I missed it. My bad.

I was so caught up in other stuff on the blog that I didn't realise that I reached 21,000 posts on the blog on Thursday. Step up Frank Dawe, it was your article, mate.

Boom and Bust (1947)

From the December 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The waste and destruction of the late total war has presented capitalism with a new burst of business, if only in replacing the bombed fixed capital and equipment made obsolete or worn out by six years of constant war production. With this leeway to make up, together with the general dearth of consumer goods, capital can look forward to a period of activity fulfilling the requirements of the “sellers’ market.” Only occasionally, amid the clamour of capitalists, “communists” and labour leaders, hounding on the workers to more production, is a voice heard warning that the sellers’ market will be of short duration. And what then? Will there be the usual slump?

The socialist answer is an affirmative, for whether production is carried on by private enterprise, or is planned through the medium of the state, the mechanism of capitalist production and distribution acts the same, no matter the ideology of those selected to control the pulling of its levers.

The memory of the world slump of the 1930’s is still green among the working-class, a slump which only ended with the preparation for World War 2; while significantly enough, a similar position existed before World War 1. In fact looking at the history of capitalism it will be seen to proceed with a movement of feverish activity followed by a crisis of stagnation. Why is this? What goes wrong with capitalism’s “works”?

At the risk of reiteration it must be repeated that the motive of capitalist production is a surplus of wealth which through the medium of money is distributed to the owners of both private and state capital; a surplus comprising the unpaid labour of the workers who having no stake in the “means of production” must perforce hire out their energies for a “cost of living” wage. The difference between this “cost” and the wealth turned out during the workers’ employment, figures in company shares, state bonds, etc. as rent, interest and profit. The “means of production” covers all those productive processes using plant, machinery, etc., with the factories which house it, as against the “means of consumption” consisting of food, clothing, luxuries, etc., consumed by the workers and capitalists, via wages on the one hand and “income” on the other.

If production and consumption are to balance it follows that the owners of the means of production should turn out no more equipment than that needed by the owners of the means of consumption. There should, for example, be the right total of ovens for bakeries or tractors for the land, while the amount of bread, etc., should not exceed the capacity of the consumers. But this presupposes a non expansive capitalism befitting its early days when domestic industry knew the limit of the local market and the means of production were puny and individually owned.

The development of the means of production ended this self-ownership and transferred the scene of production to the factories where men and women labour, not as owners but as wage-workers, and where handicraft is replaced by a division of labour suited to the pace and handling of power-driven machinery. A revolution from private production to social-production or commodity production by social effort.

Here lies capitalism’s dilemma. The productive capacity has long overflowed the local sphere and demands continuous and expanding markets, while competition for these markets creates an open race to minimise the amount of human labour in every commodity by automatic factory production and mechanical land cultivation. Capital, therefore, moves in the direction of spending more on labour-saving mechanisms than on workers’ labour-power, while the mechanism itself takes on the character of a Frankenstein which must be constantly fed with orders and “contracts.”

Take for instance a modern steel plant built to turn out girders, railway lines, etc., for the world market. From the iron to steel process, to the actual rolling, all its departments, must work at full capacity if the product, is to be economically produced, while this in turn requires the requisite amount of orders for rails, etc. To build a smaller works on the receipt of lesser orders requiring only half the capacity of the normal works would obviously he uneconomical. Repeat this example in other spheres of production and one sees the picture of capitalist production driven on to produce above the need of the market in the hope that stock will later be sold.

Eventually the ominous sign of glut appears in this drive for production and profits, by the banks shortening up on credit. “Cheap money” for borrowers comes to an end, and the stage where “stock is as good as money” changes to one where “money is the only real wealth.” To meet payments and obligations, every owner rushes to market with everything saleable for what it will fetch, for fear that market prices will reach a lower level. The crisis is on. The capitalist whales eat the capitalist small fry, now-gone bankrupt. Labour-power like every other commodity becomes a drag on the market where millions are idle because they have produced too much. In short, the forces of production are fettered and in conflict with the method of distribution.

All this may seem far away in these days of shortages, but heed the forecast of Sir Robert Johnson, chairman at the annual meeting of Cammell Lairds, shipbuilders. Criticised by a shareholder for the policy of consolidating reserves, he said : “We have to look after our money in shipbuilding because the slump comes as sure as night follows day. There are always seven years of plenty and seven years of famine in shipbuilding.” (Evening Standard, 4/4/47.)

Again, and this time from labour quarters: “America is heading for the biggest economic blizzard in history. There may be 20,000,000 unemployed and that blizzard will hit this country.” (Jake Woddis, Clerical and Administration Workers Union. News Review, 4/4/47.)

The “trade cycle” of slump and boom is inevitable for the reasons previously outlined and results from the wage system which denies the bulk ot the consumers the possibility of owning the total consumable wealth which they have produced. The capitalists stop production as soon as it ceases to be profitable and allow the piled up stock to rot or be destroyed. These they cannot give away to the needy even if they wished, for goods without price would mean the end of trade while furthermore a large part of the unsold stock is means of production, useless save as capital. Fared by such a problem periodically, national capitalism has struck out for the undeveloped areas of the world only to find that the export of means of production to these parts has resulted in their development as competitors.

There appears then only one desperate way out for world capitalism’s problem of overproduction, and that is to engulf the world in a periodic destructive war, arising from the national struggle for markets to absorb the surpluses thus giving capital elbow room, by furnishing the costly means of destruction followed by the breathing space given by the necessary reconstruction of the “peace.”

The only hope of ending this social madness and the drift to World War 3, is for the workers to advance beyond the support of capitalist planning controlled by “labour” or any other government, and to press forward to the goal of socialism where social production will be balanced by social ownership. With the means of life in their own hands they will cast off their servitude by ending the wage-system by which capital appropriates the fruits of their labour.

Frank Dawe

East Ham Parliamentary Campaign (1938)

Party News from the July 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

General Open Air Propaganda (1938)

Party News from the July 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1949)

Party News from the November 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

War and Humanity (1945)

From the August 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

After what is now cynically referred to as World War I, there sprang into existence a number of organisations whose propaganda could be summed up as “No More War.” One line of approach was to publish illustrated pamphlets showing in vivid photographic detail the effect of near explosions on the bodies of human victims, adding such captions as “This was a man.” They reasoned that the coming of another war could be prevented if they successfully appealed to the human sense of self-preservation. How mistaken they were in spite of their humanitarian motives, we who have passed through World War II know only too well. We became “hardened” to the daily scenes of destruction caused by air raids and V weapons, and knew from our own experiences what the great bomb loads were doing to the people of Germany. They, like us, for all that was assumed to the contrary, could and did “take it.” The Burgomaster of Hamburg in an interview with Edward J. Hart of the Sunday Express said : —

“But like Londoners we have shown we can take it. even when the streets were piled with our dead in their thousands. You have seen for yourselves what has been done to us here, yet when your 18 hour curfew is lifted and you meet our people going about their daily business in street and shop you will find there is no hatred in Hamburg for British or R.A.F. During four raids in July 1943, incendiary bombs destroyed 70,000 houses in Northern and Eastern Hamburg alone. In the eastern section where 700,000 people used to live all but 3 per cent. of the houses were burned down in one night. Temporary wooden structures to house 30,000, have since been built. Burgomaster Krogman added that of a pre-war population of 1,700,000 more than 1,000,000 remain in Hamburg in roofless dwellings.”—Forward, May 19th, 1945.

All this has a familiar ring especially if one shifts the location to the London dock area, where the workers dwellings were clustered around their place of work just like those of the dockers of Hamburg. It further shows how far our rulers are removed from the life of those dependent on wages, when Churchill told the German industrial workers, in a warning of heavy bombing to come to “take to the fields.” Whether the like advice was tendered to Japan’s millions by American spokesmen is not known, for according to the latest news, 5,000,000 are homeless in Tokio, while Yokohama’s docks are burnt out. British workers with over 60,000 civilians killed, can without “giving comfort to the enemy” realise what tragedy and horror the bombed workers of Japan are suffering.

