The Bread that Perishes and Those who Make it. (1908)

From the December 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like Pouring Water in a Sieve.

Far back in the last century the Baker’s Union was formed, and although it has never enjoyed the confidence of a majority of the men engaged in bread-making, or, with the single exception of the ’89 agitation, has it contained more than a remnant within its ranks, yet probably 95 per cent. of the London bakers have been members at one time or another. They have entered its ranks, paid one or two quarters’ subscription, then, generally through disgust with the internal management, have gone to swell the lapsed, and been lost. The remnant who remain in the union recognise it for what it really is—a provident society—though they do not all understand that, in the final analysis, it operates in the interests of the master class.

The capitalist, in permitting trades unions to have a legal status, demands that they shall serve him further than the mere friendly society. This is done by all trade unions guaranteeing that their members shall not strike spontaneously, thus giving the capitalist time to prepare himself for any eventuality. The bakers do even better. In every district they have a house of call, where the unemployed foregather and await the masters’ convenience. As journeymen bakers invariably go in to work on Sunday evenings with curses on their lips, and as that is the time usually chosen to give the rack another twist, it sometimes happens that a spontaneous strike takes place. When this occurs the master rushes off to the nearest club house, where he can obtain all the men he wants. Thus trade unionists are always available to break the strike of non-union or union men. The most stoney-eyed can see how useful this is to the masters.

Putting Their Faith in the Enemy.

It is necessary for the officials of trade unions, in order to maintain their positions, to advertise themselves, and to prevent the dry rot of apathy among their followers putting a period to their existence as leaders, to invent at intervals a new slogan, such as the “All Grades Movement,” “Abolition of Night Work,” etc. The latter has been the rallying cry of the Bakers for several years past, and the pence diverted from the semi-starved wives and children of the operatives, have been spent in organising public meetings to force the bill for the abolition of night work and the limitation of the hours of labour through the Imperial Parliament, and also to pay the expenses of delegates to the House of Commons. These genuflected before Liberal, Lib-Lab and Lab-Lib M.P.s, humbly beseeching their help in pushing the “Charter of Emancipation” through. At the public meetings the men were assured by hired speakers that no compromise would be considered. The damnable system of night work was to cease. The abominable slavery of 80 to 100 hours a week was to be kicked into the limbo of the past. Many arguments were advanced to show the sweet reasonableness of their “demands,” the most nauseating being the cant of the “Christian Socialists.” Everything was working up for the final onslaught, when, as invariably happens in trade union agitations, as the hour of deliverance was about to strike, there came the anti-climax.

Dilly, Dilly Come and be Killed.

A cold douche quenched any hopes that might be still, flicking in the breasts of the oft-deluded operatives in the form of a circular letter to the branches of the union. This letter ran as follows :

“I am directed by my Committee to ask your members to approve of the proposed alteration in the Eight Hours Bill.

We consider that the Bill stands an infinitely better chance of passing with the clause deleted and personally I believe that even if the Bill in its present form was to pass its second reading that particular clause would come out in committee. By deleting it we at once disarm three-fourths of the opposition to the measure which has hitherto been based largely upon the alleged impossibility (if the Bill were passed) of supplying the early morning roll and restaurant trade.

Factory bakery proprietors say, not without reason, that it would handicap them in competing with the small shops, and some of the larger shops object on the score of the very large amount of capital they would have to spend in building additional bake houses.

Some of the Liberal M.P.s whom we recently interviewed expressed the opinion that as a matter of policy there is no doubt that it would be far and away the best to make the issue a clear and straight one of Long Hours v. Short Hours, and not to give the employers the opportunity of going off on a side issue.

Of course, the districts which have day work would still be able to retain it by trade union action, and others might regain it by the same method.

Yours very truly,

Louis A. Hill,

29 May, 1908.”

Absurdity can go No Further.

Can anyone conceive of a document drafted with a more tender solicitude for the welfare of the enemy, the capitalist wolves? It abandons the main position under cover of presenting a straight issue. The one clause that did stand a dog’s chance of getting on to the statute book, and being enforced when there, was the night work clause, for the very cogent reason that an overwhelming case could be made out to prove that it is necessary in order to ensure that foodstuffs should be produced under wholesome conditions. Many bakers have collected ample materials to prove that bakeries, not only the catacomb bakeries, but some of the more modern factories, are centres for the propagation and dissemination of loathsome infections and contagious diseases, and that this state of affairs is the lowering of the vitality, and consequent disease among the operatives caused by night work and the long hours which are possible only under that system.

Let Criticism Begin At Home.

That, and the question of wholesome ingredients, must be dealt with from a Socialist workman’s point of view. When I have leisure, and as I am fast approaching the “scrapping age,” it shall be done. Once get the howling pack of Christian profit-hunters, who shriek anathemas at Leopold the Amorous from our garden city suburbs for the atrocities perpetrated in the collection of “red rubber” on the Congo, and who view with callous indifference the cruel slaughter of their compatriots in the production of white bread, to realise that this system re-acts against their material interests, the only chord to which they respond, that these flagrant outrages against the laws of Nature spell for them, too, impaired health, disease, and its consequent loss of treasure, and your precious reform is accomplished, nay, is forced on you, willy-nilly, and you would not be consulted on the matter.*

As regards the straight issue, Long v. Short Hours, the veriest political tyro knows the powerful interests which oppose the principle of limiting men’s labour by legal enactment, knows that the bell-wethers of the miners, those “gaseous vertibrates,” called labour leaders, cannot lead their followers to victory. Miners number many more thousands than bakers do tens, are splendidly organised from a trade union point of view, and have been “demanding” the eight hours’ day for twenty-five years, If the miners are in such a parlous state what chance do the poor bakers stand, except by frightening the capitalist parties through their stomachs ?

Twenty Four Hour Day Not Sufficient.

The peremptory stoppage of night work would automatically curtail the hours of labour, as is well known to the masters’ spokesmen. If a man started work at 6 a.m. and wrought till midnight he would only then have completed an eighteen hours’ day, whereas it is not uncommon for a baker to see the clock round twice at the week-end. Every baker knows that it breaks a master’s heart to see his men go home at ten o’clock in the morning, after having done twelve hours slogging. The day is at its busiest, and under a score of pretexts first one hour then another is added to the night’s work until one night is driven into the next, and the baker is robbed of all that makes life endurable. He comes out late in the day completely exhausted, his eyes are dazzled by the daylight; and if he takes one “half ale” he is fuddled, two and he is “blindo.” The nasty, drunken beast !

The last sentence in Mr. Hill’s letter is comic in view of the position of the cotton operatives, the awful plight of the railway men, and the utter rout of “the most powerful and the most perfect type of trade union in the world,” the engineers. The fact is the bakers can obtain nothing by trade union organisation, nor could they if 95 per cent. were organised. Their position has gradually become worse, their skill is fast becoming needless, they are being reduced to the status of the unskilled labourers, who can, and are, taking their places as machine tenders. They are a diminishing number, owing to the introduction of machinery doubling and redoubling the output per man in what is a limited trade, and while their nominal wages have risen slightly, their real wages have gone down considerably, for they have lost their allowance of bread and flour, sack money (which at one time amounted to several shillings weekly), yeast money, millers’ Xmas boxes, and other extras, and by mid-week many of them are “broke to the world,” as they phrase it—yet they never spend any money. Their jobs are more precarious, and they are “scrapped” at an earlier age as regular hands and become jobbers—especially now they are so inconsiderate as to lie down and die in the bake-house, or drop down in the street as they wend homeward.

