Land reform in Scotland (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, land reform has been a significant issue. It is widely recognised that there is considerable concentration of land ownership in Scotland. Typically, land reform is an issue in formerly colonised countries, where the occupying power has concentrated land ownership, such as in South Africa and Zimbabwe, to benefit the colonisers and exert control.

The concentration of land in Scotland, through the famous Highland Clearances, was a precursor and a part of the same process, appropriating land for the ruling class and sending people out to colonise other parts of the world.

According to the Scottish Land Commission: 1,252 owners hold 67 percent of privately owned rural land. Of these estates, 87 are estimated to be larger than 10,000 hectares (67 of these are in the Highlands), 667 are 1,000-10,000, and 371 are smaller than 1,000 hectares. There are 5.5 million people in Scotland.

As they note, this is not unusual:

‘Ownership of agricultural land is becoming increasingly concentrated in Europe, with one percent of agricultural businesses controlling 20% of agricultural land in the EU and three percent controlling 50%. Conversely, 80% of agricultural businesses control only 14.5% of agricultural land (European Economic and Social Committee, 2015)’.

Early in the parliament’s existence, the then Labour government passed laws to abolish the last vestiges of feudal land ownership – no longer requiring the payment of feudal duties and creation of outright ownership of land.

The Scottish Parliament took the opportunity to make changes, now it was no longer confronted by the power of landowners in the House of Lords. By 2004, it passed its first Land Reform Act, which included a broader right to roam than in England and Wales, and also introduced community right to buy, where populations up to 10,000 could register a right of refusal on land sales and transfers. This legislation also placed responsibilities on landowners for the management of their property.

The SNP have continued the process by passing further acts in 2015, 2016 and 2025. The 2016 legislation gave Scottish ministers the power to intervene in land sales. Some of this legislation was refinements of the process following human rights cases that upheld the right of private ownership against the provisions of the Land Reform Acts, particularly Salvesen v Riddell.

The 2016 Community Empowerment Act gave communities rights to intervene in disused or neglected land causing harm to communities (including urban properties). The 2025 Act includes a requirement to consider reasonable requests to lease land or convert parts of it into crofting land. This act also requires a plan which will improve biodiversity, adapt to climate change and contribute to net zero.

The large estate owners continue to fight a rearguard action, maintaining that large estates can be run more efficiently and with economies of scale (eg, when a part of the estate has a lean year, they can cross-subsidise from other parts of the estate to continue paying staff for maintenance and other costs).

Campaigners maintain that there is evidence that large estates stifle development, and concentrate power into a few hands:

‘Scotland’s current pattern of landownership frustrates economic development within fragile rural communities. Most of these responses were very general in nature but the overall perception was that because landowners have a very high degree of control over decisions about how land is used, they also have the capacity to either help or hinder economic development. The implication of this is that where local economic development is not regarded as a priority by the landowner, then it will not happen.’

Further, some landowners are perceived as ‘trophy’ owners, holding the land as a status symbol (mostly for shooting); whereas some charities are seen as hindering economic development in the name of conservation. As the land commission notes, ‘This indicates that the issue here is more to do with concentration of power and resources more generally, and that land holdings are acting as an outlet for the exercise of this power rather than its source’.

These frustrations reflect the desire of small-business folk and entrepreneurs who are locked out by their more powerful rivals. Indeed, part of the impetus behind land reform is securing the votes of rural population, including farmers and small-business people. The fact that the legislation is locked in with significant requirements for Scottish ministers to intervene, means that wealth and social connexion may, however, be the real determinant for how much, or how little changes. It will be interesting to see how much this will affect land held by the King in his own right (rather than as Crown land, which itself is managed by Scottish ministers and accounts for 35,000 hectares), such as Balmoral, and if ministers will be willing to impose conditions and lettings on any of his land.

So far, there has been little change in the pattern of land ownership, and sales and transfers of large estates are few and far between. Much as in land reform in many parts of the world, the power and right of property tends to chafe against any attempts to constrain it.

Where land is owned by public bodies, such as ‘Forestry and Land Scotland,’ commercial imperatives still apply, so the logic of capital predominates regardless of titular ownership. It is this logic that will continue to predominate even if the land is parcelled up into smaller lots.

Socialists want to end the private ownership of land and want to see it used rationally to benefit the needs of the whole community. That means, not state ownership or ownership by forestry commissions or trusts, but common ownership and democratic control.

Land being held in common doesn’t mean that people won’t be free to use their initiative to employ the land, but that under properly understood and agreed common and democratic rules, people would be able to co-operate to meet their individual and collective needs without all the layers of complexity and chicanery that come with the private ownership of land.

Pik Smeet

SPGB Snippets: Stealing the common from off the goose . . . (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

March 25, 2026

The UK government has just published the first ever Land Use Framework for England, in which joined-up thinking, better mapping tools, and free access to ownership data will supposedly rationalise legacy chaos so that “land can support house building and infrastructure, a resilient food system, climate mitigation and thriving nature.”

The framework enthuses about community consultation and partnerships but never, of course, questions the very idea of ownership. 10 percent of land is held in secret and just 8 percent of England is public access. Capitalists got their start by stealing the land off the people, worldwide, forcing generations to live as landless wage-slaves. We will never be free until we take the land and other resources back and abolish capitalist ownership laws.

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A youth panel at the conference examined how Germany’s political establishment is pressuring young people into the armed forces not only through direct reforms, but also through policies that attack livelihoods. The situation imposed onto young workers and students today amounts to ‘economic blackmail’ for those without wealthy families to support them, argued Max Radtke of the trade union ver.di…The reintroduction of conscription should be understood as a question of class interests, added David Christner of Junge Linke (Young Left). He emphasized the need for a sharper analysis of ‘who is being sent to kill and die, and for whose interests’, saying that the political imperative at this point is to develop a ‘practical alternative to repression and militarization’. 

[peoples dispatch]

How Does Yoga Alleviate Child Poverty in India? Yoga classes can offer several benefits, particularly for children living in poverty. They: 1. Provide mindfulness and resilience. These sessions provide a break from daily life, where minds are taken off of hardship outside. Students gradually develop inner strength and willpower that they can take home with them. 2. Build a community. Children feel safe making friends and coming out of their shells. They will feel less alone and it makes the day-to-day that little bit easier. 3. Improve physical health. By building physical strength, students are less likely to contract illnesses and injuries, thereby increasing attendance at school and reducing stress on health care systems. 

[The Borgen Project]

Wide-scale desertions and 2 million draft-dodgers are among a raft of challenges facing Ukraine’s military. 

[AP]

People are now openly confronting the authorities, with a few lucky ones escaping conscription. Sadly, other videos show men being forced into vehicles by recruiters or beaten to death. This past summer, József Sebestyén, a Hungarian from Transcarpathia, died during his forced conscription. The Ukrainian authorities tried by all means to cover up his case. In the video, recorded in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, a crowd of civilians surrounds a police car in which a man has been placed. In the recording, people can be heard protesting, standing in front of the car, and preventing the vehicle from leaving the scene. Ukrainians are fed up with war and even more fed up with having to see their loved ones die for it. They are now openly speaking out against family members, friends, and neighbors being dragged away.

[ZeroHedge]

. . . one of Beckert’s more arresting contentions is that for most human beings, through most of history, the idea of working full-time, not for their own provisions but for cash, was utterly alien: the proletariat almost always had to be forced into being. Sometimes this involved slavery or indentured labour, but just as often it was accomplished by undermining the traditional basis for subsistence production. By enclosing, for example, common lands in Georgian England, or indeed through more recent restrictions on access to the plains of Ethiopia or the forests of Indonesia. 

[Prospect]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Aphorisms of Socialism: [IV and V] (1912)

From the September 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Aphorism III.

Being an explanation of the Declaration of Principles of the S.P.G.B.