The war before it became “global” was openly described as the struggle between the “haves” and the “have nots,” that is between the formation called the Axis consisting of Germany, Japan and Italy who had arrived late in the field of capitalist trade and colonies and found themselves frustrated in their national capitalistic expansion and the powers that had long ago partitioned the world into their respective spheres of influence and protected trade routes.

This naked view was soon covered by the welter of propaganda inseparable from modern war; the German workers who had known mass unemployment were told that victory would mean that they would be “swimming in fat,” while Italian and Japanese workers were told a like tale of empire and prosperity. The British Empire fell back on the time honoured “democracy and freedom,” while Russia, relied on her hastened industrialisation man-power, and aid from capitalist America.

The “ideologies” in the line-up presented some strange bed-fellows ; the Nordic “herrenvolk” whose pure Aryan stock “entitled” them to rule “lesser races,” found themselves the allies of the Latins and yellow men of Japan, while democratic Britain and America opposed Nazism as the allies of authoritarian Russia which had never known a free democratic election in her history.

Meanwhile with the Italo-German part of the Axis defeated, the victorious powers sitting at San Francisco are concerned not with any humanitarian motives, but with how their rival claims can he met without a major war breaking out between themselves.

Nor are they neglecting their preparations for such an eventuality; America has already an advanced type of “doodlebug,” while Britain’s House of Lords recently discussed the development of “novel devices.” Lord Darnley said “he visualised the possibility of the atomic bomb destroying not only humanity, but the globe on which humanity lived. The world he said must reach some general agreement to avoid these conseriuences.”

Lord Cherwell replying ended with : —

“Unless the nations could agree on some self-denying ordinance it was certain that the range and lethality of weapons would continue to increase. Unfortunately this country had most to lose by this. Our geographical advantages were rapidly diminishing. Unless and until our safety could be absolutely guaranteed by some into international organisation we must insist that we not only keep abreast of but ahead of any nation who might conceivably attack us in every scientific device. No effort should be spared to ensure this.”—Manchester Guardian, May 31st, 1945.

The noble Lords were discussing the world dilemma of how to carry on Capitalism with its trade rivalries, and territory protected by force, without wiping out humanity in the end; a problem before which capitalism stands impotent.

To-day man must either abolish capitalism or end his own existence. The forces of destruction must be struck from the hands of the capitalists and their hordes of militarists, by the workers. The workers can only effect this when armed with the knowledge of their power to end the system under which they are wage-slaves to the capitalist class. Thus in a classless society with abundance for all will the world be free from want and fear.

Frank Dawe

“The Spoil of Europe” (1942)

Book Review from the October 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Spoil of Europe by Thomas Reveille. (Allen & Unwin. 10/6)

The author evidently, knows his German and his Germany, and from the point of interest of the Socialist, this is a book which relieves one of the task of ploughing through pages of the usual descriptions of the Nazis and the Nazi machine, in order to obtain some idea of the mechanism of the German administration, although the book sets out to prove how the Reich is plundering Europe.

Germany has taken over the whole of the banking system of Europe “to mobilise the surplus of capital in Western Europe for financing of Continental objectives.” Germany, in fact, has become Europe’s banker, but with a new principle. “That soil and labour rather than gold should be the basis of a currency is the recurring Nazi assertion.” (P. 22.)

That this should support the “banks create credits” cranks here is smashed by the chapter, “The Golden Haul,” where the author asserts that all the gold holdings of Europe’s banks have been seized by the authority of the Reichsbank and “gold certificates” given in its stead and so likewise the gold of private persons, together with the legal “sequestering” of gold held by banks in their name abroad so that the Reichsmark notes all over Europe have some sort of gold backing.

The comprehensive picture of the State administration of industry and agriculture, in which each industry has its own “Industrial Board,” together with the Labour Front—the organisation for the industrial workers—which is dominated by the political party of the Nazis in the shape of the “Nazi Party Factory Cell Organisation” (N.S.B.O.) leaves the Socialist with the impression that the whole outfit was copied straight from the Russian State system and adapted to German capitalist conditions.

The German worker is told that this is the German version of Socialism. “The worker need not consider himself the inferior of the employer, because all members of the German Volk are ‘equal.’ Strikes and lock-outs are forbidden, and the recalcitrant employer is tried before ‘Courts of honour,’ and is fined for offending against the social honour of work” (p. 22). Real wages are kept down and “thrift” encouraged by stringent taxation and savings, in order to divert the new income from consumers’ goods to armaments, with the reduction of interest on investments from the previous 6 per cent. to 3½ per cent. from January 1st, 1941. (P. 226.)

The full name of Germany’s set-up is the “National Socialist German Workingman’s Party,” a title that is all things to all men, and advantage has been taken of the slogans and aspirations of men ranging from Jew-haters to Communists, industrialists and monarchists.

The technique employed differs somewhat from the Communist method, as the author points out. “The Communists pursue methods known as boring from within, while they are out of power. As soon as the reins of state have been seized they unmask themselves and start a clean slate by destroying everything before them. The Nazis are much smarter. They continue boring-from-within methods well after they have assumed power, and never come out into the open until all opposition has been brought within their control, adopting any pose necessary to do this” (p. 27).

That the German ruling-class plan by all means to become the complete masters of Europe is labouring the obvious, but what is not obvious is their attitude to Britain and her Empire. According to Reveille, the Reich had no intention of invading or smashing Britain, or her Empire, but to keep her neutral with her navy here, not steaming away from a defeated Britain. And even when war was declared every effort in the way of offers of peace were made, with a scheme for recognising Germany’s hegemony of the Continent, and a free hand in her land policy, while the Reich would acquiesce in British overseas supremacy, and pledge her might as the guarantee of the British Empire.

“A model for the accord of world markets already exists; this is the agreement concluded at Dusseldorf in March, 1939, between Reichgruppe Industrie and the Federation of British Industries. Both were official bodies, and the agreement was sponsored by the Reich and Chamberlain Governments” (p. 308).

That Churchill ended this policy of “appeasement,” backed by the role of the United States of America becoming the arsenal for the democracies, while the Luftwaffe, plus the flying emissary Hess, attempted to “induce Britain to ‘voluntarily’ fulfil her assigned role in the Fuehrer’s grandiose plan,” is the burden of the last pages in the book.

Appended is the National Social Party Programme, declared by Hitler to be “immutable,” and no Socialist reading it could (except for the clauses dealing with Jews and non-Germans) say whether it was drawn up by Communists or any other reformist organisation. Take only a few.

“We demand the abolition of a professional army and the creation of a people’s army” (clause 22).

Socialists will remember this as the aim of the old Bolsheviks and the substance of the “People’s War” nonsense to-day: “In view of the terrible sacrifice in money and blood which every war inflicts upon the people, we demand the integral confiscation of all wartime profits, the nationalisation of all existing trusts” (clause 12).

The Labour Party or the I.L.P. could not beat this clause as a war cry. In fact, the Labour Party recently evaded the issue of the nationalisation of the mines of Britain and fell in with a scheme propounded by the Tories, which left the owners in possession.

“The Spoil of Europe” leaves untouched any conclusions of a theoretical nature. But it can be said that the military needs of countries preparing, then waging war, are the driving forces, whereby because of the mechanical nature of modern war, all production of field or factory must be co-ordinated.