No reform or series of reforms can touch that position. No trade union can act even as a brake to steady the downward rush. As the years roll by capital gets more aggressive, more relentless and its engines of death act with more deadly precision. The trade union is a spent force: capital can no longer be fought with the velvet glove. The only effective means is an economic revolution. The issue has too long been obscured by the thousands of tricky liars who prostitute their talents for grub. None have done it so effectively, or so cheaply to the capitalist, as those who have posed as labour leaders and dissipated the energies of the working class by focussing their attention on this or that trumpery reform that does not matter, while pumping an income from the stomachs of the starving women and children of the proletariat. Signs are manifold that their baneful influence is at last waning. We are now face to face with the fact that the class ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth, in the final analysis, spells, not “race suicide,” but race murder. There is no other name for it. There is no social problem to the Socialist. He has the key to the situation. He alone recognises with joy that society is in the melting-pot of the Social Revolution, and that the issue will be—must be—Socialism or annihilation.

J. Smith.

* Since this was written Mr. Haldane has said (Ladybank, Sept 26) that the Government “had to deal with the prevention of diseases among the poor, in the interest not merely of the individual, but of the State.”

Editorial: The Miners’ Eight Hours Bill. (1909)

Editorial from the August 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once more the position of the S.P. is vindicated when they point out that “‘palliatives’ don’t palliate.” The first result of the passing of the Miners’ Eight Hours Bill was the threat of a general miners’ strike if the employers insisted upon the terms they laid down.

The trouble started in South Wales, probably because, as the Manchester Guardian suggests, “a large number—more than half it is said— of the men are paid by the day” in that district. Hence the shortening of the working day, if all other factors remained as before, would amount to a rise in wages for the day hands. The mine-owners however, were not prepared to allow all other factors to remain as before. They demanded first an alteration of wages. The men resisted. Then they claimed that clause 3 gave them power to extend the working day within certain limits. The clause reads :

“The eight hours per day may be extended as respects any mine on not more than sixty days in any calender year by not more than one hour a day.”

The employers demanded that this provision should be enforced, saying that its enforcement was within the owners’ option. On the other hand the miners claim that it cannot operate without their consent—a claim that the wording of the clause in no way supports. However, it has been decided to take a test case to the courts for a judgement thereon.

Then the owners claimed the right to introduce a double shift, which the men again opposed on the grounds of it being unhealthy owing to the gaseous nature of the South Wales coal. This idea was, naturally, scouted by the owners. “Perhaps, however,” says the capitalist paper quoted above, “the main root of the miners’ objection is economic—the fear that the double shift may end in lower wages. The wages of the miners depend on the price of coal, and if the double shift meant a considerable increase in output, it might involve a drop in wages without a corresponding drop in profits.”

This is certainly evidence from the enemy in support of our contention that the time occupied in fighting for these reforms is a sheer waste as the general conditions of wage slavery still remain, and the evolution of capitalistic production in economising the methods employed, more than compensate the masters for the apparent benefit conferred upon the men by such reform. On this point what is called a compromise has been effected and the miners are to have a share in deciding in every case whether the double shift is to be introduced. It may be left to the employer to see that the “share” of the men in this decision will not go against the owners’ interests.

Further evidence comes from Staffordshire, where the pit lads came out on strike because the masters wanted to reduce the meal time to an extent that meant practically working the 8 hours right off.

Here again a compromise has been effected whereby the men are to be allowed 20 minutes for their mid-day meal. If as the tale told of Gladstone relates, it is necessary to chew one’s food thirty-two times before swallowing to keep one’s digestion in order, then the miners will have to measure their mid-day meal by troy weight instead of avoirdupois to keep in health. 

For years past the miners have been asking for a legal 8 hours day. Now they have it their first actions are, in one direction to threaten, and in another to actually, strike against its effects. What stronger evidence can be given of the correctness of our position on palliatives?

Editorial: The Eight Hour Day. (1908)

Editorial from the September 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Eight Hour Day.

The speeding up of the workman, the ever-growing intensity of the labour exacted from him, renders imperative a longer repose so that he may recuperate his working strength and maintain his maximum productivity. Hence flows the modern tendency toward shorter hours so that the profitableness of the worker to the capitalist may increase. It is the necessary and inevitable outcome of modern industrial conditions even from the capitalist point of view, and is by no means a sign of victory over the ruling class.

If the champions of the eight hour day were to confine themselves to stating the truth about their pet reform there would be little need to quarrel with them, but when they claim as one of the virtues of the eight hour day that it will abolish or greatly reduce unemployment, we join issue. It is rankest charlatanism to foist a piece of some necessary capitalistic patchwork upon the slow-minded as the remedy for the workers’ greatest ill, yet, unfortunately, it is the characteristic procedure of the labour leader.

In the present instance, if the reduction of working hours is to bring about more employment, it could only be by decreasing the output per man, and providing more work by causing the employment of more men to produce the same amount as before. But would it have any such effect ? So far as positive evidence goes it is directly against any presumption of a lessening of the output per man. Even past masters in the art of red-herring trailing give themselves away at times. Thus Sidney Webb and Harold Cox in their book, “The Eight Hour Day,” state in considering the result of a general reduction of the hours of labour in all trades that—

“The successive reductions of the hours of labour which this century has witnessed have been attended, after a very short interval, by a positive general increase in individual productivity. In many cases it has been found that the workers did more in ten hours than their predecessors in twelve. The effort to get more than a certain amount of work out of a man defeats itself.”

__________

The question that matters.

Instance after instance is given of the increase in efficiency and output that follows the reduction of the working day, showing how chimerical is the idea that a slight reduction in hours will put the unemployed in work.

Even as recently as the opening of the Mining Exhibition at Olympia on July 11th evidence was given of the normal result of a shortening of hours. Thus Lord Airedale of Gledhow: —

“In regard to the question of an Eight Hour Day, and of the consequent restriction of the hours of labour in mines, and the question of the increased cost that they were threatened with by mine owners, owing to the difficulties arising from the limitation of hours, he ventured to think that from what they saw that day of coal machinery, the mining engineers of that country would rise to the situation, and by the application of technical knowledge, he believed the threatened crisis would really not arise. It was cheering to note by such exhibitions that mechanical invention knew no end, and if it paid to use machinery when increased cost of labour came in, they might be assured that the difficulty would be successfully dealt with.”

It should be clear, then, that however necessary to capitalist development the reduction of the hours of labour may be, and however useful it may be in other respects, yet it most certainly is not the panacea for the great and growing evil of unemployment that its champions would have us believe. Besides, the question which overshadows all others in the eyes of the worker conscious of his position is not the paltry juggle with hours of labour, but rather the vital question of to whom shall the product of these working hours go ?

The workers, indeed, instead of wasting precious time and energy discussing and petitioning as to the particular sauce with which they are to be eaten, should at last awaken to the fact that it is not necessary that they should be eaten at all, and should take their stand with us accordingly.

Marx or Malthus? (1907)

Book Review from the October 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

The demand for an “eight hours’ day for all workers” by the enthusiastic young man whose estimate of the relative value of broken-bottles and bullets as missiles appears to be in need of some revision, led us to a study of J. M. Robertson’s “The Eight Hours Question.”