Aphorism IV.

As in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex.

This Aphorism speaks of “the order of social evolution.” The phrase shall be the starting-point of our explanation.

Society has not always been divided into the same classes that it comprises to-day. The present class division, as was shown in dealing with our first aphorism, is based entirely on the private ownership of the means of life. On this is erected the class distinction, and from it flow the class characteristics. Only this private ownership by a section could, for instance, have developed a wage-slave class (not a class who occasionally work for wages, but a class who have no other means of living than by working for wages).

But previous to the present social system other social systems have existed, upon other bases, and with other classes ruling and ruled.

Under the feudal system, for example, the feudal nobility ruled, basing their power upon a certain qualified control of the land. Under the classic States based upon chattel-slavery, a class of slave-owners ruled.

But the constant feature of society ever since it has had the class formation — that is, ever since classes have existed — has been that the ruling classes have controlled the dominating factor in production.

Under chattel-slavery it was slaves, against whose labour the free men could not, partly from pride and partly from their liability to military service, compete. The feudal nobility of the middle ages had but partial control of the land, hence their dominance was never very complete. Indeed, in England the serfs managed to throw off the shackles of serfdom and gain a position which, though still subservient, was similar to that of the free Roman citizen of the poorer class, but without the incubus of slave labour to drag them down to ruin.

But against this persistent feature of class society is the constant characteristic of the democratic societies which preceded them — the means of living belonged to no one : they were open to all.

This gives us the key to the aphorism. Without private property, without privilege in the means of living, there can be no class distinction or class domination.

The emancipation of the working class, therefore, since it can only be accomplished by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, leaves nothing to form the basis of domination. Thus it follows that the emancipation of the working class must end class domination, and must involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.

_______________________

Aphorism V.

This emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.

Before the present social system came into existence the feudal nobility were the ruling class. But it was characteristic of the feudal system (as of any system that was capable of any other ending than ruin and chaos), that they could not prevent the rise to power of a new class. The source of this was largely in the towns, where surplus products of a “non-perishable” nature were produced, which fell into the hands of a class who made commerce their business.

The sources of the merchants’ wealth were capable of much greater extension than those of the nobles, partly because the products of the country districts, being more perishable than town products, did not lend themselves so readily to international commerce, and partly because the serf, having rights in the land, was chiefly producing articles for his own consumption, and only working for a strictly limited time for his feudal superior, while the handicraftsman of the town was already producing “commodities” — goods produced for sale.

It was quite in the nature of things that with the increasing productivity of labour the capitalist side of production — the production of commodities by wage-labour — should tend to increase rapidly, and certain geographical discoveries (the way to the East round the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of America) gave tremendous impetus to this side of industrial development. The laws and restrictions placed upon commerce and production — partly feudal, partly customary to the different trades — pressed heavily upon the rising class, and so it was natural that, as their wealth and power increased, they should direct their attention toward gaining social supremacy.

As the new class rose the serfs gradually rose from servitude also, and long before the merchant forerunners of the modern capitalist class had achieved ruling power, serfdom had ceased to exist in this country. The serfs had shaken themselves free of most of their feudal shackles and stood now as independent peasant-proprietors.

But the rising capitalist class could only elevate themselves on the backs of the class of free peasants. It was from their ranks, chiefly, that these new masters looked to recruit that abundance of cheap labourers they desired for their factories. Already the break-up of the bands of retainers of the feudal nobility had supplied great numbers, and the dissolution of the monasteries had set free a great many more, but still the factories cried for more workers, and only the class of peasant-proprietors could supply the needed increase.

Events, however, proved favourable to the needs of the capitalists. An enormous demand for wool had sprung up, and in consequence the land began to wear a different aspect in the eyes of the landed aristocracy. It presented a means of keeping sheep, and hence of acquiring great wealth. Unfortunately, the peasant proprietors were in the way. The small agriculturists, whom the capitalists so badly wanted in the new manufactories and whose fields the aristocrats coveted, were clearly altogether out of place upon the land. That was a matter which the capitalist class and their landed opponents could agree upon, for all their class antagonism.

So the two combined to drive the peasants from the soil. At first they were dispossessed of their fields without any legal form, but later the classes interested passed, under various pretexts, legislation which made the expropriation of the peasants more swift. They were hunted out by troops, their dwellings were burnt to the ground, and their lands were appropriated by the great landlords and laid down in pasture for sheep.

The legislation passed against the dispossessed peasants makes terrible reading. They were expropriated at a rate far too rapid even for the rapidly growing capitalist industry to absorb them, hence their presence on the earth was inconvenient and unwelcome. Laws were passed, therefore, aiming at wiping out the surplus. Under Henry VIII (see Karl Marx’s “Capital.” Chap. XXVIII) sturdy vagabonds were to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood ran in streams from their bodies. For the second offence of vagabondage the whipping was to be repeated and half the ear sliced off. For the third relapse the offender was to be executed as a hardened criminal. Under Edward VI it was ordained that if anyone refused to work he was to be condemned in slavery to the person who denounced him as an idler. If he was absent for a fortnight he was to be branded on the forehead or back with a letter S and became a slave for life. If he ran away three times he was to be executed as a felon. Under Elizabeth similar’ laws were made. For the first offence a whipping and branding, unless someone would take him into service for two years; for the second offence execution unless someone would take him into service for two years; for the third offence execution without mercy. In the reign of James I the expropriated peasantry were subjected to like enactments.

Hollingshed says that 7,200 were executed in the reign of Henry VIII, while Strype records that in Elizabeth’s time “rogues [those, for the most part, who had been robbed of their land] were trussed up apace, and that there was not one year commonly wherein three or four hundred were not devoured and eaten up by the gallowes.” The same individual states that in Somersetshire alone in one year forty persons were executed.

These laws, and many others which cannot be mentioned here, remained in force even as late as the beginning of the 18th century, while in France, for three-quarters of a century later, laws as severe were active against the workers.

Other periods of history show the same bloody repression of subject classes by ruling classes, even from the dawn of written history. And the savage repression and avenging of the Paris Commune of 1871, together with numerous examples at Barcelona, Moscow, and elsewhere on the Continent, at Pittsburg and Lawrence in America, and at Featherstone and Tonypandy in England, of recent years, show that the same factor which we see running through all written history still persists. That factor is the life and death struggle between the classes.

This teaches us that with classes, however it may be in exceptional individual cases, economic interests govern actions. Convinced of this, and holding to it as a guiding principle, and knowing moreover that the interests of the master class is diametrically opposed to those of the working class, we assert that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.

This, of course, does not preclude the possibility of some few members of the master class rising superior to their environment and their class interests, and rendering good service to the workers’ cause. Capitalists, like workers, are human, which is why, as a class, they are actuated by their class interests. But for the same reason individual capitalists may be moved by any other human emotions, even to the extent of taking up the battle of the oppressed class.

The difficulties in the way of their doing so, however, are stupendous. Their outlook upon life is entirely different from that of the workers. No other system of society ever lent itself more to illusion than the present one, No other system ever so effectually concealed the chains of bondsmen and so artfully surrounded slaves with the atmosphere of freedom. The position of the chattel-slave was always very clear, indeed it appeared that he got nothing for his labour. Yet he, at all events, never starved, and was robbed of a comparatively small proportion of his product. The modern wage-slave, on the other hand, appears to be free; nobody owns him and he even has his foot on the social ladder – he may own property; perhaps he does own a bit, or has some money in the teapot. He actually has a vote. It seems that he is robbed of nothing, that he is paid for all he produces. Even the forces of the State seem to be necessary to hold markets abroad for the disposal of his products and of his the rich cargo of teapot at home.