There are independent writers who argue that the anti-democratic features of State-capitalism arise out of the very machinery necessary to run it, that in so far as a whole country’s resources are integrated and brought under control of the State, that this can be pictured as being one productive unit, where, as in an up-to-date works, if one division of labour gets out of step, no time is lost in ending the stoppage. The State officials therefore become responsible for the dragooning of everything and everybody, to fit into the centralising plans issuing from the higher authorities. Propaganda, and this includes the arts, stage and literature, is controlled, with the motive of allowing nothing to interfere with the direction that the leaders have laid down.

Although substantially true, this dictatorship which can allow of no political opposition, cannot be regarded apart from the phenomenon of war, in which the fear of defeat, invasion, or worsened conditions, can be the lever, used by the dictators to move the masses to collaborate in plans which virtually deny them the right to organise independent of the State.

It must also be borne in mind that the totalitarian countries have performed a “forced march” of their economic systems in order to balance, and be prepared against, the slow, yet highly industrialised, states which they will clash with in war.

This war has given some cruel lessons to the workers of the power of the capitalist state, for the state is but the “executive committee” of the ruling class, and it is in being to promote the interests of the ruling class. Yet it exists solely because the working class is wedded to capitalism, and bound to the fortunes of its commercial rivalries, its wars and poverty.

State-craft has added stage-craft to its arts and the workers are induced to cheer the very caricatures and skits of their own aspirations. Capitalism robed as “communism” and “Socialism” in full German battle kit can make their bow before thunderous audiences.

Members of the S.P.G.B. propose that the working class take the state-power into their own hands, to establish Socialism, the class-less society. The workers will be convinced of this necessity by Socialist education, driven home, unfortunately, by bitter experience. Thereafter the State will “wither away.” the need for its existence ended, never to return.

Frank Dawe

Something for Nothing (1947)

From the April 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

We saw in the previous article that exchange itself is not the cause of capitalist profit, and we posed the question—from whence comes this profit?

Let us take again the example of our capitalist who has purchased raw material, machinery and workers’ energies. Obviously the inert material and machinery cannot enhance their own value, they are factors which are constant. Furthermore our capitalist has paid the proper market price for them, thus ruling out any gain in exchange, and he now wishes to transfer their value into the fresh product, together with the new labour of the workers he has employed.

Here lies the crux of the question—does our value for value proposition—hold good here? Do workers get the value of their ability to work? All through we have presented Capitalism as a system whose whole activity centres around the production and sale of commodities and the plain answer to the question is that the workers’ abilities prove no exception to the rules of capitalist production.

The worker appears on the labour-market offering his abilities for a price or wage, his offer is taken up by the capitalist who has use for them, paying in exchange the price then ruling on the market. Thus the power to work, or labour-power, takes on qualities of a commodity—it is produced for sale—it has no use-value to its owner, and it will be a use-value to the consumer or buyer.

But labour-power has a characteristic unlike any of the inert purchases bought by our capitalist, for this living thing can produce value over and above its own. The problem is solved. The value of labour- power is based on the labour-time spent on the food, clothing and shelter necessary to produce it, which value finds its monetary expression in wages. If we therefore subtract the value of these “means of subsistence” from the total value that the worker produces, there is a surplus of value left over to be realised by the capitalist when he markets the product.

Our use of the term labour-power arises because the worker does not—as is usually supposed—sell his labour to the capitalist. The labour expended by the worker goes into the products of the employer and in these the worker has neither ownership nor right of disposal. Actually the owner claims the right to all labour performed within his control during the time that the worker “contracts” over to him the use and disposal of his labour-power. Another aspect of the sale of labour-power is that the worker usually credits the capitalist with a week’s labour-power before being paid for it, the capitalist thereby having a week’s labour in hand before being called upon to settle the wage-bill.

We earlier on said that the value of the workers’ means of subsistence is the labour time necessary to produce it; we can therefore divide the working-day into “necessary labour” equalling the value of the workers’ labour-power, while the rest of the day is surplus-labour. In effect the worker produces value equal to his day’s wage in say, three hours, the remaining time being spent producing surplus-value for his employer. The ratio of necessary-labour to surplus-labour tends to become progressively smaller as the means of production increase and more wealth is turned out with the same or less labour, in other words, the gap between the workers’ subsistence and the “rake-off" taken by tho boss, becomes increasingly greater. As subsistence is in money terms, the worker must keep incessant watch on his ’’real wage," i.e., its purchasing power, be his “nominal wage” what it may. A general rise in prices, for instance, will tend to leave him selling his labour-power below its value, and this, if for no other reason is why he must unite with others in a union with the withdrawal of labour-power as his final weapon, to hold his nominal or money-wage in line with his real-wage, for he and his like are the sport of the market in which a change of price level affects immediately the standard of living.

Whilst the slave of old was owned outright by his owner, the modern worker affects to be a “free man,” selling, like any other trader, a commodity for which he asks but a fair price in line with its value. As such he suffers all the vicissitudes of the market; he must accept as inevitable, overwork during the boom, unemployment during the slump, along with the regimentation of himself and his family in times of crises when even the right to bargain the price of his commodity is withdrawn by law. Machinery, which should lighten his labours, becomes his rival when installed to “save labour"—his labour and his job—whereupon more often than not, his wife plus children of "working age" are—to balance the family budget—thrust upon the market as his competitors in cheap labour-power.

There is no escape from this market in labour-power, even where it comes under the control of the planners of state capitalism, for the relationship of wage worker-employer, is not thereby abolished. In truth the worker is the slave of capital, a unit of the living labour force which enters the process of commodity production as part of the capital costs necessary to gain for the capitalists—something for nothing. How the capitalists share the gains of the workers’ exploitation will be sketched in our next article, “The Division of the Spoils."

Frank Dawe

The Workers and the State (1946)

From the February 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world’s workers have been conscripted, categorised, rationed and regimented by the power of the State, ruthlessly should they live in dictatorship countries, by their “consent” in the democracies. In spite of this the Socialist view that the State is “the executive committee of the ruling class” is contested by many. Let us therefore take a swift survey of the evidence of history.

The Social institution called the State had its genesis in the advent of private property, and its beginning took place after thousands of years in man’s history, during which he had no concept of private property as such. From these misty eons of time we find that man, and the word includes woman, in the unequal fights against the forces of nature, banded together in tribes or clans in which all implements and provisions were the common property of the whole community, and no trace has been found by philologists of the words mine and thine in use during this immense period of primitive communism.

The tribes practised complete economic and social equality, there being therefore no classes, no law or state, only the observance of the tribal rites and customs; everyone took part in the common tasks of the day and had an equal voice in the election of officers. An injury to one was an injury to all in this democracy where the social relation was that of kinship, and the greatest punishment, banishment to the world of terrors outside the tribe.

Writers on this period of man’s development (Engels' “Origin of the Family”) describe how the “means of production” evolved and changed man from the savage hunting the animals for food armed only with crude weapons, to that of barbarian who now domesticated the animals and became a pastoralist, the period which ushers in the dawn of civilisation, and private property.

So close was man always to the edge of famine that the need for moving to new hunting grounds inevitably brought him into conflict with other occupants and during these forays captives were taken and killed; sometimes they were eaten. Man later learned that the captives could provide many meals if put to attend the pastures and cattle he had acquired.

So the enslavement of man by man aided by the increasing knowledge of agriculture begun the private ownership of the means of life.

This new method of production gave rise to wealthy families and poor families and in place of the communal family group there came the inferiority of woman as the mere “help meet” of her lord and master, for only through him could their issue inherit the family property, now protected by the law and force of the State.

The age-old tribal communism had been broken down by the needs and institutions that were set up and given the sanctity of authority by the class which owned and controlled land, cattle, money and slaves. The city states which eventually arose in the congenial Mediterranean area were based on this class ownership and were the scene of the violent class-struggles which fill the history books, and it is a sobering thought that the philosophy, architecture, and oratory of Rome and Athens were only made possible by the labours of a slave class whose toil gave the owners the comfort and leisure to pursue those studies.

