-labourer and the chattel-slave is that the former sells himself piecemeal, i.e., in periods, while the latter is sold once for life.

It is, of course, possible that the capitalist may use up in one day a greater quantity of labour power than the worker can restore in three (“Capital,” p. 217). In other words, he may use more labour power in a day than he pays for. It is the labourer’s business to claim the price of his commodity, and hence a struggle ensues as to the extent of the working-day.

In sections 5 and 6 of Chap X. (“The Working Day”) Marx shows how the manufacturers succeeded in extending the working day by degrees from the normal day of the Middle Ages to twelve hours in the seventeenth century. Then how, with the introduction of machinery in the eighteenth century, a violent encroachment took place on the remaining leisure of the workers. “All bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day and night, were broken down” (p. 264).

Men, women, and children were worked to the point of exhaustion, until even the capitalist legislature, threatened by working-class revolt on one hand and the extreme physical and mental deterioration of that class (the source of surplus-value) on the other, were compelled to place legal restraint on private greed by limiting the hours of labour. For years they dallied and toyed with the matter, passing laws and abstaining from granting money for their administration and adopting all manner of devices to render their concessions purely nominal. Only when the most distinguished medical authorities had pointed out the danger to the ruling class of persisting in the industrial murder of children, did this class definitely prescribe that no children under 13 years of age should be worked more than 12 hours in one day. Even then it left, all manner of loopholes for the evasion of the Act (1833), of which the manufacturers, in their blind profit-lust, were not slow to take advantage.

With eloquent thoroughness Marx shows how rival sections of the ruling class exploited the misery of the workers on the political field in order to gain their own ends ; how time and again they betrayed them, and finally only conceded the meagre right of sufficient time in which to eat and sleep after a bitter struggle over every inch of ground for half-a-century.

These passages are indeed enlightening as to the character and methods of our masters, which have changed, if at all, only in the direction of greater duplicity.

The very nature of machinery enables the master class to increase the speed at which their slaves work, thus exhausting them more rapidly and reducing a legally limited working day to nominal value. Hence the workers are under the necessity of continually struggling to obtain still further reductions in the hours of labour. For by so much as the speed at which they work is increased, by so much is their life-time shortened.

Hitherto we have considered only one means of increasing the surplus-value, i.e., the lengthening of the working day. Capital, however, by no means rests content with pushing that to its limit. It is for ever seeking to reduce the value of labour-power and consequently the necessary time spent by the workers in reproducing that value, thus leaving a greater portion of a given working day in which they must produce surplus-value. This result is effected chiefly in two ways.

From the time the capitalist class first assumed control of industry there has gone on an increasing splitting-up of the forces of production among the producers. By concentrating numbers of workers in one workshop the earlier manufacturers were enabled to divide a handicraft into separate parts, each part being taken up by a different worker. Instead of being a skilled craftsman the worker became a mere special cog in a machine, and in this way the time spent in learning his calling was considerably reduced. Another effect of this alteration in the process of production was an increase in the product of a given number of men. The specialisation of individuals economised the time necessary to produce each individual commodity. This resulted in reducing the cost of the articles produced and consequently the maintenance of the labourer. Thus in two ways the exchange-value of labour-power fell ; wages suffered a reduction and the increased product went to the capitalist.

The effects of this division of labour, which Marx defines as Manufacture proper, were insignificant compared with those resulting from the advent of machinery and modern industry. Here the worker loses the last vestige of skill and has his productive capacity enormously increased by being converted into an attendant of a monster which operates not one but many tools at once. The time spent in learning his task now falls to almost nil, while the cost of his necessaries is still further reduced and his wages along with it. Surplus-value increases by leaps and bounds, and since machinery is constantly being improved, more universally and economically adopted, there has as yet been discovered no limit to this increase.

We see, then, that capital grows by securing domination over living labour-power and consuming it to the limit of its capacity. In this process the labourer preserves the constant part of capital, reproduces the equivalent of his wages, and adds a surplus which may be converted into new capital.

Despite various theories concerning the “abstinence” of the capitalist, however, the whole of this surplus-value does not become capital. Quite a considerable portion goes to provide the person of the capitalist with the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries proper to his social status. Still, he does “save” !

What specially interests us here though is that his whole consumption fund, large though it may be, involves no reduction of the amount of his wealth. Even if he consumed the whole of the surplus produced by the labourers he would become no poorer. He would remain a capitalist.

There is, however, another aspect of this relationship. In the course of time the capitalist inevitably spends a sum equivalent to his original capital in his own personal consumption. The capital he has invested therefore becomes practically the creation of the labourer : a sum of accumulated surplus value. If, for instance, the capitalist makes a profit of 20 per cent. per annum and consumes the lot, then in five years he will in effect have consumed the whole of his capital. The sum intact which he still retains is the fruit of his exploitation of labour-power, and it is with this sum that he continues to purchase labour-power.

The reason the labourer offers himself for hire is precisely because he does not possess the means of production. By continually yielding to the capitalist all his product over and above his necessary price, wages, he reproduces his own propertyless condition. Saving by the capitalist, nay, the mere existence of the capitalist, involves the absence of opportunity to save for the worker. The process of exploitation perpetuates itself.

The accumulation of surplus-value, the fruits of the process, simply enables the process to be carried on more extensively. In other words, the workers produce the means for their employment on an ever-increasing scale. Their reward for doing this will be dealt with in a further article.

Eric Boden