All this presents difficulty enough even in the case of the worker, assisted as he is by his class interest in seeing through the sham. But it is an almost insurmountable barrier to those born and bred in the atmosphere of capitalist circles, so much so that the few who do get some glimmering of the position are in most cases shut off from true democracy by class arrogance and class prejudice. They are generally the superior ones, and must lead.

It is just here that our clause applies with greatest force. Without shutting the door against any who subscribe to our principles and act in accord with them, it is upon the working class that the working class must rely for their emancipation. Valuable work may be done by individuals, and this work may necessarily raise them to prominence, but it is not to individuals, either of the working class or of the capitalist class, that the toilers must look. The movement for freedom must be a working class movement. It must be founded upon the understanding of their class position by the working class. It must depend upon the working class vitality and intelligence and strength. Until the knowledge and experience of the working class are equal to the task of revolution there can be no emancipation for them. Hence they must control all individuals in their camp, no matter which class they may belong to, and they must be guided in the conflict by the principle of the class struggle, which is based on the irrefutable fact that all written history is a history of class struggles, and the knowledge that the emancipation of the working class can only be the fruits of a class struggle, and therefore must be the work of the working class itself.

A. E. Jacomb

Puzzle corner (1950)

A Short Story from the June 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our problem this month is adapted from a chapter in Edward Bellamy’s book, “Equality,” entitled, “The parable of the Water Tank.” Through a certain land there flowed a clear and pleasant stream and to this stream the people came to draw their water as and when they desired. There came amongst these people those who suggested that this state of affairs was far from good. They hinted that one day the stream might dry up and, as a precaution against this possibility, they proposed the building of a water tank to hold a reserve supply. This was agreed to by the people and the proposers took charge of the operations and also control of the tank. They arranged, and enforced, a plan whereby the people should draw water from the stream in buckets and pour it into the tank. For this they were to receive one half-penny per bucket. When the people required water they would not go to the stream but to the tank where they would be supplied at the price of one penny per bucket. Those who owned and controlled the tank would be exempt from the need to assist with the filling operations but would have access to the water in store. This arrangement went on until the tank became full, when the owners cried "Halt.” The next day the people came for water with their buckets but the owners asked first for the price of one penny. The people pointed out that as they were not now allowed to put water into the tank because it was full they earned no half-pennies and, in consequence, they had no pennies to pay. But the owners sneered and turned them away without water. To protect the tank and its contents from the thirsty people, the owners engaged men to act as policemen and soldiers, they engaged economists and soothsayers to explain to the people and to pacify them, they engaged clerks and officials to measure the water and keep accounts, they engaged servants and slaves to help them to enjoy the privilege and luxury that their position entailed. They bathed in the water, they drank it, they wasted it, until the level fell. Then they cried out to the people to come with their buckets to the stream to get more water to refill the tank. So the process started over again. ½d. a bucket put in and 1d. a bucket taken out. Soon the tank was again full and the people were once more turned away thirsty because they were not allowed to earn the pennies per two buckets that would entitle them to draw one bucket out. This is the state of affairs now. The stream still flows through the land, the tank is rapidly filling again, and hundreds of people are talking, questioning and seeking a solution to the problem of a land with plenty of water and plenty of thirsty people. There is a solution, a very simple solution. We do not intend to give it here. We think the workers are wide awake enough to see it. At least, those who read the Socialist Standard should be.

W. Waters

The Purpose and Method of Colonisation [6] (1914)

From the November 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last issue.)

“There are some 830 millions of the neo-Caucasian race of the world, who are either uncultured or backward or retrograd in their mode of life, who stand at present entirely aloof from our civilization, who in the eyes of most white men are helots, without rights to be maintained or feelings to be considered. At the present time these 830 millions of black, brown, and yellow men are unable to wage war on the white man on anything like equal terms. To his aggressive advance they can only oppose a passive resistance ; often they are quite without defence against his conscious or unconscious cruelty. Out of this total of 830 millions of backward peoples at least 365 millions dwell within the limits of the British Empire or its sphere of political influence. If we are going to—I will not say exterminate, for that is now impossible—make the lives of 365 millions of black, brown and yellow human beings miserable and serf-like, so that by degrees they dwindle and die out, are we so sure that we can plant in their places an European population which will prove as suitable to climate and surroundings ? . . . It is very doubtful whether the white man can exist there in large numbers . . . and whether he can suffice for the agriculture and the mass of the work of development. . . . We must, therefore, protect, educate, uplift and encourage the aboriginal population.”

Thus spake Sir Harry Johnston at the Annual Meeting of the Anti Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society on April 23rd, 1914.

Although Sir Harry accuses “most white men” of looking upon coloured mankind as “helots” whose rights and feelings need not be considered, it is pretty evident that for all practical purposes only “our pioneers of colonisation” can be meant— those who have been in the past and are now actually treating the coloured races in this manner ; those who have been and still are waging war upon them to which they cannot reply upon “any thing like equal terms” ; those who, “consciously or unconsciously,” perpetrate cruelties against them.

The phrase “most white men” can only refer to shareholders who do not despise dividends made by torturing innocent human beings in a manner the world had never known before—to a ruling class which has filched the lands of nearly half the coloured peoples, and under whose sway slavery is increasing and millions have already been forced into reserves and compounds. But for an Imperialist to accuse his fellows of disregarding the natives’ rights and feelings is not only an extremely grotesque case of ye pot calling ye kettle black, but also betrays him for the ignoramus and humbug that he is. For none other would suggest that a civilisation based on the right of might, and into the range of which the “backward peoples” must be brought, by fire and sword, is compatible with maintaining the rights and considering the feelings of the weaker.

How, indeed, would our Imperialists establish their civilisation in the colonies if the natives there were to retain their rights to their land ? What would become of capitalist enterprise, and where should the supply of labour come from, if the natives’ rights to the unrestricted use of all nature’s gifts as means of subsistence, were to remain unchallenged ? Is it possible that a policy of scrupulously respecting the feelings of the natives in the matter of industry, and mere theoretic teaching and encouragement, could solve the “labour problem” ? Would it not be a calamity striking at the very roots of civilisation, and making all commerce and progress impossible, if the natives were at liberty to cease work when they had produced enough to “provide their ordinary and very primitive requirements of subsistence” ? Where would their Worships’ profit and dividend come in ?

In fact, as the recent commission upon native labour in East Africa pointed out, the main contention of the planters there is that there is an ample supply of labour in the Protectorate, and that the only difficulty in the way of making them emerge in sufficient numbers to work for the white man, is the comparative affluence, which they still enjoy. It was, therefore, and is still, constantly being urged, that the natives should be forced out of their already small reserves (in the South African Province of the Transvaal, for example, 1,000,000 natives have assigned to them 500,000 morgen of laud which they can call their own, while 31,000,000 morgen are in the possession of 300,000 whites!) or that taxation should be so increased as to force them to spend a larger portion of the year in labouring for the white settlers ; it is suggested that they should do their share of work for the Government; that they should be compelled to wear clothing in order that they should be forced to buy such things, etc, etc.

No, the "labour problem” in the Colonies can only be solved by further encroachment upon the rights and liberties of the native (aboriginal) populations, and the solution must carry with it the character of encroachment even if effected indirectly by the gradual economic development.

However much some Negrophile capitalist souls may pretend to regret the violation of the coloured people’s rights and feelings and however much they may claim to be anxious to see the same glorious triumph which civilisation has resulted in at home, where all “rights” are perfectly safe and all feelings scrupulously considered, it is evident that the natives’ salvation is unavoidably bound up with hardship and suffering in the beginning.

All who recognise the great gulf that separates the primitive coloured man from the highly advanced whites must see that the former, in the very interests of his uplifting, cannot be trusted to the same extent, and left to enjoy the same privileges, as the “high standing” modern working class. Just as their right to their land cannot possibly he maintained, so their well-known and deeply deplored “right to be lazy” must be infringed!