The republic of Rome was organised on a military basis and had a constitution drawn up which divided the population into six classes, each class holding votes according to its property strength, whilst for defence each vote in the legislature carried the duty of providing a centurion or officer over a hundred men drawn from the populace It is a commentary on modern war that the poorest of the proletariat, having no property, were not asked to defend their “way of life”; they being classified as mere breeders by the Roman state.

Thus the possessing class held political power during the time of Rome battling against its Italian tribal neighbours and later as the centre of an empire holding the greater part of Europe and Africa in its grip. The slave system ate into the heart of the Roman state and brought ruin and decadence in its train; the slave taken in war. or made so by debt, was considered a chattel that had no legal right to properly, to marry or enter into a contract. Slaves often provided a Roman holiday as gladiators trained to fight each other in the arena, a training which served them in good stead in one of the several Servile Wars that broke out. Spartacus, joined by the gladiators' school, roused the slaves, trained them and inflicted defeats on the Roman army for four years, the revolt being finally crushed and its supporters brutally burnt or crucified in thousands by the victors.

Reform in the late days of the Empire allowed the slave to buy his freedom, or as a serf to farm a plot of the broken up estates, for work had become a degradation in the eyes of the Romans, and by now the large landowners had ruined the small owners by estates run entirely by slaves brought from the imperial wars by a paid proletarian army. Rome became filled with discharged soldiery, freed men and proletarians, demanding bread and land from a ruling class replete with the plunder and tribute of the wars and colonies. No the state gave them doles, circuses, and more wars. Furthermore, the state declared the “public ownership" of the slave's religion, Christianity, long persecuted for hinting that the slave was as good as his owner—in heaven. Yet nothing could allay the rot of such a slave economy, and Rome offered little resistance when beset by the Teutonic hordes from outside.

The fall of Rome's military power saw the splitting up of Europe into many principalities and kingdoms which owed their existence to the usurping of the tribe and clan system by the warrior and land owning class, assisted now by the spiritual inheritor of Rome's power, the Roman Church, headed by the Pope. This epoch called Feudalism was one of chronic warfare over land in which the remnants of communal society were stamped out by the lauded chiefs, and where the Church as an arbiter became a great land-owning and political force used in bemusing and enforcing class rule on the enslaved class, the serfs. The theory of the state was one of service, and pyramidic in structure; the. king holding all land in his realm and granting its ownership to his subjects under bis protection, they swearing loyalty to him and his law while providing him with arms and soldiery according to their status. The serfs farmed their lord's land not as the uneconomical slaves of Rome but with the added interest of raising their own keep on strips of land granted them by the lord of the manor. Revolts, but more the need of the state for money, later gave the serfs the liberty to rent small plots, notably in England, as peasants.

Meanwhile another class was growing, that of the merchants and manufacturers, who resented the king’s power to tax and squander money on wars whilst they had no voice in the council of barons and king, and thus arose in England the Parliament of Commoners which the king summoned as he thought fit, generally for money, or as a lever in his quarrels with the barons. The townsmen or burghers grew more insistent against the church and king as the latter were fettering their ever-growing commerce by state restrictions and the ban on usury. This clash of interests found expression in religion, and Protestantism was adopted by the merchant class from the anti-Pope doctrines of Luther of Germany. Tactically they backed Henry VIII in his quarrel with the Pope over the breaking of his marriage vows, sacred to the feudal church, a schism whereby the crown “requisitioned” the church lands and wealth, thus severing its power.

The class struggle of the rising capitalist class went on through the reigns, and finally culminated in a civil war in which the Parliamentarians recruiting the yeomanry and townsmen ended absolute monarchy by defeating the Royalists and beheading their king, Charles I, in Whitehall.

With the state in the hands of the capitalist class we enter the era of industrial capitalism, where abroad the capitalists grab colonies and roam the world for markets and raw materials, while at home their allies the capitalist landlords drive the peasants off the land and into the towns where, as "free'’ men, they enter the factories to a new slavery, wage-dom, a revolution still pursued with variations in India and Russia to-day. The new mode of production, the hiring of labour power to operate power-driven machinery, places the whole wage class in subjection to the owners by virtue of the monopoly of the means of production in their hands. Furthermore, over and above the total wage bill it leaves in their possession enormous surpluses of commodities which they must trade abroad, therefore the state increases and jealously guards the spheres of influence and foreign markets for this overplus, for out of its sale comes the new capital to repeat the process of profit making. Should an actual threat by rivals arise the state invokes its power over propaganda, arms the wage workers and with many patriotic slogans urges them to annihilate the enemy of the national interests. These wars, local at first, have increasingly involved all in misery and destruction while with the advance of science the technique of war is revolutionised by new equipment and weapons.

To-day the state, with two world wars to its credit, becomes more authoritarian by the needs of modern total war, and must even in the "peace” retain in its hands the power to regiment workers and direct industry in readiness for a possible world war 3. Hence the long view of some capitalists in favouring nationalisation plans so beloved by the "left.”

We have made a case for the class and military nature of the state. Yet is it possible to end the state and the exploitation of man by man ?

The wars and poverty of capitalism are an unnecessary contradiction which grown-up mankind should not now tolerate, in view of the titanic output of wealth possible if society was freed from profit and class rule.

Socialists advocate the democratic social ownership of all means of wealth production, a return in fact to man's earlier practice, but on a mach higher plane, his forays for example were caused by hunger, not by surpluses.

The owning class is not fitted mentally to accomplish this great social change, it must be the work of the majority the now enfranchised workers, and they must not waste precious time reforming their masters' system but grasp the need for ending it before capitalism hurls us all into another conflagration which will leave surviving mankind the inheritor of mere dust and rabble.

Frank Dawe

Shall Capitalism Continue? (1943)

From the April 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

The question that all thinking men and women must be asking themselves to-day is: Can capitalism stand inviolate and yet satisfy human needs? That this stage of thoughtful consideration is prevalent is borne out to some extent by a leading article in the "Transport and General Workers' Record," the organ of the T. and G.W.U., the union that caters for over a million "unskilled" workers. (Feb. 1943).

Under the heading "A Call to Duty," the writer insists that it is the duty of every trade unionist to study the social and economic problems that press for a solution to-day. He goes on:—

  But we have seen nothing in any of the post-war plans published by organised vested interests which encourage us to hope that if their proposals are adopted we shall not see once again the skies black with the smoke of burning wheat, coffee and cotton while the streets resound to the march of the unemployed, or hear once again the scream of bombs and shells of nations fighting yet another devastating world war.

The writer's solution for this is summed up in his own words :—

  A way must be found to keep the resources of the world in full employment, and to enable the people to have access to the goods produced. There must be an unbreakable link of adequate purchasing power between production and consumption.

What we should like to ask is this: Is it possible under capitalism to let the people have access to the goods produced? Let us probe this a little deeper.

Socialists have critically examined capitalism, and have come to the conclusion that the wages system is basic to it.

That in order to end capitalism, an end must be made of wage labour, and no amount of tinkering, planning or scheming will unfetter the latent productive powers that are waiting to be used by humanity, unless the wages system is abolished.

This may seem an alarming conclusion to many, and we must provide some evidence for this finding.

The wages system is the capitalist method of paying for the use of the mental and physical energies of men, women, and even children, by those who possess and control money, plant, land and raw materials.

To put it bluntly, the transaction amounts to this: The owner of this energy or labour-power sells it to the highest bidder; the buyer then rises it to his best advantage, appointing foremen, overseers and timekeepers to see that the contract is kept, and that he gets his money's worth.