The member for Tyneside shows the uselessness of this particular “palliative” by a searching analysis of its effect in case of “particular legislation” in that direction. He simply “wipes the floor” with such “Socialist” opponents as Webb, Shaw, and S.D.F. Jones. His position may be summed up by the following quotations:

“They (Messrs. Webb & Co.) have undertaken to provide a manual of fact and theory for the politicians and labour-leaders who have to deal with the question. Their only bias is the bias of sociological inclination. Yet their altruistic bias is quite as fatal in science as a mercenary one would have been inasmuch as it is even more likely to blind and mislead. Generosity and nobility of feeling will not suffice to decide the matter for those of us who feel that half the miseries of life spring from action undertaken from motives either benevolent or genial. . . Mr. Webb is sensitive about the ungenerousness of pointing out to the working-men that they are mistaken, but he seems to have no misgiving about leading thousands of them to the bitterest disappointment.”

Waiving the question as to what is meant precisely by “sociological inclination,” members of The Socialist Party of Great Britain will heartily concur in the foregoing : indeed, one might use the words as a text when combating the fluffy sentimentalities of the I.L.P’er who derives his “economies” from the New Testament (with profuse apologies to the Old), or the perfervid oratry of the average S.D.F’er on the question of “free maintenance,” who, like Dick Dauntless in “Ruddygore,” argues that it must be right so long “as your ‘eart be your compass” in so far as “this ‘ere ‘eart of mine’s a dictatin’ to me like anythink.”

But clearly as Robertson sees the futility of the legalised restriction of hours (and, incidentally, of other palliatives); although from his own historical and sociological works the fact of the “class struggle” might be deduced : while “economic causation” is the master-key by which he unlocks the mystery of the rapid spread of early Christianity ; he fails to follow his own clues, and, obsessed by one idea (Neo-Malthusianism), proposes counter palliatives, which while they might lighten the burdens of a class doomed to remain in slavery for all time, are grotesquely beside the mark to those genuine Socialists with whose principles, apparently, the learned member has yet to become acquainted, Socialists who believe with him that “the one hope lies in the good sense of the more thoughtful workers, who ought to be the means of guiding aright the rest, they themselves listening to economic reason rather than to the blind impulse which attacks the symptom instead of the cause.”

But here, oddly enough, our author, who elsewhere rightly insists upon the vital importance of verification of premises, takes for granted what is obviously his main contention, namely : that the cause of poverty is overpopulation. In a book of 150 pages, there is not a line directly devoted to the proof of what he regards as the “essence” of Malthusian teaching, viz : “Population tends to increase in an excessive ratio to food”—which, to say the least, in a book which is practically a plea for “Neo-Malthusianism”—is a curious slip. His ludicrously easy task of exposing the absurdities of the Fabians does not justify him in the belief that he has exposed the errors of what he is pleased to call “a crude Marxian economics,” still less does the fact that Gronlund made an error in his statement as to the debated question of the number of Malthus’ children, or that Tom Mann gravely assures the worker that the lessened hours of labour will benefit both the proletarian and capitalist, justify him in the belief that he has established the truth of the precious “law,” which “holds good no matter what be the efficiency or equality of the distribution of wealth.” In the terms of his own main contention, having regard to the implied object of the book, (chapter 13 is called the “Population crux,”) J. M. Roberston’s “The Eight Hours Question” must be regarded as a literary miscarriage, a splendid warning to Guy and Guenn in the avoidance of a non sequitur, a striking example of the truth of the ever-recurring fact that scholarship, literary ability and even genuine sympathy with the worker, are absolutely no guarantee that the real issue for the worker can be more than glimpsed. The exhibition of possibly the most brainy man the Liberals can claim placing himself upon the level of palliative-mongering “Labour-leaders” and middle-class bureaucrats, whose fallacies he deplores, and whose antics he must despise, gives one “furiously to think.” It becomes increasingly right, meet, and our bounden duty, at all times, and in all places, to strenuously oppose those who, whether by reason of mental obfuscation, or by reason of deliberate attempt to contuse the worker for their own ends—the two reasons merge only too easily in the “leader”—have inscribed “Socialism” on their banner, and are acting falsely to the grandly simple principles involved in that faith.

Lack of space forbids more than a cursory examination of the proposition that poverty is caused mainly by “overpopulation.” J. M. Robertson, ashamed, apparently, of the crudely absurd proposition iirst enunciated by Malthus, viz., that population tends to double itself in geometrical progression, whilst subsistence can only be made to increase in arithmetical progression, contents himself with saying that “Population tends to increase in an excessive ratio to food.” Now, it is evident that, put into its very simplest form, this must mean: the more food (“warmth and clothing” is somewhat illicitly smuggled in later on) available, the greater the birth-rate. Yet, on his own showing, the “upper” classes tend to reproduce less, and here the “food supply” is adequate, not to say excessive. Does Robertson maintain that this lessened rate is due to the adoption of Neo-Malthusian teachings ? Grant even that such principles have been adopted, is it not flying in the face of all logical procedure, to assume that this lessened birth-rate is due only to the operation of that circumstance. Further, in ancient Greece and Rome, is it not a fact that the “lower orders” tended to increase at a faster rate than the “upper” classes ? Were there Malthusians then ? Was abortion and infanticide practised more by the patrician than by the proletarian, by the “citizen” than by the helot?

In all seriousness, one asks: Is there not sufficient food, or is it only the purchasing power to obtain food which the English wage-slave, the Indian ryot, the Irish peasant lacks ? “When her population was at its highest Ireland was a food-exporting country. Even during the famine, grain, meat, butter, and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving, and past trenches into which the dead were piled.” Had that food been available, possibly, Robertson may retort, there would have been more reproduction and more want. On which very point one seeks in vain for anything approaching a proof, and is fobbed off with such gratuitous assertions as “With such general distribution of wealth as we all wish for, population would easily double in 20 years unless the lesson of prudential restraint be learned step for step with the improvement.”

It is curious that it does not occur to the minds of Neo-Malthusians that there is another alternative worth considering, viz., that poverty causes overpopulation. The development of this point would result in lengthening an already over-long article. Perhaps the Editor will allow the point to be considered on another occasion. I content myself at present with pointing out that the lowly organisms which haunt the blood of man, and try deadly conclusions with the friendly phogocyte multiply in a way that the worthy Malthus would have called “very striking,” and that, deprived of nourishment, several of the one-celled plants and animals protest by retiring into semi-privacy for a while, and then forming themselves into mere reproducing agents, one organism giving rise to innumerable ”spores.” “Neo” Malthusianism will hardly touch these degenerate beings.

Of course, the Socialist is well aware that the big fringe of unemployed tends ever more and more to aid the employer in beating down labour to a mere subsistence-wage, but he is also aware that this is because the worker, under our present system, is a mere commodity, a curious piece of mechanism differing only from the machine it minds in its power of producing surplus-value, in handing over to its owner the handsome difference between its own cost of subsistence and the value of the commodities its labours have brought into being.

It is the duty of The Socialist Party of Great Britain to tell the workers in general, and the Malthusians in particular :—

(1) Whatever temporary good may accrue to a few individual workers from the adoption of their principles, no permanent benefits can possibly be gained by the working class as a whole.

(2) This particular palliative, along with its bosom friends Total Abstinence, Thrift, Clean Boots, Brushed Hair, and the New Theology will be preached to you by all sorts and conditions of men. The S.P. of G.B. will be at the old stand, giving a hand to Economic Pressure, who will not too gently, but firmly, persuade you that Socialism is your only hope.