If the civilised worker, as the result sod reward of centuries of “education and advancement,” has acquired the privilege in question, and can be relied upon not to abuse it, it is inconceivable that the granting of a similar right in these Colonies could in any way make civilisation a reality amongst the uncultured and retrograde peoples. Could anyone seriously entertain the idea that without infringing their “right to be lazy,” these simple minded people would develop anything approaching the prodigious industriousness of the modern working-class ? Does not the very existence of the “labour problem” in many Colonies show that “education” and “uplifting” have not hitherto so far advanced things as to bring about this highly desirable result ?

The members of the modern working class, so far from abusing their privileges, jealously dispute with each other, not only locally, but nationally, for what are vulgarly called “the jobs on hand,” and from their repeated applications for the “right to work,” it cannot be doubted that they are looking forward to a time of still greater activity. Is not the claim of the whole working class “more work” ?

Just at present the prodigious industry, coupled with the most rigorous abstinence, of the European working class, has once again literally overwhelmed their masters, and in their endeavours to find new outlets and “work for all,” a deadly conflict for the right to do the work of the world in future has arisen. It is, indeed, at such stagnant periods that the complete triumph of civilisation is moat glaringly demonstrated, because rather than relax their pace of toil, or partake more liberally of the fruits of their labour, they submit to a wholesale destruction, not only of an enormous mass of stored-up wealth, but even of productive human forces.

But while the modern working class, in all these things, as a result of their “culture” and age-long “education,” see eye to eye with their masters; while they again and again justify the masters’ implicit trust, and in spite of all temptations, do not deviate from the path of virtue, and from serving the Lord God Capital, it cannot reasonably be suggested that the ideas of “uncultured backward” people would coincide with the conceptions of a modern master. After all, a high civilisation such as “ours” presupposes an all embracing “system of education,” and last but not least, of religion, such as Christianity. Whereas the modern workers, in obedience to their lords’ and masters’ command, “set themselves at variance against one another” rather than relax their ever increasing productivity or consume more than one eighth to one third of the fruits of their labour, thus periodically leading their masters to the embarrassing problem of how to dispose of the surplus; whereas, in short, the majority of the working class fully come up to the expectations of their masters, it would be most unreasonable to trust savages with the same privileges as are enjoyed at home.

These “helots,” after having for centuries laboured under the wicked conception that the sole purpose of all natural resources was to serve as means of subsistence, and who were consequently accustomed to consume the whole of the fruits of their labour (think of the horror!) —these sinful people, who never dreamt that mother earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, can hardly be rid of their impossible notions, and converted into useful and “profitable” units, by the persuasive efforts of the Lord's chosen servants alone —indeed, corporal punishment has been found a far more efficient means of curing obstinate reluctance to acknowledge the supreme authority and laws of God—Capital.

If one thing emerges more strikingly than another from the history of the efforts by which the capitalistically backward countries have been and are being brought into the range of modern civilisation, it is the fact that the fundamental condition of such enterprises is the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land and and their conversion into wage workers. The much-vaunted “education of the savage races” is really only a high-sounding phrase used by some to hide this awkward fact of expropriation. We only need again refer to the obstinate resistance which the “aggressive advance” (the term is in itself significant) of “civilisation” meets everywhere on the part of the aboriginal populations, and to the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient supply of workers, to illustrate this fact. Deprivation of free access to the means of subsistence is, in fact, the only way to convert free men into wage slaves; and the existence of each a “labour problem” merely proves, as has been pointed out, that the separation of the natives from their own conditions of labour and their root, the soil, is not yet successfully effected, in other words, that the impoverishment of the people is not yet complete. In the eyes of our Imperialists, such countries are, of course, in a very backward and uncivilised state, and “education and culture” must be improved therein. No one in his senses would ever associate a “high civilisation,” such as we find at home, with a similar “labour problem”; quite the contrary, complete (capitalist) civilisation is unthinkable without a permanent reserve army clamouring for “the right to work ”

The lesson is obvious and should not be lost upon the modern working class, who labour under the delusion that they still have “a stake in the country.” It is that “civilisation” presupposes the completed expropriation of the mass of the people from the land and the means of wealth production.

But it is by no means necessary to go to the Colonies to discover the basis of “our civilisation.” Does not the fact stare one constantly in the face that the people have been deprived of their heritage ? What other explanation is there for the “terrible social difficulties” and stupid anomalies surrounding us ? What other cause is there of this awful and degrading poverty in the midst of plenty ? What else could turn every technical progress into a calamity ? What other factor could turn every labour saving device into a means of increasing the unemployment and poverty of the many ? Is it, or is it not, the fact that the few (the capitalist class) have confiscated the land and the instruments of wealth production, and that they allow these things to be used only when it suits their interests — their pockets ?

Never was there, consequently, a more bare faced, hypocritical cry than the present appeal to the workers to take up arms in defence of “ their country.” Why, Lloyd George himself told an audience in Bedford last year that “most of the land of Britain is in the hands of very few persons.” He went on : “I should say it is in the hands of something like half of the population of Bedford.” He pointed out, speaking of the agricultural workmen (and his remarks obviously apply equally to all other workers) that “he no longer had a stake in the country, . . . and that he had been converted from a contented. well fed, independent peasant to a hopeless, underpaid landless drudge on the soil, whose wages are less to-day than they were, in proportion to their purchasing capacity, in the reign of Henry VII ! Where has the land gone?" the speaker asked. “Stolen! Landlord Parliaments have annexed Naboth's vineyard.”

Thus we see that the policy of colonisation that is being carried out before our eyes and has been described in these columns—the robbery of the land from the native and the destruction of his own means of living—is nothing more or less than the policy which has successfully reduced is —“the heirs of civilisation”— to a class of wage-slaves labouring our whole lives in poverty in order that others may enjoy lives of riotous luxury.

Even a Liberal minister, when it suits his party purpose, can tell us truths about our present position, but dare not admit the obvious universality of this practice wherein the whole of labouring mankind is being more and more completely reduced to a condition of abject economic slavery; but the workers cannot forever remain duped. They will realize the fact that the fate of their black brothers is their own fate, that the causes which have reduced them to slavery are reducing their black brothers to slavery.

The white labourer, like the black, is forced to toil for capitalist profit by force or fraud, and it is more than ever clearly true that the working class of all countries are the wage-slaves of a mass that makes its country synonymous solely with its profit. This all-important fact the workers must end by seeing clearly, and then they will stand surely together as one man on the freedom of humanity, by the overthrow of this world-wide capitalist class. This must be so, for economic development fights for us and, to use again the well-worn but fundamentally true words of Marx, the workers have nothing to lose but their chains, while they have a world to win.

Rudolf Frank

(Concluded.)

Blogger's Note:

By the time the last in the series of these articles had been published in the Socialist Standard in November 1914, Britain and her allies had already been at war with Germany for three months, and in 1915 Rudolf Frank, originally from Bohemia, was to be interned as an 'Enemy Alien' at Alexandra Palace. 

I don't have exact dates for when he was imprisoned but Frank wrote in the December 1964 Socialist Standard article, 'Reminiscences of an old member', that:

When the 1914-1918 war broke out I was put in an internment camp. The long confinement at least offered opportunities for further enlightenment and discussion on politics. Lectures and meetings were held and prisoners were also free to debate subjects in all kinds of private circles, language classes, etc. Soon groups particularly interested in Socialism were regularly gathering around our platform. The discussion became particularly lively when Comrade Neumann, also an active member of the S.P.G.B. (translator of Kautzky's Erfurter programme) later joined the army of internees. Apart from lectures, a very successful May Day meeting was held with Neumann as the principal speaker. Among the many adherents to the Socialist case were Mundl, Guilke, Bankofsky, who all joined the S.P.G.B. after their release . . . 