Wages, then, are the price of labour power, which takes on the attributes of a commodity for sale on the market. Its price rises and falls—it is dear, it is cheap, it is scarce, or there is a glut—in short, labour power is part and parcel of commodity production. Well might an old speaker of the S.P.G.B. enquire of his audience. What is the difference between what you sell and pounds of sausages—sausages 1s. 4d. per lb., and you 1s. 4d. per hour?

Yet there is a special difference between the commodity labour power and the other goods that our capitalist must purchase for production. Honest business man that he is, paying the proper market price for machinery, materials and his labour power, he finds that by putting to work this active commodity on his inert merchandise, that it produces goods or values over and above what he originally laid out, thereby leaving a surplus which legally belongs to him.

Our capitalist is in possession of commodities in which is contained the unpaid labour of the worker.

As to their use value to other people he is not so much interested as how quickly he can sell them, and it must be fairly obvious that the worker cannot buy back the whole of the product that he has produced by his labour.

Here we must leave the simple illustration, and transpose it to the real world, for we have arrived at the point around which swings the whole capitalist system.

For our capitalist is representative of the employing class which exploits the great working class with one object— the obtaining of surplus value, which they divide among themselves as industrialists, bankers, landlords or middlemen, by a process which is beyond the scope of this article to describe.

The workers' share is kept at a minimum by the acceptance of the commodity nature of their one possession—their labour power, and in the struggle over its price they have built up huge unions, in order, as the cynics have it, to bargain over the conditions of their servitude to the capitalist class. Yet if they did not struggle, and if necessary withdraw their labour power—i.e., strike—they would, in the words of Marx, be reduced to the level of broken wretches past salvation.

But our capitalists have troubles of their own. What if they cannot sell their commodities? Contained in the mass of products in capitalist hands, there is, when sold, not only the income they seek, but the new capital to repeat the operation we have described. This is where the trouble starts, for capitalist production is not an isolated phenomenon but is world wide, and the "world markets" are the possession of those who can sell the cheapest. They can reduce prices by more than one method; they can reduce the cost of labour power, increase the intensity of labour, instal labour-saving machinery, lengthen the working day, obtain cheaper raw materials, or keep rivals from obtaining same.

A tendency in this we must note is that capitalism to-day is organising not as a "private enterprise" agglomeration, but as national units, which speak and trade for their capitalists as a body.

Every so often, as has been seen, there comes a "depression." The markets are "glutted," and the first action of capitalists is to reduce the buying of labour power, so then its unfortunate owners must walk the streets unemployed, sustained by grudgingly given doles or charity. Nor can the capitalist give away the products he cannot sell, even if he wished to, for not all have their capital in "means of subsistence," which is what our worker needs in the shape of clothes and food. Many are engaged in producing "means of production," such as factories and heavy engineering; furthermore, they would by such methods knock the bottom out of prices, thereby rendering capitalism further inoperative.

The usual practice is to let their commodities lie up, and often rust if they be ships or plant, and even make bonfires of such things as wheat or cotton.

Having brought the reader so far, it does not need any great imagination on his or her part to understand that a prolonged stalemate on the part of world capitalism can easily lead the competitors to settle the question by force of arms—by war. Therefore to let the people have access to goods produced, there is only one way: let the people own and control all the means of production and distribution, producing everything solely for use instead of for sale and profit.

Well might Marx, that guide and thinker, begin his classic "Capital" with the words: "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities." For in this prosaic opening is contained for Man, as for us, the crux of capitalist production, and to-day, 60 years from his death, there is no working class in the world that has abolished commodity production—has, in other words, established Socialism, where the buying and selling of labour power has ceased, where the link of "purchasing power " is abolished as a capitalist device.

We as the only Socialist party in this country hope for the day when the mature advice of Marx is heeded, and trade unionists write upon their banners, not a fair day's work for a fair day's wage, but the abolition of the wages system.

Frank Dawe

The New, Old Capitalism (1942)

From the March 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many attempts have been made by propagandists to explain the dictatorships of Germany, Russia and Italy, and all manage to find some central theme upon which to build their case.

Some say it is the work of evil men (although Stalin is getting a good press now). Some argue a case for a Capitalist anti-labour conspiracy, instancing Italian and German suppression of democrats and socialists.

The Trotskyists formulate a case in which they allege that Russia had her “Socialist” revolution betrayed by Stalin and his bureaucrats, who have turned Lenin’s "dictatorship of the proletariat” into the dictatorship over the proletariat.

Enough has been said to illustrate the diversity of opinion regarding this vexed subject.

The Socialist views Capitalism as one whole cloth which, although woven into different patterns, and sometimes of mixed materials, nevertheless has one basic texture—the exploitation of the workers by a class that lives on the surplus, over and above that which the worker receives as his wages.

Now whether this class is organised as a bureaucracy as in the dictator countries and adopts such nomenclatures as Communists, Fascists, or National-Socialists, it does not detract from the fact that they are eaters of surplus value, and that the system which they have erected is nothing but collective or State Capitalism. The fact that in the dictator countries the population have had no long democratic experience has made it fairly easy for "great leaders” to be swept into power, and to declare a dictatorship. Moreover, it is no mere accident that some 300 million people have been cajoled to accept the Totalitarian method of running capitalism, for implicit in the cry "away with Democracy” has been the imperative drive for war and the "liquidation” of recalcitrant minorities or independent groups, these being described in Russia as wreckers and Trotskyists, and in Italy and Germany as Jews or Communists. Trade unions are merged into the State set-up—one party rules, the party organising the country for "Total War.”

The setting up of State or collective Capitalism has spelt the end of Liberal or laissez-faire doctrine (the right to do what you will with your own), because private property must fall in line with the needs of the State.

The worker under dictatorship finds that whereas he was dismissed, say, for lateness, by a private capitalist, that now a State ordinance decrees that he shall be fined or imprisoned; his "Trade Union” officials are party bosses, and he has lost the legal right to strike or bargain for the sale price of his labour power. He must listen to State propaganda only, and his power to elect representatives of his own choice is limited to a panel put forward by the ruling clique, which allows of no opposition. Such is the necessarily brief sketch of a regimenting capitalism which the workers will one day break with surprising results; the fight will be more for independence and freedom of speech than for mere bread.

The curtain may go up on a stage set for a real leap forward in human endeavour to solve this age old problem of class ownership of the means of producing wealth, with its privileged position for the few, and social inferiority for the many. The workers will see that this jungle we call capitalism can be organised into different forms going under various titles, with appropriate "ideologies” to match, with its protagonists all proclaiming the virtues of their respective set-up using such euphemisms as "A new social order,” "A new civilisation,” or even "The workers’ state,” which only result in a new set of bosses. There are now indeed few more mistakes that the workers can possibly make.

And now, probably, Socialism—the real democracy which has the common ownership of the means of production and distribution as its basis—will become a real live issue.

Frank Dawe

The Planners of Capitalism (1942)

From the July 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have had to contend with multifarious groups and parties that held, and hold yet to-day, the view that every inroad of the capitalist state into the realm of industry is a step in the direction of Socialism.

Seeking support on those lines is the major party —the Labour Party—which stands for the nationalisation of the main industries of the country, with compensation for the owners at a fair rate of interest by giving them government bonds, equal to their assessed capital. The Labour Party has been influenced by such people as the Fabians in the shape of G. B. Shaw and the Webbs, who have contributed much to the doctrine of State control, along with the I.L.P. which, in the past, declared that it would convert the Labour Party to Socialism, by which it really meant State-capitalism, and even now is only critical of Russian State-capitalism on democratic grounds.

A later arrival was the “Communist” Party, which made the wildest claims for the “dictatorship of the Proletariat” that they declared was in operation in Russia.