Augustus Snellgrove

A Look Round. (1907)

From the May 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Louis A. Hill, to whose utterances I have previously referred in these columns, continues his advocacy of an Eight Hours Act for bakers and continues to make unprovable statements in connection therewith.

***

In communications to the Dally News and the Daily Express recently, he stated that the passing of the bill would “find work for practically every unemployed baker in London” and “would find employment in London alone for some 4,000 or 5,000 extra hands.” Now in my humble opinion Mr. Hill knows he cannot justify these statements, hence his refusal to debate the matter with a member of the S.P.G.B., when asked to do so at the meeting of bakers held at Canning Town on February 9th.

***

In the February issue of the Journeymen Bakers’ Magazine, Mr. Jenkins, General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Operative Bakers, reported that during the Labour Conference at Belfast he visited one of the largest and most up-to-date bakeries in the city, and “had special facilities offered me to examine the newest machinery that had been introduced from a labour-saving point of view, and found, as I had expected, that every development of machinery was throwing men out of work, the result being that 102 men were on the out-of-work list, so that with a 700 membership, one out of every seven were out of work, which represents a very serious state of things ; up to now they have been able to deal with this small army of unemployed, but from all appearances they may be eventually hard pushed to provide for them unless by a serious increase of contributions, notwithstanding they are working under a 48 hour week.”

***

According to the British Baker for April 19 last, Mr. Jenkins attended the Annual Dinner of the Portsmouth Branch of the A.U.O.B. & C. on April 10 and in replying to the toast of “The Amalgamated Union,” laid special stress on the Eight Hours Day Bill for the Baking Trade now before Parliament, which had, he said, been rendered necessary by the excessive labour forced on those who could find employment, the result, in connection with modern improvement, being an ever-increasing army of unemployed bakers, which the proposed Bill would practically eliminate. Where ten or fifteen years since ten or eleven sacks was considered a fair output per man, now double that amount was the output in many of the factories, and it was evident that something to alter the conditions of the workers was an absolute necessity.

***

Once again I ask Mr. Hill, and also Mr. Jenkins, to reconcile their extravagant statements with the actual facts as admitted by, at any rate, the last-named.

***

That “Radical of Radicals,” Mr. Horatio Bottomley, has made Mr. Featherstone Asquith a present of a suggestion, but does not for a moment suppose that Mr. Asquith will adopt it. He says : “An Old Age Pension of 5s. per week for every law-abiding citizen—whether otherwise “deserving” or not—of the age of seventy years and upwards, who cares to claim it. That will exactly fit the case—and Mr. Asquith’s name will go down to posterity as that of the great Chancellor who, out of the country’s wealth, fed and clothed the aged when their powers of contributing to it were exhausted. No man could seek a higher reputation than this.”

***

Oh! that will be joyful. Most members of the working class are “too old at forty.” The great friendly societies, who take care only to enrol “good lives,” show in their statistics the number of middle-aged members who, mainly because of unemployment, lapse. And if they can only manage to “hang on” until they are 70, and never break the law, Horatio would give them five shillings per week !

***

This, in Mr. Bottomley’s opinion, will enable them to feed and clothe themselves. I should like to see Bottomley, Asquith & Co. doing it at the price. And what about rent ?

***

In the following year Mr. Bottomley would extend the pensions to those of 65 years of age, thus bringing himself into line with those other advocates of “justice” for the squeezed-out workers, the Labour Party, who through Mr. G. N. Barnes, urged this proposal in the House of Commons in February, 1906.

***

In sending stamps for twelve months’ subscription to THE SOCIALIST STANDARD, “Wrong Fount” expresses his appreciation of our efforts to produce an interesting and instructive journal, the reading of which has greatly strengthened him. He is a member of the S.D.F., and has been recently a municipal candidate for that body. He does not wish his name and town to be mentioned, as “the time has not yet arrived,” whatever that may mean. He adds:—”You have a good work ahead ; it is good if only for what the ‘S.S.’ has taught me, although I am still ashamed of my ignorance. Go on, Lads!”

***

Well, we cannot expect to dispel ignorance all at once. It took many years for some of us who were in the S.D.F. to arrive at the stage of entirely breaking away from the reform and palliative mongering of that body. But at last “the time arrived,” and we formed the S.P.G.B.

***

One paragraph in “Wrong Fount’s” letter is undoubtedly based upon an insufficient knowledge of the facts, and may also be due to some prejudice on his part against us. He says: “might I suggest that there is a vast difference between criticism and vilification—although I must confess that the latter weapon is not used so much now as it was formerly by you. That is good, too.”

***

Now, I do not think it can be charged against us that we have ever vilified anyone in the columns of this journal. To vilify means to degrade by slander and a slander is a false or malicious report. So far as we know, no “slanders” have ever appeared and every effort will be made to keep them out. Upon reconsideration “Wrong Fount” will no doubt withdraw his remark.

***

On Wednesday, September 6th, 1905 (one year and eight months ago), whilst the Trade Union Congress was sitting at Hanley, over a hundred people were evicted during a heavy downpour of rain from their homes at New Hemsworth, near Barnsley, at the instance of the Colliery Company, with whom they were in dispute. Other evictions followed later. The dispute is not yet settled, and the evicted ones have not yet returned to “their” homes. They are endeavouring to subsist on the few shillings that can be raised by making charitable appeals to their fellow members of the working class, who have not sufficient for themselves.

***

For fourteen months out of the twenty there has been a “Labour” Party in the House of Commons, specially claiming to represent the Trade Unionists, of whom the Hemsworth colliers form a part. While the colliers and their wives and children have been suffering and starving, the “Labour” Party have been earning the encomiums of the capitalist party, and boasting of their “sensibility, adaptability, and respectability.” One of them (Ramsay MacDonald) moved the adjournment of the House to discuss the shooting of natives in Natal, but none (not even W. Thorne, S.D.F.) has risked his reputation for “sensibility, adaptability, and respectability” by denouncing the damnable system which produces such outrages as the Hemsworth evictions.

***

“Wrong Fount” may accuse me of vilification, but can he deny that what I have written is true and justifiable ?

***

Of course one can quite understand the reluctance of Keir Hardie and his friends to take action concerning such a glaring illustration of that class war which they declare is only a “shibboleth” and “a reactionary and whiggish precept, certain to lead the movement away from the real aims of Socialism.”

***

A formal report has been issued by the Departmental Committee appointed to inquire into the “probable economic effect of a limit of eight hours to the working day of coal mines.” Some interesting evidence has been given, particularly as to the effect of a reduction in other industries. Mr. H. F. Donaldson, M.I.C.E., chief superintendent of the Ordnance Factories, Woolwich, detailed how the hours in the factories had been reduced from 54 to 48. Their method of work was really piecework, and the production had been approximately the same as under the old regime. The attendance of the men had been more regular since the shortening of the hours. He did not think that the reduction had meant an increased intensity of labour, but it did mean “hustle,”

***

Mr. J. Lowrie, manager of the Royal Army Clothing Factory, Grosvenor Road, also gave evidence. He said that at his establishment there were employed 1,532 women and girls, of whom 1,385 were on piece work. Until 1894 they were working 55 hours per week, after which year they were reduced to 48. He did not think this reduction of seven hours had made any difference in the output: there was the same efficiency in the shorter hours. He considered it had been an economic success.

***

And there are some folks who talk of dealing with the unemployed problem by enacting an Eight Hours Day !