On his release from prison in 1919, Frank was deported from Britain and was never able to regain re-entry despite many attempts. "Comrade Neumann" was also expelled from Britain at the end of the war and, according to Robert Barltrop in his book 'The Monument', was rumoured to have died in the Spartacist Uprising. Frank eventually settled in Austria, still a socialist, still spreading the word, and played his own part in the eventual formation of the Bund Demokratischer Sozialisten.

The following links give more background on Rudolf Frank:

• Nov 1964: Reminiscences of an old member
• Dec 1964: Reminiscences of an old member (part 2) 
• Mar 1971: Obituary: Rudolf Frank

The Purpose and Method of Colonisation [5] (1914)

From the October 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last issue.)

Whether the “Study of British Methods,” in which certain European capitalist politicians seem to indulge, is also responsible for the incident which initiated the ghastly human slaughter now in progress, and which incident it greatly benefits the master class of this country to use for the purpose of hiding their own mercenary objects, it is not in our province to investigate. Anyhow, in reviewing the history of the component parts of the British Empire, no one will be at a loss to find precedents enough and to spare for any violation or outrage, however infamous and however revolting, that may have been committed in Belgium. The “glory and greatness of the Empire” is in fact made up of a long series of piratical conquests in which the sole right of Might has been everywhere proclaimed from the housetops, and in which the freedom and independence of millions of people have often been respected less than “scraps of paper.”

How the “indisputable right” over some of the millions of square miles in Africa, for example, has been secured, is in living memory; although it must not be supposed that the sordid history which centres round the gold and diamond fields exhausts the resources in the art of brigandage and massacre that the British “haute finance” is capable of commanding. In such books as “With Kitchener to Khartoum,” “The Unveiling of Lhasa,” etc., etc., typical instances are abounding of how the British “protectors” impose themselves and their “culture” upon small and relatively weak nations. Says the author of the last mentioned account of a Tibetan expedition, speaking of the “strange people we fought and conquered” : “We killed several thousand of the simple, brave, and ill-armed men; I was sorry for these Tibetans. Their struggle was so hopeless; . . . Here was all the brutality of war, and none of the glory and incentive. These men were cheerful, jolly fellows—and I have seen their crops ruined, their homes burnt and shelled, the dead lying about the thresholds of what were their homes, and all for no fault of their own—only because their leaders were politically impossible.” But what matter the lives of these people, if the “freedom of trade,” or trade-routes, in short, the freedom of Capital, is at stake ? As the writer adds with regard to these leaders: “Fortunately, however, this slaughter was beginning to put the fear of God into them.”

In the face of our present daily records of what “white against white,” Christians against Christians, can do, it will easily be granted that the deeds by which resistance to British expansion by the “so much inferior coloured heathen races,” has been crushed, not only equal any tale of brutality that is to-day laid to the charge of “the enemy” with regard to Belgium, but certainly outdo the latter in cowardice when we bear in mind that the unfortunate registers of “the invincible forces of civilisation” and Christianity did not dispose of anything like the modern efficient instruments of murder.

And if those who have laid thieves’ hands on so great a part of the world’s surface and have thereby flouted the independence of millions of people in the past; if these who are responsible for such barbarities as will ever be connected with the establishment of British dominance whether in Africa, Asia, Australia, or elsewhere if those who have never tolerated any interference with the “rights of free trade” (i.e.,, free robbery) and have carried out more “punitive expeditions” and burnt more villages of innocent peoples than the rest of the coloniz­ing nations put together ; if those who could stand by, incapable of shame, when recently hundreds of unarmed men and women were done to death or wounded in the blood-stained streets of Johannesburg ; if those who range themselves now on the side of these human fiends and very embodiment of oppression and tyranny, whose crimes vary between “Bloody Sunday” and exiling of innocent men and women to the icy dungeons of Siberia : if those now accuse their Continental rivals of savagery and violating the independence of small nations, while at the same time posing as the “trustees of freedom and good conduct,” even we—knowing their achievements in hypocrisy—feel bound to admire their insolent audacity in treating the public to this masterpiece of nauseating cant.

Of course, just as the vandalism and beastly deeds, committed by order of the German military authorities, figure in the official chronicles and school-books of the Teutons as heroic achievements, so the merciless usurpations, rapes and massacres which have marked the acquisition of “our” colonial dependencies are gloried in and impressed upon the children of the Empire as examples of British manhood, pluck, and enterprise.

Although to some extent outside the present subject, the foregoing will nevertheless serve to emphasise again the fact that the acquisition of the Colonial Empire is distinguished by the application of the most brutal, up-to-date methods that the machinery of militarism, and law and order is capable of bringing into play. But let us now revert to the subsequent economic policy of our colonial pioneers of “education and native advancement,” and see what the cultural trust imposed upon the “more advanced peoples” comes to.

Authority having once gained a footing, that is to say, the Right of Might having been brought home to the “uncultured heathen,” every subsequent activity of the Colonists is subservient to the process of converting all things capable of satisfying human wants and desires into what Providence intended them to be, namely, Commodities, so that they might at last take their proper places, as holy values and sacred property, in the temple of Mammon. The extent of the success of this process is the measure of the “prosperity” and “loyalty” of the Dominions. It goes without saying, that since all things have to become marketable values, this process involves the expropriation of the natives from all nature’s gifts—which brings the first virtue : Abstinence. And it is equally plain that only when the native’s life is hedged with notices such as:

“No admittance except on business”

“Trespassers will be prosecuted,”

will they lend themselves, or rather be forced, in order to live, to sell and apply their energies in the service of Capital— which brings a further virtue: Industry. This is so self evident that we could only describe as child-like naiveté or gross stupidity, Lord Curzon’s remark that “he greatly deplored, and had tried his utmost to discourage, the settling of Europeans in an in­digenous country with the object of extracting from it the essence which should serve to the natives as means of subsistence.” But where would abstinence come in ? And what, one may ask, are the Colonists to deal in and export if not the produce they have stolen from the natives ?

When, for example, the Chartered Company, who hold immense concessions in Africa, lease (as they have done last year) 1,000,000 acres of land (selected areas to be chosen throughout Rhodesia) at the rental of 1s. an acre, to an enterprising international firm, it is obvious that the latter mean to extract and export the resources of the territory ; in other words, these resources no longer belong to their former owners, the aborigines of Rhodesia, who will shave to look to the new proprietors (their expropriators) for their means of subsistence, unless they are prepared to quit. Such transactions necessitate, consequently, the absolute disregard of the natives’ interests and customs, seeing that if their most vital custom of all were to be observed, namely, the communal ownership (as distinct from private ownership, as in Europe) of all the land, the very object of any capitalist enterprise and colonisation would naturally become illusory. Which is surely more than a Colonial enthusiast, like Lord Curzon, could wish for. Indeed, this deprived of the native of his primitive means of living and own conditions of labour, is the very basis of all colonization; it is only hypocrites of the type of Curzon or His Excellency Dernburg, who pretend to be ignorant of the fact that in first completely disinheriting the mass of the natives, or, in Dernburg’s own terminology, in first “fulfilling the cultural trust” is the key to the “great question of how the white man is to retain his hold and domination over mankind of darker colour.”

Unfortunately, the proclamation of “Protectorates” here, and the annexation of large territories there, in short, the theoretic monopoly of the land and the granting of concessions to trading firms, on the one side, does not always automatically transform the native population into full-blown, wage-workers on the other. However desirable it may be to extract the maximum of surplus-value from this “economically most valuable motive-power,” the vastness of the territories and relatively thin population (the Colonies comprising, as a rule, disproportionately larger areas than the respective mother countries), also the widely different climatic conditions—these two main factors render difficult and protract the establishment of an effective, all-embracing control over, and exploitation of, the natives. Hence, the necessity for the professional labour-recruiting agencies ; the application of direct force (slavery); the importation of foreign labour: all of which methods have been shown to be practised on a large scale at the present time, as a temporary, if unsatisfactory, solution for the annoying “labour problem.”