But the “Workers’ State" picture has somewhat faded over the years until to-day sociologists have some difficulty in differentiating the State system in Russia from that of Nazi Germany. The question now arises as to why the Labour movement plumps for State control of one kind or another. In the first place, State control can be viewed as being in line with the centralisation and concentration of capital, “for capitalist development had its genesis in the expropriation of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few,” and State boards, corporations, trusts, nationalisation and the like are but parts of the higher evolved capitalism.

Illustrating this is the statement of the Board of Trade and the Minister of Food that there will be the closing of half of the retail shops by midsummer this year which means that some 300,000 “small man" businesses will be “telescoped,” and their trade taken over by the bigger organisations. (News Chronicle, April 6th, 1942.)

This “freeing” from the world of business of a type that has attempted to rise above the proletariat, that has given his children a better education, forms a nucleus from which come the sometimes brilliant men with ideas who flow into the parties of the “left," and as trained writers, intellectuals and professionals, make well thought out schemes for the planning of capitalism, motivated, you may be sure, by the prospect of filling the requisite posts in its administration. Against the planners, the Tories, representing the solid property owners, and holding high office in the state for decades, appear reactionary to the suggested new order of things, and resent the move to superannuate them to a back seat politically. For against the Tory conception that a man’s worth—his substance—is the amount of property he owns the embarrassing newcomers have the “revolutionary” cry of “equal opportunity,” and declare that ability should he the test of a man’s right to income, so away with private property. Let the State take over for Socialism now! Whilst this haggling goes on as to which type of capitalism should be adopted, and who is to run it, the great majority of “base” mechanics, the proletariat, must be thinking that they have a role to play in this era of change and are fearful that totalitarianism and State capitalism are of one piece, that their liberty, and thus of humanity, depends on what part they play.

We declare that we Socialists have earned the right to be listened to, for of all sections of the working-class we have been true, whilst the concept of Socialism has been distorted, and used as a cover to march our class from one morass to another, their labour-power bought and sold like merchandise, their children snobbishly belittled.

We still propagate that you must abolish the wages system, must fashion a society to your needs, a class-less society, where mankind passes from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Will you hear us? 

Frank Dawe

Austerity and Exports (1945)

From the November 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the tragedies resulting from the advent of a Labour Government is the large number of workers who quickly become disillusioned by the capitalistic arguments vouchsafed by the new rulers and their spokesmen. Take, for example, the September Record, organ of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, wherein the workers are treated to a full article on why they should support "Full Speed Ahead in the Great Drive for Exports, written by the Acting Secretary, Arthur Deakin. No Liberal or Tory would disagree with the main points of Deakin’s article, which reiterates the historic capitalist case for bringing "backward” countries under the capitalist regime. But where the capitalists of old covered this operation under the ideology of spreading civilisation and Christianity abroad, Deakin would seek markets for Britain’s industrial products under the guise of the recommendations of the "United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture,” which aims at "raising the standard of living and health throughout the world; more efficient methods coproduction will have to be introduced in the economically backward areas of the world.”

The Labour Government, he adds, cannot effect this policy without it is "backed by the utmost output of the workers in the export trades,” and offers a word of warning that "In our great drive for the production of goods for export we must for some time be prepared to live under the same conditions of austerity us applied during the war.” 

All this is contemporary capitalist policy, discreetly stripped of any reference to the paraphernalia of tariffs, spheres of influence, monetary juggling and power-politics based on the military might possessed by the contestants for the world’s markets, on which are, dumped the surpluses filched from the workers by the seekers of profit—the world capitalist class.

Britain’s place in this capitalist "power” scheme has declined owing to the increased independence through industrialisation of the members of her "British Commonwealth and Empire,” typically Australia and Canada, whose native capitalists now jealously guard their own home market. Further, even with Germany put out of the way as a competitor, Britain the one-time "workshop of the world,” will find difficulty in competing with such huge units as America whose magnitude of production makes each commodity cheaper even with increased wages and shorter hours.

This is not to say that Britain cannot win a share of the export trade in a world denuded by war of consumer and capital goods, though the amount depends on how soon she can stop off, plus the ability of her rulers to withstand her own internal demand for consumer’s wants by priorities, savings drives, and rationing, aided maybe by the purchase of bare necessities abroad via a negotiated foreign loan. Britain in the words of the new Director of the “National Union of Manufacturers,” representing 2,000 firms—must “export or expire.”

Thus the Labour Government is faced with the dilemma of administering capitalism with its mechanism of markets and profits while attempting to placate the workers who want something of the promised “New Order” now.

Therein lies the harm done to the socialist aspirations of the workers by the Labourites who, like Deakin, write of “our” export trade and "our” industries, when in fact the workers stand dispossessed of any of these things and where the only market they appear in is the labour market in which they sell their ability to work to the capitalists, whether these be organised in private firms or in nationalised industries. Having bought the worker’s labour-power the capitalists use it to produce commodities whose value is over and above the wage outlay—a surplus for which the capitalists have paid nothing. It is not, and never will he. therefore the motive behind the export, trade to "raise the standard of living throughout the world,” but to realise this profit either directly by payment from foreign customers, or by the return of equal values that can be sold on the open market. A failure to continue this process through lack of buyers or “overproduction” results in the sellers of labour power crowding the labour market in their unemployed millions, a recurring crisis which forces on a trade war, without guns to its conclusion in actual wax with guns—or atom bombs.

In conclusion, socialism is not a lahour-controlled-capitalism, but a new civilisation in which men stand in dignified relation to each other, not as buyers and sellers in a class society, but where the common effort to produce the means of living entitles all to equal access to society’s products and services. A complete transformation which ends traders and money power and replaces international capitalist conflict by international co-operation.

The Labour Party having no mandate to lay even the foundation of such a change must inevitably fail to solve the social conflict; thus fulfilling Laski’s fear of "other men and other methods,” a warning that has been writ large by "Labour’s” prototype in Germany’s Weimar Republic and by the rise of dictatorshipss. The one and only bulwark against such a calamity is an understanding socialist working-class.

Frank Dawe

Money and Socialism (1943)

From the October 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people are incredulous when Socialists declare that money and banking will have no part to play in Socialist society.

Those on the "left" who are informed at all keep a discreet silence on this particular subject, or have been won over to the belief that Socialism has been established in Russia. Events and more information of the internal set-up of that country will in due course dispel the illusion from workers' minds. Yet such is the inroad that apologists of Russian “Communism" have made into the general theory that is essential to the workers' understanding of Socialism, that we are prompted to quote the Soviet War News pamphlet, "Believers and Clergy of the U.S.S.R." (Hutchinson & Co., 3d.). It contains a list of monies deposited with the State bank by priests and the acknowledgment of same by Stalin. One priest gives as follows: “I paid into the Government Bank on the 28th all my private savings, totalling 273,000 roubles'' (p. 6), (equivalent to about £11,000).

How these ecclesiastics came by their money need not detain us; what is exposed are the features of capitalism that Socialists have for years contended arise from the capitalist basis of Russian economy. What are the features of which we speak? Here a brief glance back is necessary in order to view capitalism in perspective.

Historically, capitalism, or the production of commodities for a market, breaks the fetters of feudal economy, based on domestic handicrafts and land cultivation, by revolutionising the means of production, thus changing the class relationship of landed proprietors and serfs to one of wage-workers and capitalists.

The erstwhile peasants become the employees in the capitalist's manufacturing workshops for wages.

Thereafter the development of the capitalist class itself goes apace with capital accumulation, and the invention of power-driven machinery to cheapen their commodities. Small private enterprise gives way to limited liability companies and trusts, tending always to remove the capitalists further from the activity of personal supervision by the delegation of a host of technicians, managers, etc., who carry out the capitalists' mandate, until in the case of State capitalism itself the State is used as the central organisation for managing capitalism as a national whole.