J. Kay

The Land of the Free! (1906)

From the February 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

A dispatch from Dayton, 0., reports that 300 employees of the National Cash Register Co. were discharged because they failed to attend a meeting to listen to addresses on the labour situation by the company officials. The meeting was called by the company because of its decision to refuse the demands of the Typographical union for an eight-hour day. This is the concern which advertises itself as the “model employer of labor,” because it furnishes bath towels, pocket-handkerchiefs and hair curlers to its employes. In return for these kindnesses the company exacts complete obedience from its slaves, as shown above. This only makes clear again that the capitalists will grant everything (even higher wages sometimes), but freedom to the workers, for with freedom will come an end of exploitation. The capitalists are dictators because they own the tools with which the workers must earn a livelihood. When the workers own the tools the despotism of capitalism will cease, and only then.

Labor (St. Louis).

50 Years Ago: Shorter Working Hours and Unemployed (1958)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The speeding up of the workman, the ever-growing intensity of the labour exacted from him, renders imperative a longer repose so that he may recuperate his working strength and maintain his maximum productivity. Hence flows the modern tendency toward shorter hours so that the profitableness of the worker to the capitalist may increase. It is the necessary and inevitable outcome of modern industrial conditions, even from the capitalist point of view, and is by no means a sign of victory over the ruling class. If the champions of the eight-hour day were to confine themselves to stating the truth about their pet reform there would be little need to quarrel with them, but when they claim as one of the virtues of the eight-hour day that it will abolish or greatly reduce unemployment, we join issue . . . 

In the present instance, if the reduction of working class hours is to bring about more employment, it could only be by decreasing the output per man, and providing work by causing the employment of more men to produce the same amount as before. But would it have very much effect? So far as positive evidence goes, it is directly against any presumption of a lessening of the present output per man. Even past masters of the art of red herring trailing give themselves away at times. Thus Sidney Webb and Harold Cox in the book, The Eight Hours Day, state in considering the result of a general reduction of the hours of labour in all trades that

“The successive reductions of the hours of labour which this century has witnessed have been attended, after a very short interval, by a positive general increase in individual productivity. In many cases it has been found that the workers did more in ten hours than their predecessors in twelve. The effort to get more than a certain amount of work out of a man defeats itself."

[From the Socialist Standard, September, 1908.]

Our May Day message (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

May Day is a pagan festival that has survived from the mists of pre-history, changing as society has changed. It was one of the few pagan festivals the Christian Church did not annexe for its own ceremonies, and the welcome to summer and fruitfulness continued through the centuries. The meaning of the old Druid celebration was forgotten, and the event became ritualized, with the early morning gathering of greenery, the crowning of the Queen of the May, and dancing around the maypole.

In 1644 the Puritans banned it, their consciences no doubt shocked by the dissipation of so much energy in dancing and merriment, that could have been more profitably expended in the developing means of production. With the Restoration the maypoles returned, and on the first of May the common people once more danced on their village greens and the streets of the towns. But social forces stronger than the laws of King and Parliament were stirring. Capitalist production was changing, and destroying, the customs of centuries. Men, women, and children, were forced into Blake’s dark satanic mills, mines, and sweat shops. May Day became as every other day, back breaking, mind numbing and miserable. Only in isolated rural areas did the celebration linger, a dim folk memory of unity and happiness.

In 1889 at the Paris Congress the Second International was formed. A resolution was passed affirming that the limitation of the working day was the first step in the emancipation of the working class, and May Day was set aside for international labour demonstrations. Behind the scenes in the labour movement in England there was conflict. The Social Democratic Federation* which had boycotted the Paris Congress and allied itself with the French Possibilists tried to prevent the demonstration. The London Trades Council, the representative of the older craft unions, supported a shorter working day on the basis of free collective bargaining. The newer trade unions wanted the eight hour day to come about by legislative regulation. However both the SDF and the London Trades Council eventually joined in the demonstration though with separate platforms. The story of this struggle was told by Engels in his article The Fourth of May in London, first published in Vienna’s Arbeiter-Zeitung May 23, 1890.

The first international May Day celebrations held in London on May 4th 1890 saw a procession to Hyde Park of over 100,000 workers in support of an eight hour day. Since then May Day has been haunted by the spirit of reform.

Year after year workers have marched behind banners seeking not the overthrow of the capitalist system, but only to protest against its effects. They have called for a “fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”, for better housing, for cuts in unemployment, for pension schemes, for better health and education services, for disarmament, for “rights", for racial and sexual “equality”. Every political careerist and opportunist has scrambled for a place on the May Day platform. Sworn enemies in the labour movement join together on this one day and address each other in terms of brotherly love. Lofty sentiments and pious resolutions fill the air. Labour leaders who in May 1914 and May 1939 paid lip service to international working class solidarity, only months later were urging the working class to take up arms and slaughter their fellow workers in other countries.

Hitler staged an official “Labour Day” in May 1934, with the hammer and sickle, alongside the swastika. If these seem strange marching companions after the Communist Party whitewash of the last 40 years, it should be remembered that at the time of the last free elections in Germany in 1933 both the Nazis and the German Communist Party were united in their hatred of what they both called “bourgeois democracy”. Since the early years of so-called communism in Russia, the Russian ruling class have cynically used the May Day parade to display their armed might. Whatever flowery greetings are sent from Moscow, the silent message of the tanks, missiles, and marching forces, is intended for the ruling classes of rival powers.

If we now have shorter working hours, unemployment benefits, old age pensions, and comprehensive education, some of the problems we face are even more terrible. What worker who demonstrated on May Day 1890 for an eight hour day, could have imagined that a weapon would be developed, capable of incinerating every man, woman, and child, in a 40 kilometre radius? The lesson is clear. Marching for short term aims has not brought emancipation to the working class.

Good intentions on the part of the working class are of no value without an understanding of how capitalism produces their problems and why only Socialism can solve them. That is why the Socialist Party of Great Britain must stand apart. We cannot demonstrate in solidarity with the Labour Party, Communist Party, SWP, IMG, WRP, and all the other protest groups who mouth their hollow promises of social reform on May Day platforms. We seek the end of the system that brings war, poverty, crises, unemployment, and misery to the majority of the world's population.

Our May Day message to the working class is therefore our message for every other day. Those who do not own the means of production are nothing but the slaves of those who do.

The forces of production long ago reached the point where they could produce the abundance necessary for the change from private ownership into social ownership. The interdependence of society has outgrown local and national bounds and is world wide.

The working class of the world must organise politically to dispossess the capitalist class of the means of production and distribution and establish common ownership.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain sends greetings to our fellow working men and women of all nations and races and urges them to join with the world Socialist movement in order to free society from the tyranny of class rule. Our common task is the establishment of Socialism.

Alice Kerr

* Some members of the SDF who wanted to work only for Socialism instead of immediate aims, and who were against the SDF associating with the second international or the French Possibilists, left in 1904 and formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain — They were dubbed by their opponents the "impossibilists”.

The Doom of the Small Baker. (1908)

From the April 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Effect of an Eight Hours Day on Small Masters.

The officials of the Bakers’ Union continue to make pathetic appeals for working-class support for their poor little bantling, the Eight Hours Bill for Bakers, on the grounds that it would, if carried into law, solve the unemployed problem so far as bakers are concerned.