In the meantime, the mills of economic development are grinding ; no sections of natives, hitherto secluded, are to be deprived of the blessings of civilisation and the comforting security it affords. Railways and extensions of railways are constantly opening up new districts and announce to previously obscure tribes the arrival of—the tax-collector; an indispensable means of bringing the native idlers to their senses and to their toil. “If one considers,” says deploringly a correspondent in an East African organ, “that there are about 3½ million of people living in the district of Ruanda and Urundi, who, in consequence of the seclusion of their exceedingly rich homelands, still enjoy, at this time of day, complete freedom from tax-paying, the necessity for opening up, through a railway, will at once become obvious.” And the “Usambara Post” (27.9.13) stated in support of a railway from Tabora to the Kagaraknie, that “such a railway would open up extraordinarily valuable districts, and that the introduction of the poll-tax there would alone make the railway pay its way.”

“No doubt it will cost thousands, but it will bring in millions”—such is their assurance. Railways in particular are powerful levers of “native advancement”—hence the great activity in this direction. They not only open up, and enable the easy transport of the produce, but of the “human material” as well. The Ovambo and Amboland railways in South-West Africa, for example, were built for the specific purpose of “serving the regular and increased supply of workers for the diamond mines.” And during a discussion (4.6.13) of the Government Council in East Africa the following was pointed out: “The idea of a continuation of the North railway up to the Lake Victoria did not originate so much from the endeavour to open up the mystic country of the Squatters and to enter into competition with the Unganda railway, but rather was the plan involved by the desire to confiscate the masses of workers living in the districts of the Lake Victoria.” This does not, of course, prevent our colonisers from pretending at the same time that the railways are built in the sole interest of the travelling workers. Indeed, what would a Christian employer not do for the welfare and amenity of the native ? ” Every friend of theirs,” he says, “must advocate the building of railways, seeing that the worker is exposed to many dangers and risks while en route for weeks and months” to the elevating occupation in the death pits of the diamond mines ! In the face of the comparative scarcity of workers it would, of course, be deplorable that these arms and “hands” should meet with accidents before having been drained of the “milliard values slumbering in them.”

And so, in accordance with the law of development of capitalist production, every activity that the enterprising European traders command in the Colonies, tends to separate the means of production more and more from the native and to concentrate the scattered means more and more under a few controlling concerns, thereby gradually closing to the natives all avenues outside of, and disciplining them for,—the wage-labour market. The exacting of hut-taxes, poll taxes, grazing-dues, etc.; permits for hunting and fishing ; the enclosure of large tracks of land either for cultivation or cattle-breeding ; the construction of railways and other means of transport and communication, water and irrigation works—these are only a few of the things which supply the precious “indirect pressure” and restrict more and more the liberties of the natives, until eventually they will find no other way to live than by selling their labour-power to their foreign masters. The “labour problem” will then be solved.

Naturally enough, this transition, far from being regarded by the natives as a normal economic development, or from benefiting him, is mostly looked upon as an act of aggression, of conquest—an arbitrary charge wrung from him in bitterness, and leaves behind a deep sense of injury. This resentment has undoubtedly been the cause of most colonial wars and rebellions since the first presence of the white man there, but the fact that the “superior” whites (superior, undoubtedly, in weapons) ever emerge victorious from the fray, again proves that Might is Right.

Rudolf Frank

(To be Continued.)

The Purpose and Method of Colonisation. [2] (1914)

From the July 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last issue.)

Every analysis of, and enquiry into, the conditions of the overwhelming majority of the peoples of Christian civilised countries will and must reveal the fact that, so far is this civilisation from giving or promoting genuine joy in life, there is a very real justification for the common reference to this existence as “the burden of life,” if not for the necessity of having “to bear the cross” in silent resignation. Surely, then, it is anything but desirable or justifiable to inflict such “burdens” upon other peoples who live in happier circumstances—free to enjoy the natural bounties surrounding them, and above all, the fruits of their labour.

The records of many individual missionaries, explorers, travellers, etc., besides being almost invariably full of praise for the physical beauty and soundness of the greater number of more or less primitive peoples, and paying high tributes to their skill, moral qualities, etc., such records with equal frequency depict the free and happy existence of the “uncivilised” as compared with the sordid “struggle (!) for life” of civilised man. In a recent number of the “Samoanische Zeitung” for instance, the following appeared:

“In this sunny climate with glorious scenery around us, we forget the squalid, sordid atmosphere which envelops all great European cities, and the fierce, stone age struggle for a bare living in which hundreds of thousands of men and women there are piteously involved. When we compare the happy condition of the Samoans and other Central Polynesian natives with that of the abject poor in England, America, and Russia, we feel sorry for the latter. . . . Let us not, then, over educate the native, and especially let us not instil into his mind the belief that cash is the main chance. For many of us it is, but not for him.”

And from an East African paper I extract the following, written by an experienced traveller:

" . . . On broad well-kept roads . . . the villages and huts of the Washambaa people and other native tribes can be reached ; there one can observe them tilling their fields, feeding their children, collecting the milk from their herds, and one cannot help a feeling of envy at the leisure which they can enjoy in these proceedings. They live simply, and without a care in the world—not tilling much more than is required—most of the food practically grows into their mouths, but they are almost too ‘lazy’ to grasp for it. Black children with dark clear eyes and well-fed little “tummies” are hurrying through rich banana-groves and break down the fruit ; if it is ripe they eat it, if not, it remains on the ground to rot.

“During my travels there I was often reminded of other parts of the world I had visited and I drew comparisons. Thus, many a landscape made me think of Italy ; there, for example, between Amalfi and Sorrento (Italy) with its disrupted mountains and high plunging brooks, an industrious people wrings treasures from the soil. On the mountainsides there are teeming vineyards, whose yield, however, the hungry, begging multitude of children, who imploringly stretch out their meagre fingers at the approach of the visitor, can never enjoy !”

Apart from the absence of anything that modern society, as at present constituted, could offer to other leas advanced races to guarantee the latters’ enhanced welfare and happiness—supposing for a moment that the bourgeoisie, of all human societies, were capable of such an altruistic feeling—there is the indisputable and glaring fact that the Bourgeoisie utterly reject any idea of association with, or relationship other than unconditional distinction, from the colored, and especially the more or less primitive black races—not to mention their abhorrence for such notions as “equality” or “brotherhood.” This fact, then, would also constitute a queer explanation for the Bour­geoisie’s keen interest in colonizing and their support of missionary effort. Not only the Colonial Press, but writers and politicians at home take every opportunity to lodge their pro-tendencies. “We will not have any equality or test against any what are called “negrophile fraternal relation with those African races !” vituperate those superior, if conceited, Sons of God. “Assimilation of our high-standing working class (c’est bon !) with the detestable, lazy rabble of Africa ?—Never!” they rave. One feels it necessary to remind the enquirer, that the coming of the vulgar “civilized” has no more been invited by the “detestable, lazy rabble” than the presence of the bourgeoisie is appreciated. What, then, one may ask, is the incentive—the purpose of the missionary effort ?

Now, although the disinterested apostles and propagandists of Christianity, and the rest of the vulgar satellites of the bourgeoisie, often let the cat out of the bag by themselves boasting of the commercial value (to their paymasters) of their missions, there are none the less the assertions of their more hypocritical, or shall we say ignorant, brethren affirming pompously that the object of their “missions to the heathen” is their great concern for the education, moral and intellectual uplifting, and general welfare of the natives of foreign “uncivilised” lands. Childish as this assertion may seem at this time of day, even to the non-Socialist, it is nevertheless the officially declared and avowed object of missionary organisations, besides being frequently used by those following on their heels.