Whatever form it develops, the capitalist system produces commodities, and for their exchange and circulation needs a medium for expressing their value and price. All other commodities have been ousted by gold for this supreme position by the fact that gold enshrines in a small compass much human labour for its production.

Gold is therefore the commodity par excellence for expressing value in terms of money, on the basis that the labour-time expended to produce a given quantity of gold by modern methods—i.e., socially necessary labour—can be equated to an equivalent of socially necessary labour incorporated in any other commodity.

Most national currencies are therefore related to gold— an ounce of gold of certain fineness, for instance, divides up into nearly four pounds sterling, or in currency terms £3 17s. 10½d. The fact that gold, having doffed the commodity form and given the State stamp of money, can be replaced by metal or paper tokens, gives the clue to the basis of the capitalist arrangement of credit money, or exchange without immediate payment in gold, which enables the finance capitalist to offer to the whole capitalist class the total loanable wealth via the medium of banks, much to the dismay of the “small man," who finds difficulty in getting credit as against large concerns.

Any mismanagement of token currency by the capitalistic state in, say, the printing of too many notes to do the work of gold coin leads to inflation, and a comparable rise in prices.

Money is rightly said to be the lubricating oil that enables the capitalist mechanism to move, but it is not the motive power, for the true drive is the human need of the necessities of life. Standing in need of these necessities, the workers must sell their labour-power before they can buy commodities for their subsistence; and by the social legerdemain of money they are legally robbed of full access to the social wealth which they have produced, the trick being that wages will purchase but a portion of the total wealth made by them, the surplus being split up among the employing class.

With the foregoing as a background we return to the subject of Russia.

The social upheaval that took place in Russia opened up the country for industrialisation. The Bolsheviks seized power by the support given them by war-weary workers, soldiers and peasants, for the slogans of peace, land and bread; taking control of a state where the partly foreign capitalists were very weak politically. But could they jump the successive stages of capitalist development into Socialism? The S.P.G.B. declared an emphatic no! No intellectual minority could perform the social miracle of introducing Socialism with a non-socialist majority! Around the "Communist" dictatorship gathered those who determined to end the slough of semi-feudal Czardom. Learning from the large- scale producing countries, and applying this technique to a huge backward country, they tackled the problem that once faced all capitalist countries, namely, how to get cheap food for the towns. This was done by buying at a fixed price all peasant produce and by urging peasants into “Collectives" for the more economical use of machinery leased to them by the State. Alongside with this, industry was planned on the' basis of payment by results, or piecework, thereby increasing that part of the population dependent on wages paid by the State.

Thus at a stroke, this form of state capitalism removed any would-be capitalist to the completely impersonal owner of capital vested in the state, and created a social stratum of managers, experts, and functionaries who are appointed and salaried by the government. The class relationship in Russia is not yet sharply defined, but at first glance it could be described as one of state investors as against mere wage workers.

The official account of the state debt to hand is in the Statesman’s Year Book, 1942, which gives the following: "In January, 1933, the internal debt was 10,088,900,000 roubles; the internal debt has been increasing annually; some are lottery loans, and others bear interest of 4 per cent."

“National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state," says Marx, “whether despotic, constitutional or republican, marked with its stamp the capitalist era. The only part of the so-called national wealth that enters into the collective possession of modern peoples is their national debts." He then continues, “As with the stroke of an enchanter's wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and then turns it into capital without the necessity of its exposing itself to the trouble and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury."—Capital Glaisher Edition, p. 779, Genesis of Industrial Capital.)

Those simple souls who look for a capitalist class in Russia living in luxury will look in vain; for accumulation has had a chequered career in that country, being sunk in the fixed capital of new industrialisation, in the shape of roads, factories, power undertakings and equipment, much of which was bought and paid for from abroad, and this, together with the necessary heavy taxation drained away by the needs of modern war, leaves little time for the production of luxury goods. It would seem that the creditors of the young Russian state must wait for better times. Austerity is the mode at present for the monied class in Russia, although glimpses can be had of the upkeep of villas and servants which suggests a much higher living standard than that of wage-workers.

In contradistinction to state capitalism and those who advocate the nationalisation of the financial system, Socialists stand for the complete ending of the assessment of values in terms of money. Socialist society will not produce exchange-values or spend any part of its labour force obtaining the metal gold for currency, so essential to capitalist production and payment.

It will, undivided by classes, produce and distribute goods and services without money or price for use by the whole community.

Frank Dawe

The Division of the Spoils (1947)

From the May 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The aim of commodity production is the realisation of surplus value and the first step towards this end is the purchase of the necessary means of production, either by the individual capitalist or by what is increasingly the case, a state body. Thus beginning with money, the Capitalists buy factories, plant and raw materials plus the energies’ of working men and women and the net return on this outlay is an increased sum of money, sufficient not only to repeat the process, but enough for further expansion of production.

From the unpaid labour of the workers there is— notwithstanding the personal “expenses’’ of the owning class in luxury living—a sum of money to be reinvested in the productive process, either as an addition to the existing capital or as capital seeking fresh fields of exploitation, leading to an inevitable accumulation of capital seeking surplus-value, or profit. Herein lies the dilemma of Capitalism and the slave-like history of its working-class victims. Let us look at this.

All money set aside as industrial capital can for our purpose be divided into two parts, that spent on the inert means of production we can call “constant” capital, while that for buying labour-power, which preserves and furnishes additional value is “variable” capital. Now if the function of labour-power is to labour, then the call for labour by the employing-class will depend on the market demand for commodities, while the market will, in turn, be gained by those owners that have succeeded in reducing the labour in their commodities to the lower level.

Labour-time is therefore the Capitalist’s devil which claims as its victims those that are hindmost, driving them to centralise or amalgamate their capital and concentrate it in labour-saving machinery, and the plant lay-out of mass production—to invest in constant capital rather than variable capital.

This results in large capital devouring its smaller rivals, while the social outcome is such that the means of production call for a progressively smaller number of workers to operate it, making it impossible for Capitalism to find work for the total employable population, hence an industrial reserve army is in constant being, ever threatening the wage level of those in jobs.

Spurred on by the needs of the market and the greed for surplus-value, capital accumulation in the past was built up by driving labour-power below its value by excessive hours, piecework and low wages, but wiser methods hold sway to-day in production-drives advocated by the workers’ own “leaders” coupled with subtle plea that the workers have a "share” in nationalised industries and state planning —an idea writ large in Russia where the old methods of accumulation are joined with the new. Lastly, though the needs of the accumulation of capital may increase the total wage-bill in connection with the total number employed—the wage-bill—decreases in proportion to the national income. So much for the workers’ "share” in Capitalism’s productivity.

Yet not all capital invested in the Capitalist economy is productive of value or surplus-value. To begin with, the industrialists—whose workers directly produce value and thereby surplus-value—must part with some of the surplus to others whose capital forms an integral part in Capitalist production. The merchants. bankers and others, though not in productive industry, nevertheless share in the surplus according to the size of their capital and receive, over a period, an average rate of increment, enforced by competition : for capital flows out of those spheres where the rate is low to where it is higher. At this point it might be asked: “How do those capitals whose workers produce no surplus-value, exploit their workers?”

The finance-capitalists whose service to capital is to centralise all the available loanable money for the use of the whole Capitalist class, reap the difference between the depositors’ rate and the interest charge for borrowers. The work entailed being done by their employees, who merely receive the cost of subsistence or salary consistent with this type of work. The outlay in wages and equipment compared with the charge for the bank services give these Capitalists their share in surplus-value. Again, the merchants who market the products, effect this much more economically than could the many independent industrialists, thus saving them labour-time and capital. The wage costs' for their workers’ abilities and commercial knowledge, set against that part of surplus-value which the industrialists leave them to realise in the selling price, give the merchants their profits.