Now as the large number of small bakers still carrying on business in London and the large towns are themselves working much longer and harder than their overwrought employees, and spend their Sabbath, when not in Chapel seeking business, posting up their books and doing other necessary clerical work, and are yet unable to keep in a state of solvency, the forcing up of their wages bill by the enactment of a legal eight hour day, would be, in many instances, the last straw, and their shops would be closed forthwith. Even now the journeymen, after working a “night’’ of eighteen or twenty hours on Friday-Saturday, often cannot get their wages when they finish, but have to call round late on Saturday night, after the barrowman has brought money in from the rounds.

Immediately, therefore, the new conditions began to operate, the factory owner would scoop in the trade of the struggling masters, with the inevitable result that in a very short time the already large army of unemployed bakers would be augmented to an enormous extent.

The baking industry a few months ago was all agog because of the wonderful machinery on view at Islington. Since that time that “labor saver” has been installed in various factories in London and the provinces, and now several balance sheets are going the rounds of the Baking Trade showing the capacity of such machinery in actual every night practice. In one particular factory five hundred sacks of flour are being turned into one hundred thousand loaves by eleven men, and in another four- hundred and eighty to five hundred sacks are done by fifteen men, the extra four men being required in this instance because the bread made is “fancy.” To-day the small master has a difficulty in squeezing thirteen sacks out of each man he employs. Obviously, therefore, it is only a question of time and the small man must finally disappear altogether, even under the present conditions of unlimited hours for a limited wage, and any change whatsoever can only result in speeding the departing guest into the ranks of the proletariat. In the factory bakers are not wanted: any “unskilled” man of average intelligence can do what is required, and for laborers’ wages.

The eight hour day will come, whether it be legalised or not, in fact, it is here in many instances because the capitalist has found that after that period labour is dear at nothing an hour. He can suck all the labour force out of a man in that time, and just as he has no use for superseded machinery made of steel, he has no use for the human machine until it has recuperated. It does not pay him to run expensive machinery with men from whom all the energy has been pumped. He therefore selects a new gang from the large crowd who are always waiting at the gate, in all weathers, night and day. If by any chance he retains a gang for a short period over the normal day, so alive is he to the quality of their labour that he actually pays them at a lower rate for overtime—in some instances as low as 2d. per hour, and even then by a pretty “wangle” is able to comply with the Trade Union clause in bis contracts with Boards of Guardians and other public bodies.

The “big pot” in the trade is in favour of a legal eight hour day, and the reason is not because he is bubbling over with the milk of human kindness and sympathy for the journeymen bakers, but because he has everything to gain from it, and the poor devil who is hanging on by his eyebrows stands to lose what little he has.

What are we to think of those posing as leaders who are holding up such a palpable sham as a remedy for the miseries of the working baker? Happily an ever increasing number are embracing the only remedy,—Socialism.

W. Watts.

Farce or Tragedy? (1906)

From the May 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1901 at the French Trade Union Congress, the delegates, by an overwhelming majority, decided to inaugurate a general 8 hours strike on the First of May, 1906. At the time of writing this the period is near at hand when the unions will be expected to put to the test this anarchistic idea of which they are enamoured. The wretched betrayal of the workers by Millerand and the compromising policy that was pursued by the bloc in the Chamber had its effect by throwing the militant proletariat into a fierce anti-parliamentary campaign. One can only admire the spirit of revolt which animates these wage workers who are tired of the dilettante performances of their “Socialist” reformers ; still, in spite of, or perhaps because of, that admiration, we must not overlook the means by which, they are going to try and get the 8 hours’ day.

The General Strike as such, without being backed up by a political force (and an armed force at that), has never been successful. And although some may point to Russia as a refutation of this position, the fact is that even there it has simply been used in conjunction with an armed political movement. In Italy recently the general strike did not last long, and notwithstanding that on the railways the “passive resistance” of the employees, severely hindered the work of the railroads, it did not prevent them being used. After all, our comrades of the working class of France at this juncture only contemplate a general strike for an 8 hours day, and afterwards, presumably, whether won or not, they go back to work for their masters just as before. An 8 hours day, if attained, does not necessarily mean any permanent reduction of the unemployed. Machinery is used when it is cheaper than human labour, and a restriction of the hours of labour will only mean an impetus to the introduction of machinery, and a greater intensity of labour for those at work, with a quicker wearing out of the wage slaves.

An 8 hours day is not high enough goal for the workers to try to gain, by pitting their empty stomachs and pockets against the full ones of their masters. To enter into a prolonged struggle in this manner, and for such, an object, is somewhat foolish. They are going to strike by walking away from the workshops and factories and leaving them as the full and undisputed property of their masters to be kept by them till the workers return to be still farther exploited.

The French workers have not a sufficiently extensive economic and political organisation at present for a general strike to be a success. They will have to organise as a class on the political as well as on the economic field. There must be no division, no walling-off of skilled and unskilled, employed and unemployed, no splitting up of the workers in one industry into a number of antagonistic autonomous units, but their organisation as a whole in one body. When the workers are organised as a class, understanding what the aim of a militant body of workers should be (viz., the overthrow of the capitalist system of the private ownership in the means and instruments of producing and distributing the necessaries of life), they will not attempt a general strike for an eight hour day, but working intelligently with, and as part of, a revolutionary class party, they will use their organisation, not to the exclusion of their members from the workshops and factories, but to the end that the workers may run them in their co-operative capacity as the property of the working class. It will not be a general strike but a general lock-out of the master class.

The economic arm alone is not sufficient, it needs the political arm to break down the ramparts capitalism has erected in its defence. The political is not sufficient unless it has the economic to lay the foundation of the co-operative commonwealth. As the French workers are not organised in this wise, as the strike contemplated is not with the active co-operation of a revolutionary political force, and as the workers have evidently not yet grasped their mission, things point to it being a farce. A farce it will be unless the armed forces of the government are brought down on the strikers and convert a farce into a tragedy.

E. J. B. Allen

Marx and trade unions (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx’s assessment that the English trade unionists involved in setting up the International Working Men's Association were “real powers" was to be proved correct by the subsequent careers of some of them. Robert Appelgarth, for instance, played a very prominent role in presenting the evidence of the trade unions to the Royal Commission which had been set up to investigate them in 1867 and whose Report in 1869 paved the way for a further liberalisation of the law governing their activities. Howell, as Secretary of the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee from 1871-5, was the first General Secretary of the Trades Unions Congress, whose first congress had been held in Manchester, in June 1868. Thus Marx was dealing with some of the top British trade unionists of his day. Since in politics they were Liberals it may seem strange that Marx, as a revolutionary communist, should have been prepared to work with them. But, for him, what was important was not their politics but the fact that they were leading trade unionists, solidly implanted in the working class movement.

In other words. Marx’s participation in the IWMA was a resumption of the same strategy derived, through Engels, from the Chartist experience of the early 1840s which had motivated his earlier collaboration with Ernest Jones. Because he believed that out of the economic organisations of the working class would eventually evolve a conscious political movement for socialism, he was not too concerned about the political ideas of the trade union leaders he had agreed to work with. The development of the working class movement itself would, Marx believed somewhat over-optimistically, sooner or later put this right. The important thing at this stage for Marx was to set this movement in motion, to encourage independent working class trade union and political activity. When this did not happen, as became evident within a number of years. Marx severely criticised the union leaders for having sold out to the capitalist class and the Liberal Party.