It will, therefore, not be superfluous to have on record in the “Socialist Standard,” fresh evidence from Colonial mouthpieces of our Christian promoters of “civilisation,” that the sole object of the colonization and opening up of foreign “uncivilised” countries, is first of all the forcible appropriation of their natural riches (wealth), which the native, of course, never dreamed was by the Will of God ordained to serve a purpose far higher than that of being merely enjoyed as means of subsistence.

Further, and necessarily, the forcible subjection and exploitation of those peoples for the benefit of the cosmopolitan clique of capitalists and concession hunters, since for the purpose of success in the piratical enterprise of appropriation it is necessary to have the co-operation of the natives themselves. And it is here the “good offices” of missionary societies come in. They offer the cloak behind which to hide the brutalities connected with the conversion of the native from an owner of his land and independent conditions of existence into a propertyless wage-earner—the element which is as indispensable to Capital as is the stomach to the human being. All the talk of education, moral and intellectual uplifting, etc., simply resolves itself into an effort to imbue the native with the due respect for that mysterious quality of all things known by the “civilised” as Value and Price, and the inestimable virtues of industry and abstinence.

It is, besides, a matter of history how the various peoples, who to-day “enjoy” the company of “cultured civilised man,” have been and still are being “educated” and “guided.” The Putumayo horrors still haunt the memory and are in themselves sufficient to prove how far from the truth is the impudent assertion that the concern of the “pioneer of civilisation” is the welfare of the natives. Indeed, the blood of thousands of innocent men, women and children cries out aloud against such a lie as this.

A glance over the map of Africa, for example, which has in later years in particular received the attentions of the Gospel merchants and their “followers”—the concession hunters—will prove to the world in whose service the former are, and will provide for posterity a lasting example of Christian love and brotherhood.

The governments of Germany, England, France, Belgium, Italy, etc. have vied with each other in their disinterested desires to help on the work of “education” and “uplifting” pre­liminarily started under the auspices of their sky-pilots, while the factory hells of Krupp and Maxim and other murder-instrument makers have been kept busy supplying the wherewithal to furnish the recalcitrant with a dose of the eternal bliss promised by the missionary. Almost each designative name on the map recalls the cold-blooded slaughter of numberless innocent human beings in the most cowardly and fiendish manner, although the whole extent soldiers will, of course, never be told. One has of the horrors perpetrated by the Christian to be satisfied with what filters through, and can only gather from one’s knowledge of the all-pervading greed of that sinister and dehumanised 20th Century product, the modern capitalist class, what the innocent multitudes of the natives can expect once they come into the clutches of our masters.

Who of us, who are Socialists, can forget the Congo or the Tripolis atrocities, the wholesale slaughter in South Africa, the massacres in Egypt and in the Sudan, the butcheries in Algeria and Morocco, the systematic murders in German East and South-West Africa ? All of which have been perpetrated, and are still being perpetrated, in order to obtain access to, and confiscate the riches of the land, and by the same token force the natives into the labour market !

As a rule, after the chiefs of the staff in the human slaughterhouse have had their day and their “purse” for successfully establishing their masters’ authority abroad, the equally deadly, if less noisy and often more deceiving, weapon of legislation completes the work of brigandage and the consequent impoverishment of the subdued peoples. Thus, last year’s “Land Act” assigned to the 4 millions natives in the South African Union, 11,000,000 morgen land out of the total area of 142,000,000 morgen, the remaining 131,000,000 morgen being in the occupation of 1,250,000 whites. The provisions of the Act are, of course, such as to prevent the natives from acquiring land outside the scheduled areas, and to leave them no alternative but the wage-labour market—no escape from the dependancy on the “profiteer.”

It is obvious that so long as a man can find his means of subsistence freely provided by nature, e g., so long as he owns means allowing of the production of the things whereby he lives, he need not and will not sell himself to another man ; in other words, he is not fit material for capital. This fact alone is sufficient to indicate that expropriation of the native is an indispensable condition. And just as the history of the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe is marked by a series of revolutions and wars ending, as it did, in the complete dispossession of the great mass of the people of every vestige of independent property, so the natives of “uncivilised” Africa have to go through this metamorphosis as soon as they have the misfortune to come in contact with the modern bourgeoisie. Capital, the demon inseparable from the bourgeoisie, is as we know, not a thing—it is a social relationship and requires the existence of a huge class of men and women deprived of all possibility of producing their own means of subsistence. The crucial point in the Colonies is, therefore, to ensure the separation of the natives from their own conditions of labour and their root, the soil; and thus create there that “high-standing” artificial product of modern society, the proletariat, which is synonymous to saying—”the poor.”

Rudolf Frank

(To be Continued.)

The Levellers 1640-1649 (1961)

From the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The word “Leveller” was first heard in 1606 when a band of men roamed the Warwickshire countryside, uprooting or levelling fences and hedges enclosing the once-common lands. These detested barriers had been going up all over England for eighty years.

Enclosing the “waste-land” that from time immemorial had been common property brought increasing misery to the poor and greater .wealth to the rich. Large areas were turned into sheep walks to satisfy the growing demand abroad for superior English wool. In Thomas More’s Utopia we read, “ The sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters now as I heare say be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.” Fresh ideas on farming and improved methods of stock-breeding made squires land-greedy. Enclosing was the polite name for stealing; people were driven from their homes to give pasture to sheep. Their only hope of survival lay in the towns, where they were fleeced even more closely than their woolly competitors.

Inventions and the necessity for larger ships meant bigger outlay and brought a demand for more money in the form of capital. A rich, powerful merchant class came into being. The first bank—the Bank of England, 1694—came with it.

The land lost much of its aristocratic value; the traditional obligations to tenant and labourer tended to disappear. The old tyrant with titles was often superseded by a new tyrant with money. Farmworkers were tricked out of rights of tenure. Though freed from the old bondage they were enslaved in a new and often terrifying system.

Throughout these tremendous changes Charles I remained obstinately feudal in outlook. Something was bound to happen. By 1628 the House of Commons was three times richer than the House of Lords. This gave its members confidence to resist the king's demands for money. So in 1629 he closed Parliament for eleven years, hoping to show his recalcitrant M.Ps. that he alone held power. But in 1639 a rebellion broke out in Scotland, and by 1640 he had been forced to recall Parliament to vote the necessary money to quell the rising. Here was the opportunity the Members had dreamed of. They knew that archaic notions of kingship must give way to a governmental system favourable to the merchants.

As a warm-up for their startling policy they executed the king’s chief minister, the Earl of Strafford, who had been raising an army in Ireland to crush Parliament. At the same time John Lilburne, leader of a “left-wing” group—the Levellers—was released from prison, where he had resided two years for issuing anti-State Church pamphlets. Now free, he got an Army command.

With this widespread opposition came a taste for democratic expression. The popularity of Cromwell's rising faction gave the Levellers a chance to speak out. How and where did they fit into the political ferment?

Parliament was divided. On the right were the Anglican Royalists, conservative and pro-Charles. On the left were the Independents, radical but not united. They were divided into a right-wing called Gentlemen Independents headed by Cromwell, Ireton, and Fairfax, and a left-wing known as the Levellers. The latter reflected the aspirations of small farmers, humbler-tradtsmen, work people and soldiers. They advocated greater political equality than the Independents and had a widespread popular support. 

In addition to political demands the civilian arm of the movement (the Diggers) urged greater economic equality; and in recognising that all political organisations and freedoms spring from or are crushed by the particular mode of land-ownership, they earned for themselves the undying hatred of Cromwell.

At this stage the Levellers were welcomed by the Radicals. All through the struggle the Levellers did best in the army, perhaps because there they were better organised than the Diggers. Both issued a considerable mass of literature, the Levellers maintaining that economic freedom followed from political freedom, and the Diggers seeing it rather the other way.