The landowners, hereditary possessors of the earth’s surface, lend no like "service” to Capitalist production, hence the historic enmity of the Capitalists against this monopoly. National Capitalism, fresh in the saddle of political power has adopted policies, varying from state control to even the "liquidation” of landowners as in Russia and earlier in France. An eventual compromise is always concluded with this "charge on industry,” even though land as land has no value and will only yield rent out of the surplus values of farmers and industrialists. Landowners in this way take their share of the spoils through the undertakings on their land whether these activities be mining, building or agriculture. They accumulate wealth, brought about, by others activities. Their land offered as a commodity is bought and sold for a sum that is equal to an investment whose interest would equal the rent.

To sum up, surplus value is the totality of unpaid labour wrung from the workers' in the productive process. while its distribution to the Capitalists as rent, interest, and profit takes place in the circulatory process.

Frank Dawe

Engels and Russia (1946)

Book Review from the July 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a revised edition of “The Life and Teachings of Friedrich Engels” (published in 1945 by Lawrence & Wishart, 100 pages, 4s.), Zelda K. Coates quotes Engels in support of Russia’s economy and institutions. She approvingly quotes from Engels’ “Origin of the Family,” wherein is shown the development of woman from the equality of early communal society to that of her modern legal status of a monetarily assessed "chattel,” and where he prophesied that: — 

   "With the transformation of the means of production into collective property, wage labour will also disappear and with it the necessity for a certain statistically ascertainable number of women to surrender for money ” (p. 91, Kerr Edition).

The view of Engels was that with the end of the wages system, which typifies capitalism everywhere, marriages based on property and money would give way to sex unions based solely on mutual affection. Believing that Socialism has been established in Russia, Coates declares:—

   "It is certainly no accident that this [mutual love as the only tie] has been attained almost completely and in actual fact and not merely in theory in the U.S.S.R.—the first really Socialist country, the national economy of which is based on a social collectivist system ” (p. 77).

The facts easily dispose of this assumption. Divorce, for instance, is only for those who have money in Russia, where legal costs make it prohibitive for most of the lower-paid workers. Russia’s easy divorce proceedings were ended recently by decree, as was legal abortion, while money grants and medals are offered as an inducement to women to raise large families. Furthermore, the likelihood of those in the large income and privileged stratum to wed in their own circle rather than with the lower-paid wage-labourers is too obvious to be stressed. Coates advances the usual case that Russia, under Lenin, established the "dictatorship of the proletariat,” but significantly adds that the peasantry have now attained political equality with the workers and, while not denying different modes of life and earnings of different "sections” of Soviet society, she says : —

    "In general the difference between the early Soviet Constitutions and the Stalin Constitution of 1936 reflects the progress of the U.S.S.R. towards a completely class-less society ” (p. 88).

The logic of which is that Russia’s "class-less” society now ceases to need the dictatorship of the proletariat, there being no other class to dictate to. Before the phrase therefore sinks again into its intended oblivion, from which it was dragged by the "communists,” it would be interesting to consider its origin and meaning. It occurs in the early views of Marx and Engels in the epoch of violent capitalist revolutions, where the newly formed political organisations of the wage-workers of Europe (often in a minority compared with the peasantry) could, thought Marx, lead a government over the feudalists and early capitalists—the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Nor was armed force excluded, as witness Marx’s "Address to the Communist League,” 1850, in which Marx advised the workers to organise on military lines while yet emphasising that "the proletariat must see to it that no worker shall be deprived of his suffrage by the trickery of the Local Authorities or Government commissioners.” In his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875), Marx deals with some proposals of Lassalle and makes the point that the proletarian dictatorship is the transition stage to communism. Arguing a like case, Lenin and his party —the Bolsheviks—won support in 1917 from the land-hungry peasantry and war-weary soldiers of Russia for the slogan of peace, land and bread. Czardom abolished, the "communists” created a state apparatus in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, now under Stalin, acts ruthlessly to any political opposition. But to return to Marx's "Critique,” which Lenin publicised so much. Marx envisaged a lower and higher phase of communism, first the transitional stage of inequality, based on the amount of each individual’s labour, for which he receives a certificate from society, drawing its equal in labour terms from the social stock of the means of consumption, a society where "everyone is only a worker like everyone else.” With the development of the means of production and the individual the stage is reached where society can say "From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” The state, as such, once needed by the proletariat to hold down its adversaries, "ceases to exist.” The "communists” revised Marx’s lower and higher phases as "socialism” and “communism” respectively, and proclaimed that socialism, i.e., the lower phase of communism, had been set up in Russia. Since then, the rise of Russia’s rouble millionaires, priests with substantial fortunes to invest, the charging of education fees, banking, inheritance, national debt, etc., and a huge armed state, that refuses, in Engels words, to “wither away,” must provide a first-class headache for the most ingenious "communist” apologist trying to square Marx’s transitional period with Russia’s economy. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, for the march of social history shows that backward countries, whatever their political set-up, cannot go ahead to a class-less, moneyless society, especially as an isolated unit.

Marx, with this obviously in mind, wrote in his preface to "Capital” that:—

   "Even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement—it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development, but it can shorten and lessen the birth pangs.”

Coates book gives no indication of the altered views of the later Engels; and a serious omission in this respect is Engels’ preface to Marx’s "Class Struggles in France,” one of the last things he wrote, revising his earlier opinions on insurrection and favouring the use of the franchise.

In this preface, written in 1895, Engels first refers to the views held by Marx and himself in 1848:—

   "History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production. . . .”

(“Class Struggles in France,” by Karl Marx. Preface by Engels. Published by Lawrence & Wishart, 1936. Page 16.)

Engels then refers to the period of the Paris Commune, 1871, and writes: ". . . once again, twenty years after the time described in this work of ours, it was proved how impossible, even then, was this rule of the working class ” (p. 19).

In his 1895 Preface, Engels goes on to extol the growth of the German Social Democracy; he was spared the knowledge of its later reformist development. ". . .  the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the Workers’ Party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion ” (p. 23).

He had remarked a little earlier (Page 22) that "the franchise has been, in the words of the French Marxist programme . . . transformed . . . from a means of deception, which it was heretofore, into an instrument of emancipation.”

Engels describes armed revolts, street fighting and the barricades as obsolete. The soldiers see, not the people behind the revolts, but agitators, rebels and plunderers; on the other hand he lists the new weapons and training of the state military forces. The workers of the “atomic age” can now add more to Engels' list, and thus reinforce Engels' case of the hopelessness of insurrection in ending capitalism.

Engels, as the faithful collaborator of Marx, helped to bring to the working class the epoch-making work “Capital.” Its analysis of capitalist society describes the main features as commodity production, wage labour, surplus value and money. It follows, therefore, that Marxists must perforce describe Russia as a capitalist country, even though the Russian State directs and controls the whole economy, and where capital in the main is nationalised. Notwithstanding those who, like Coates, point to nationalisation as the substance of socialism, socialists agree with Engels, who, in his “Anti-Dühring,” wrote; — 

   “The modern stale, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine; it is the state of the capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over the more it becomes the real collective body of all the capitalists. The workers remain wage earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished, it is rather pushed to an extreme. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the handle to the solution.” (Martin Lawrence Edition, p. 313.)

The challenging stand of the S.P.G.B., with its companion parties abroad, in that we alone stand for the abolition of capitalism and its wage system, is firmly upheld by political history and endorsed by the matured opinions of Engels and Marx.

Engels recognised that modern developed capitalism must cede, for inherent social reasons, the legal means of revolution to the workers. The duty of the socialists is to see that the vote is used not for reforming capitalism, but to abolish the relationship of capitalist and wage worker and establish not state capitalism, but common ownership of the means of life.

Frank Dawe