In fact until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 the activity of the IWMA was mainly of a trade union nature. Not all the members of the IWMA, particularly not the French workers, were convinced of the utility of trade unions and strikes and to Marx fell the task of providing a theoretical justification of trade unionism. Marx proved to be a worthy successor to Hodkingson and other earlier pro-working class writers, in whose tradition he must indeed have been regarded by the English trade unionists whose practice he was showing to be sound from an economic point of view (despite what the economic orthodoxy of the day claimed) and who called him "Dr. Marx" out of respect for his economic and historical knowledge. This is not to suggest that English trade unionists were incapable of themselves providing economic justifications for their activities. The Secretary of the London Consolidated Society of Bookbinders. Thomas Dunning (1799-1873), had written a book, published in 1860, Trades Unions and Strikes: Their Philosophy and Intention, which impressed both Marx and the leading British economist of the time, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Marx referred to it several times in his footnotes in Capital and, more extensively, in some notes which he did not in the end include in Volume 1 of Capital. In these notes he took up Dunning's argument that the economic logic of trade unions was to ensure that the laws of supply and demand were “fairly” applied or, translated into Marx’s economic categories, to ensure that the workers were paid the value of their labour power, defined as the value of

the means of subsistence that is customarily held to be essential in a given state of society to enable the worker to exert his labour-power with the necessary degree of health, strength, vitality, etc and to perpetuate him self by producing replacements for himself.

Without trade unions, workers would tend to be paid less than this value:

. . . the value of labour-power constitutes the conscious and explicit foundation of the trade unions, whose importance for the English working class can scarcely be overestimated. The trade unions aim at nothing less than to prevent the reduction of wages below that level that is traditionally maintained in the various branches of industry. That is to say, they wish to prevent the price of labour-power from falling below its value.

“Abolition of the wages system”

Marx presented a particularly well-argued case for trade unionism in a reply to John Weston, an old Owenite and a member of the General Council of the IWMA. which took up two successive meetings of the Council in June 1865. [1] Weston had argued that trade union action to raise wages was pointless, even harmful, as wage increases only led to price increases or to wage cuts for other workers. Marx showed how Weston’s arguments were unsound: the level of wages did not affect the level of prices; the effect of a general increase in wages would be, after a readjustment of demand, a decrease in the rate of profit. Marx did, however, recognise that trade union action, including strikes, was basically only defensive and that if workers were not going to go on fighting a permanent rearguard action they should begin thinking in terms of abolishing the wages system altogether:

I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their every-day conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any large movement. At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these every-day struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in those unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto ‘A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword. ‘Abolition of the wages system!’

Marx ended his talk by proposing a resolution. which the General Council adopted, the third clause of which declared:

Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system.

The trade union question was also discussed at the first Congress of the IWMA in Geneva in September 1866. Marx drafted the “Instructions” for the General Council’s own delegation. The sixth section, headed “Trade Unions: Their Past. Present and Future", gives a very clear idea of Marx's hopes for the future evolution and role of the spontaneous economic organisations of the working class that trade unions were:

. . . unconsciously to themselves, the trade unions were forming centres of organization of the working class, as the medieval municipalities and communes did for the middle class. If the trade unions are required for the guerrilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wage labour and capital rule.

This characterisation of the trade unions as being the equivalent for the working class of what the medieval towns had been for the bourgeoisie Marx had already made on previous occasions, in the Poverty of Philosophy and in the series of articles in the New York Daily Tribune 1853-4 in which he referred to as his “history of strikes". It is almost a syndicalist vision of the emancipation of the working class, except that Marx envisaged the trade unions playing a political role, converting themselves into, as it were, a mass political party of the working class, rather than remaining industrial organisations relying exclusively on industrial action to try to overthrow capitalism.

Marx’s participation in the British trade union movement was however not just confined to theorising. As we have said, until 1870 the IWMA was mainly concerned with trade union matters and has been accurately described as being during this period “an international trade union liaison committee". [2] When a strike occurred in Britain and the employer imported blackleg labour from the Continent, the IWMA intervened, often successfully, with leaflets and speakers in the appropriate language, to persuade the continental workers not to break the strike. Similarly, when a strike occurred in Britain or on the Continent, the IWMA publicised it and raised funds from workers and trade unions in other countries to help the strikers and their families. Marx, as a member of the General Council, played his part in such activities, drafting for instance a leaflet addressed to German tailors concerning a strike.

Marx put the finishing touches to Capital, which was first published in German in Hamburg in September 1867, at a time when he was actively involved in the mainly trade union-type activities of the IWMA. This no doubt helped to give Capital a very pronounced pro-working class character. Marx only mentioned the trade unions in passing (since he planned to deal with the question in a separate volume, which never appeared, to be devoted to "Wage Labour"), but he did devote considerable space to another working class struggle: that to achieve a legally-enforceable maximum working day. As with trade unions. Marx was not content simply to describe and support this struggle. He also showed how the demand for a legal “normal working day" was justified even from a capitalist economic point of view.

There had been opposition to this demand also within the IWMA, once again from the French workers who, influenced by the ideas of Proudhon, had doubts about appealing to the capitalist state to protect the working class. In the "Instructions" he drafted for the General Council delegation to the 1866 Geneva congress of the IWMA Marx met this criticism head on. with regard to the legal limitation of child labour. The "more enlightened part of the working class", he wrote

know that, before everything else, the children and juvenile workers must be saved from the crushing effects of the present system. This can only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts.

Mere Marx appears, not so much as an early-day syndicalist, but as a reformist arguing that the condition of the working class could be improved under capitalism through the action of the existing state.

Class struggle over hours

But he was no more a reformist than he was a syndicalist. He did indeed believe that state intervention to limit the working day could bring about a real improvement in the condition of the working class and in Capital did not hesitate to say so:

  On the whole the working population, subject to the Factory Act, has greatly improved physically. All medical testimony agrees on this point, and personal observation at different times has convinced me of it (Chapter X “The Working Day", Section 6. footnote).
  To guard against false conclusions front the text, I ought here to remark that the English cotton industry, since it was placed under the Factory Act of 1850 with its regulations of labour-time, etc., must be regarded as the model industry of England. The English cotton operative is in every respect better off than his Continental counterpart in misery (Chapter X, Section 5. footnote).

This is a far cry from the absolute impoverishment of the working class under capitalism which some have read into Marx! Marx also had the highest regard for the government officials who enforced the Factory Acts in a strict and conscientious way, saying of one, Leonard Horner (1785- 1864) that "he rendered undying service to the English working-class” (Chapter IX. “The Rate of Surplus-Value”. Section 3, footnote).

It is important to understand why Marx thought that it was possible for factory legislation to improve working class conditions. It was not because state intervention generally — reformist political action, if you like — could bring about an improvement in working class living standards, but because, in this particular case, in the absence of state intervention, wages were being driven down below the value of the workers’ labour power. The parallel with trade union action was clear, and deliberate. Factory legislation was another way of ensuring that workers were paid the full value of the commodity they had to sell, their ability to work. If they had to work too long hours the workers were not being paid, in the words of the slogan Marx denounced as conservative, "a fair day’s wage for a fair day's work”.

Marx, basing himself on a leaflet produced by the building workers strike committee during the strike and lock-out of 1859-60, summarises the workers’ case for a shorter working day as follows:

You pay me for one day’s labour-power, whilst you use that of 3 days. That is against our contract and the law of exchanges. I demand, therefore, a working-day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place . . . I demand the normal working-day because I, like every other seller, demand the value of my commodity (Chapter X, "The Working Day", Section 1).

