Random notes on Marxian Philosophy (1950)

From the August 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Marxian Philosophy, as has been frequently stated is the outcome of German Philosophy, socialist Utopian doctrines and English Political Economy.

There are many prominent men to-day who sniff at Marxism; a doctrine formulated in the nineteenth century cannot in their opinion be valid to-day. The last eighty years have certainly brought about remarkable progress in the development of productive forces; electric trains, aeroplanes, radio and much modern machinery did not exist at the time that Marx formulated his theories. This profound development of the material means of production can certainly not be held as an invalidation of the Marxian ideal (i.e. Socialism); it must on the contrary be regarded as fulfilling much more adequately the prerequisite material foundation which Marx considered to be a preliminary for the construction of a classless socialist society. The invectives hurled against the Marxian ideal from this standpoint are therefore unwarranted. The utmost charge that can be made is against the Marxian analysis itself, which is in the opinion of its rebutters unsound. In face of the much more modern development of society “historical materialism” and “surplus value” in their opinion no longer hold water as scientific theses, even granted that some justification may have been held for these concepts in the “Victorian Epoch.”

. . . The question arises: Can one honestly subscribe to a doctrine, or body of doctrines, which is unsound in its essence.

The Marxian “ideal” may be cherished, but then it is the ideal of predecessors of Marx (Bray, Thompson); but for that idealistic vision Marx deserves no special merit, nor even for his consistent devotion to the workers’ cause—if one may add this factor too. It is his theories which constitute his “contribution” and which enable us to understand modern capitalism. The entire ideological phenomenon is to be elucidated through an explanation of the economic conditions of man. This is historical materialism. The religious thoughts, the changes of ideas, intellectual life have their grounding in the economic structure of society—and one may add the political and juridical life. That Hitler, Bolshevism and Labour Government can be explained in terms of the economic structure and that they are satisfactorily explained are factors which leave no doubt in our minds of recent events. Neither Hitler, nor Bolshevism, nor Labour Government could have arisen in Feudalism, in a previous economic building of society.

The perennial incomes of the capitalist class are a deduction from the total labour of the working class; the result of the excess produced by the workers over their own income, i.e. the value of their labour power.

This is the doctrine of surplus value. The value of a ware is the sum total of labour contained within it. What do we mean by value? We mean just that which we use in colloquial conversation, viz., a treasurable estimation. But this treasurable estimation only arises in exchange societies or where exchange of goods has arisen or taken place. In a Socialist community two children in a Kindergarten may very well exchange their toys, but they will not do so with a concept of value. Nor will value be a factor of their articles for them, as it must necessarily be for them to-day behind their backs, namely, some sort of treasurable estimation. The value of a thing is then to-day some sort of qualitative estimation of it, even if the factors behind that estimate are not grasped. . . . money, too, has value, i.e. gold, silver, copper. The exchange of a commodity for money is the exchange of one for another value. It has been said that the proportionally determining factor in the exchange of values is their usefulness. This is pure nonsense! It cannot mean estimation as to whether a fur coat contains a thousand times more usefulness than does a chair. This is a purely subjective estimation —the utility of a commodity. But if the degree of usefulness is impossible to fathom, it is possible to gauge the socially necessary labour in an article, which Marx holds to constitute the value of the thing. That the total value of goods is estimated in terms of labour; exchanges on an average for a total of money estimated in terms equivalent of labour is Marx’s thesis, viz., the labour theory of value, and he has shown that although his thesis is that of Ricardo, Smith and other economists too his special contribution is that it is not “labour” which the worker sells to the capitalist but his labour power. The pervading thought in my mind is the applicability of the doctrine of Marx to the progressive industrial 1950 capitalism.

G.

Of Memories and Managing Directors (1947)

From the August 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a recent edition of the house magazine, the managing director of a multiple store stated, "The memory of those who gave their lives for their country will abide with us.” We are familiar with these earnest promises to keep faith with those workers who died in senseless wars waged against the workers of other lands. Stone manifestations of these utterances stand in every village and town up and down the country, surmounted by the symbol of a rather elastically interpreted religion.

The dead present little or no problem in our modern capitalist society. Their dependants are doled out with a pittance, their names are mentioned with less and less frequency; and so they die their second death. It is the survivors who constitute the problem to the capitalists, who are, one presumes, sufficiently grateful to take back their ex-warrior employees for the period the reinstatement right covers (it is true there are cunningly concealed loopholes available to these employers which they use whenever urgently necessary).

But more and more of our stalwart men are finding that, far from a situation arising where they can say, "Well, we’ve done our bit, the war’s won, now we can settle down to make progress in our chosen careers,” business concerns have no use for men who inadvertently wasted six or seven years at a time when they would have been increasing their knowledge and experience. Too old to be trained anew, out they go. On applying to other firms for employment, they get the same answer—too old; too old in their late 20’e or early 30’s! Becoming bitter, they blame the individual firms, the Labour Government, anyone, in fact but the only cause of their troubles—CAPITALISM.  It is capitalism which dictates that a worker should only be employed in a job and at a wage which leaves a surplus value for the employer.