Common-ownership of the land was the bed-rock of their philosophy. Stripped of its Biblical overtones it stated a view that is still a staggering novelty to millions today. “. . . the time will be when all men shall willingly come in and give up their lands and estates and submit to the community.” They added, “and of that for money there was no need of it” (if men led communal lives). In the letter to Lord Halifax, Winstanley asked, “I demand whether all wars, bloodshed and misery came not upon creation when one man endeavoured to be a lord over another.”

In an article in the Leveller paper, The Moderate in 1649, after some men were executed for cattle-stealing, a writer suggested private property was the cause of a great deal of crime committed by the poor, “ We find,” he wrote, “some of these felons to be very civil men, and say, that if. they could have had any reasonable subsistence by friends, or otherwise they should never have taken such necessitous courses for the support of their wives and families.” The paper was suppressed after September, 1649, by “democratic” Cromwell.

The Levellers just as clearly saw that religion with its mirage of a happy future life was the carrot that encouraged the poor donkey of a labourer to stagger on. Winstanley wrote, ". . . to know God beyond the creation or to know what he will do to a man after the man is dead, in any other wise than to scatter him into his essences of fire, water, earth and air of which he is compounded (a belief handed down by the ancient Greeks) is a knowledge beyond the line or capacity of man to attain to while he lives in his compounded body.” Richard Overton, too, wrote in Man's Mortality that the idea of the soul was ridiculous.

The New Model Army (Roundheads) was Parliament’s striking force, its job to overthrow the king. But because its ranks were filled with many pro-Leveller men the Levellers saw in it a means of getting better conditions for the poor. On May 20th, 1647, “a great petition” was sent to the Commons demanding political reforms and the re-organisation of the Constitution. When the re-imprisoned Lilburne (he was in and out of gaol between 1646-1648 for various attacks on authority) heard that the common hangman had been instructed to burn it, he looked to the army for support. He declared the power of the land vested in the army, and at this point Cromwell agreed. Next, a manifesto, The Case of the Army Truly Stated, was presented to General Fairfax on October 15th, 1647, and later An Agreement of the People, which dealt more with civil matters.

Fearing the support gained by the Levellers, the Presbyterians compromised with Charles. Enraged, the Independents with the Levellers marched to London, entered the House and passed a measure to thwart any attempt to corrupt the army; the Presbyterians were crushed. Though Cromwell had been aided by the Levellers, he refused to free Lilburne. When we see what the Levellers were after, we can understand why! The Case of the Army Truly Stated listed thirteen points:

1. New election for new parliament.
2. House of Commons to be cleared of royalist sympathisers.
3. Army’s supremacy to be made known officially.
4. Excise tax to be lifted from the poor, Better tax-laws.
5. Trials to be speeded up and improved conditions for prisoners.
6. Greater religious tolerance.
7. Abolition of tithes.
8. Oath of Supremacy to be abolished.
9. No oaths from those with conscience scruples.
10. Law reform to enable laymen to understand legal matters.
11. Removal of privileges. All to be subject to same laws.
12. Enclosed land to be returned to common use.
13. Pensions for disabled soldiers, widows and children.

The stir that these programmes made, forced Fairfax, Cromwell and the others Grandees (as they were somewhat derisively called) to allow their discussion in a series of debates held in Putney. Cromwell reasoned that if these fiery demands could be proved too extreme or impractical. Leveller influence would diminish and the threat to his supremacy would disappear. The main point was that the vote was the birthright of all men, and to this Ireton replied, “. . . voting was a property right. Only those who owned a house worth 40s a year in rent or who had a freehold interest in land should vote. The protection of private property was of the utmost importance, now that freedom had been won. Everyone was free to make money, and to own property, and the law was there to protect them while they did it.” Rainborough for the Levellers retorted that what was required in voting was reason not property. And Sexby added, “. . . as things are today unless a man has fixed property, he has no rights in England at all.”

Cromwell had the Case of the Army condemned in Parliament. Next, he set out to quell his army and persuade the least influenced to sign a pledge of loyalty at Corkbush Field, Ware, in Hertfordshire. There the Agreement of the People was presented to Fairfax. He accepted it, but told the men to go on signing and they did. But then up rode two dissenting regiments singing and wearing the Leveller colours. Immediately Cromwell drew his sword and rode angrily among them, tearing away their colours. His sudden action quietened them. The ringleaders were arrested; three were found guilty and one of these was shot.

It was a serious defeat for the Levellers. They tried resistance again, but were imprisoned and Lilburne remained in the Tower. At Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight, Charles in 1648 launched another attack (the Second Civil War). All the contesting elements of Parliament sank their differences again in preparation for the fray. The artful Presbyterians released Lilburne, hoping he would stir the army to mutiny. But he supported Cromwell, presumably regarding him as the lesser of two evils.

After the royalist defeat more discussion on the Agreement of the People followed and it actually reached Parliament, but lay in abeyance while the king’s fate was decided. On January 30th, 1649, Charles, king by the grace of God, died by the grace of the merchants.

M. Brown.

(to be concluded)

50 Years Ago: The Purpose and Method of Colonisation. (1964)

The 

50 Years Ago column from the November 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

If one thing emerges more strikingly than another from the history of the efforts by which the capitalistically backward countries have been and are being brought into the range of modern civilisation, it is the fact that the fundamental condition of such enterprises is the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land and their conversion into wage workers. The much-vaunted “education of the savage races” is really only a high-sounding phrase used by some to hide this awkward fact of expropriation. We only need again refer to the obstinate resistance which the “aggressive advance” (the term is in itself significant) of “civilisation” meets everywhere on the part of the aboriginal populations, and to the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient supply of workers, to illustrate this fact. Deprivation of free access to the means of subsistence is, in fact, the only way to convert free men into wage slaves.

The lesson is obvious and should not be lost upon the modern working class, who labour under the delusion that they still have “a stake in the country.” It is that “civilisation” pre-supposes the completed expropriation of the mass of the people from the land and the means of wealth production.

But it is by no means necessary to go to the Colonies to discover the basis of “our civilisation.” Does not the fact stare one constantly in the face that the people have been deprived of their heritage? What other explanation is there for the “terrible social difficulties” and stupid anomalies surrounding us? What other cause is there of this awful and degrading poverty in the midst of plenty? What else could turn every technical progress into a calamity? What other factor could turn every labour saving device into a means of increasing the unemployment and poverty of the many? Is it, or is it not, the fact that the few (the capitalist class) have confiscated the land and the instruments of wealth production, and that they allow these things to be used only when it suits their interests—their pockets?

Thus we see that the policy of colonisation that is being carried out before our eyes and has been described in these columns— the robbery of the land from the native and the destruction of his own means of living —is nothing more or less than the policy which has successfully reduced us—“the heirs of civilisation to a class of wage- slaves labouring our whole lives in poverty in order that others may enjoy lives of riotous luxury.

The white labourer, like the black, is forced to toil for capitalist profit by force or fraud, and it is more than ever clearly true that the working class of all countries are the wage-slaves of a class that makes its country synonymous solely with its profit. This all-important fact the workers must end by seeing clearly, and then they will stand surely together as one man on the freedom of humanity, by the overthrow of this worldwide capitalist class. This must be so, for economic development fights for us and, to use again the well-worn but fundamentally true words of Marx, the workers have nothing to lose but their chains, while they have a world to win.

From the Socialist Standard, November, 1914.

English Nursery Rhyme (2003)

From the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

They hang the man and flog the woman

That steal the goose from off the common,

But let the greater villain loose

That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone

When we take things we do not own,

But leaves the lords and ladies fine

Who take things that are yours and mine.

                                                 – circa 1764

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A fuller version of the poem can be viewed here.