Since the capitalist employer is not prepared to accept this argument, insisting on his right to make maximum use of the commodity he has purchased, the struggle for a “normal” working day becomes a class struggle:

. . .  in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class (ibid.).

Marx describes the course of this struggle in detail, from the first attempt at legal limitation initiated by Robert Owen in 1802 through the Acts of 1833 to the 1850 Act. in Section 6 of Chapter X of Capital entitled “The Struggle for the Normal Working-Day. Compulsory Limitation by Law of the Working-Time. The English Factory Acts, 1833 to 1864”. There is therefore no need for us to repeat that history here, but it must be emphasised that this was a purely defensive struggle:

  The history of the regulation of the working-day in certain branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others in regard to this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated labourer, the labourer as ’free’ vendor of his labour-power, when capitalist production has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of resistance (Chapter X. Section 7).
  For 'protection’ against ‘the serpent of their agonies’, the labourers must put their heads together, and. as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death (ibid.).

This explains why state intervention in this domain was capable of bringing about a once-for-all improvement in conditions, but incapable of bringing about a continual improvement. Like trade union action, once it has improved conditions by raising workers’ wages to the value of their labour power, its role became purely defensive: to ensure that wages were not driven down below their value, in this case by over-work as a result of too long a working day. So factory legislation was subject to the same limitations as trade union action: it could only play a rearguard, defensive role against the encroachments of capital.

In fact, here too the working class had to run fast just to stay still. The capitalist employer sought to compensate for the shorter hours imposed on him by the law by making his workers work more intensively (harder and faster); which meant that the workers would eventually have to demand a further shortening of the working day to avoid being over-worked and so underpaid:

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the tendency that urges capital, so soon as a prolongation of the hours of labour is once for all forbidden, to compensate itself, by a systematic heightening of the intensity of labour, and to convert every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means of exhausting the workman, must soon lead to a state of things in which a reduction of the hours of labour will again be inevitable (Chapter XV, "Machinery and Modern Industry", Section 3c).

Marx added, in a footnote, that "the agitation for a working-day of 8 hours has now [1867] begun in Lancashire among the factory operatives”. The Geneva Congress of the IWMA in 1866 had in fact already adopted the demand for an 8-hour day, following the example of the American trade unions.

Marx also explained, in the Preface to Capital, the space he had devoted to the Factory Acts by referring to the political, as well as economic, lesson they had for the continental ruling classes. The present epoch, he wrote, was that of the rise of the working class:

In England the process of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must re-act on the Continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working-class itself. Apart from higher motives, therefore, their own most important interests dictate to the classes that are for the nonce the ruling ones, the removal of all legally removable hindrances to the free development of the working-class. For this reason, as well as others, I have given so large a space in this volume to the history, the details, and the results of English factory legislation.

In other words, the change-over to socialism would be less violent to the extent that the working class was better treated. In fact, Marx believed that, with the extension of the franchise as well, a peaceful capture of political power by the working class in England had become a distinct possibility.

But there was one argument in favour of a shorter working day and week which Marx did not use, even though it was as widespread in his day as it is now: that it would help reduce unemployment. Marx’s knowledge of the economies of capitalism led him to point out that the effect was more likely to be the opposite. A shorter working day, by increasing labour costs, would encourage the introduction of labour-saving machinery. As he told a meeting of the General Council of the IWMA in August 1868, which was discussing the question, the case for a shorter working day should be based, not so much on economic arguments, but simply on the need for workers as human beings to be healthy and to have more free time; so that they would be fit and educated enough to be able to carry through the advance in civilisation that the change-over from capitalism to communism would represent.

Marx thus provided a theoretical justification for what the working class movement in Britain was actually doing — trade union action to defend wages and demanding a legal maximum working day. This was in accordance with the role he and Engels had assigned to communist theoreticians in the Communist Manifesto:

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists . . . merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from an historical movement going on under our very eyes.

In this sense, a large part of Capital, Marx’s major work, can be said to be a theoretical reflection of the activity of the working class of his day in Britain.

Adam Buick

FOOTNOTES

[1.] First published in 1898 by his daughter, Eleanor, and Aveling under the title Value, Price and Profit, which is the title under which it became a textbook for those calling themselves Marxists in the British working class movement. Its original title was Wages, Price and Profit, by which it is known in other countries and which is also used in some later English editions.

[2.] Collins and Abranisky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, p.84.

A May Day Message (1933)

From the May 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first day of May once had a significance which has now become only a tradition. It was a day of hope and rejoicing at the awakening of Nature from its winter sleep and the promise of bright days and good crops. The wet, dark days of winter were past, and the dry, sunny days of summer were coming, and it was an occasion for fun and frivolity. The festival is old and takes us back to the flowery times of old Greece and Rome. Our forefathers celebrated the day with festivals in the villages with dances round the maypole.

But these are dull times, and our opportunities for gaiety are limited by our toilsome hours providing profit for masters. Yet a pale shadow of these celebrations still drifts about on May Day. Just as the ancient joyous and colourful festivals reflected the spontaneous outburst of less rigid times, so the modern ghost reflects the strictly commercial character of to-day. In the parks beribboned railway vans and the like have a "busman’s holiday.”

The Labour movement celebrates May Day in its own particular way. The first conference of the International Workingmen’s Association adopted a resolution stating that the limitation of the working day was the first step in the emancipation of the working class. When the first conference of the second international met in Paris in 1889 they seized upon this resolution, reaffirmed it, and set aside the first of May in every year for Labour demonstrations in favour of an eight- hour day. Since then the first of May has been haunted by the spirit of reform.

Every year larger and larger processions form up behind banners representing almost every conceivable reform, and, with bunting flying, march to arranged spots where platforms are set up to enable Labour leaders and cranks of different descriptions to rant and rave or discourse sweetly to the enhancing of their own reputations and the satisfaction of masses of discontented workers who have not yet discovered the real source of their discontent and the remedy. The proceedings end with the passing of pious and empty resolutions which do not carry the working-class movement a step further on the road to emancipation.

The association of protests against mere effects of capitalism with the May Day demonstration continues to cloud its proceedings. It expresses the clamourings of hosts of people who have their own little corner of discontent, and sworn enemies unite on the platforms to entertain the large audiences. Nationalists, unemployed, Communists, trade unionists, anti-vivisectionists, labourites and reformers of myriad hues unite in more or less vague protestations against the powers that be— protestations that are utterly futile because there is no effective power to back them up.

Our May Day message is now twenty-eight years old, but it is still the same, and it is still fresh and to the point. The capitalists own the means of production and distribution, and owing to this they are able to keep the worker a toiling slave. Ownership of the means of production and distribution is assured to the capitalists through their control of political power, a control that the worker gives them when he votes them into power at election times. The way to freedom lies through dispossessing the capitalists of the power they wield and the instruments they control. This can only be accomplished by obtaining control of Parliament for the purpose of establishing Socialism. This is the common task of the workers the world over regardless of race or colour. The purpose and the determination necessary are the same on every other day of the year just as much as it is on May Day.

As spring awakens hope let it awaken those who are sunk in apathy to the real promise of the future, and stir them to grapple with the fundamental problems of working-class life.

On this May Day then, as usual, we send forward a message of fraternal greeting to our fellow-workers of all lands, whether they be Jewish or German, Hindu or Russian, white or coloured. We urge them to join with us in the work of overthrowing the power that keeps them in bondage and to refrain from placing trust in ideas of leadership or in vague aspirations that only have the heartbreaking end of disillusion and apathy.

Gilmac.