Workers! Whilst you accept capitalism as the system of economic life you will always be too old or too young for the job. You will at intervals be rushed off to serve “your” country by destroying your comrades of other nations who are being urged with identical slogans to destroy you. You will always return to find that the fine promises were tongue-in-cheek ones which your bosses do not intend to implement.

The breathing-space between the rounds in the fight for world markets grows shorter. Stir yourselves now, or soon you too will be “abiding” in the memory of some managing director.

G.

One of the Carrots (1947)

From the November 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a trolley-bus passing through Hampstead the other day, an elderly woman, in the course of conversation, remarked that “it is the foreigners who are to blame.” Judging by her shabby clothes and care-worn expression, a lifetime of being exploited had given her little or nothing for which to thank her own nationals; but it has long been a firmly held opinion of the uninformed majority in the working class that the foreigner is responsible for our economic troubles, is for ever trying to throttle us, and simply refuses to play the game—the cad.

However, if the woman who is our subject of discussion went, for example, to Egypt, she would be astonished to find that her aggrieved cry has its echo in the Arabic tongue. The fellaheen, ignorant and exploited slaves of the great land capitalists there, look upon the luxury stores and houses owned by the French, Greeks and Jews with envy and hatred, frequently fanned into open rioting by the propaganda of the ruling class. Our worker, if of enquiring and analytical turn of mind, disturbed perhaps after visiting other lands, to find the same mistrust of the foreigner in existence, might start to wonder why States do not try to remedy tins. Why do they not try to “bring the people together”?

The reason is very obvious to the socialist, but the non-socialist worker finds it hard to accept. It is that all States are run by and for capitalism, and this social system can only continue to function whilst the workers are unconscious of the class-struggle. As long as the exploited donkey class continues to he misled by the bunch of carrots (one carrot being this anti-foreigner complex) dangling before its nose, so long will the capitalist class ride comfortably on its hack.

When the donkey realises that it is never allowed to get near enough to the carrots to test their desirability, the time will be appreciably nearer when the rider is hacked off. Until then the ruling class will do all in its power to foster the idea that people act according to the dictates of some mysterious characteristic inherent in their nationality and not, as is the real fact, according to their class function. The function of the capitalist, regardless of nationality is to use the worker for his own ends. The task of the worker is to understand this and achieve his freedom, which necessarily carries with it the freedom of all mankind.

G.

Wage-Slaves and Warriors. (1917)

From the July 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

Apparently the one objective of the ruling class engaged in the European conflict at present is to “win the war,” no matter what the cost to the people they keep in subjection, and who wage the war for them. The one social distinction is to be obtained in the bloody ampitheatre of Mars. The saddest and most ironic thing about the world conflict is that the workers have waged the war against the wrong people.

In all history it is the greatest instance of misdirected energy: it should have been their own ruling and exploiting class that they should have struggled against, and in the countries called the workers’ own, and which will be their own when they take possession.

“Crush German Militarism!” is our masters’ cry here ; but they would dearly love to have an English militarism as well organised, efficient, and as much a menace to their rivals as that which they denounce. Meanwhile there is no need to take a personally-conducted trip to Flanders in order to crush “Prussianism”: we have plenty of the English variety here! The Germans alone can destroy their own particular brand of that pestilential growth. Let us hope that they will do so before long, uprooting, capitalism also in the process, once for all!

As the war proceeds, veil after veil of lying nonsense is torn aside, and the ghastly truth, —apparent from the start to the Socialist— appears to the disillusioned and war-harrowed masses, the truth that not one nation's rulers care a damn about “honour,” “truth,” and “liberty”; that in this war no great principle is at stake ; but that, instead, the most hellish war of all ages is being waged for capitalistic rivalry and gain, for world markets and commercial supremacy.

Whilst every secret of science has been probed to see if it can be pressed into the service of war, and the wage earners are annihilating each other in patriotic frenzy, they themselves have seen every so-called right and liberty they had suppressed by capitalist despots. In England there are at the present time (according to statements made at the Leeds Conference) 74 Englishmen incarcerated without a charge being preferred against them, and without any means being afforded them of making a defence. And many others who decline to take part in the war on principle, are in the prisons of “their own” country.

Nevertheless, the “fighting for freedom with the strength of free men” goes on, and the duped workers become more and more enslaved by the class whose interest they are lighting for. The civic rights of the vaunted “democracy” have been made to function as a door-mat; the incubus of debt rears itself daily to more colossal heights; the British casualty lists alone are some 30,000 weekly. The astounding apathy and complaisance with which the people accept these things is one of the features of this, the “Great War for Freedom,” the “War to End War.”

Every country involved is piling up its human wreckage of maimed and dead, creating sorrow and suffering to the one sordid end of capitalist advantage. Noble arid devout ministers of religion are “doing their bit” by preaching the incumbent duty of destroying the “Huns": vicarious sacrifice is a parsonic privilege. Others among them have become exemplars, and have gone out with rifle and bayonet to fight men equally as deluded as themselves, perhaps, in the vain hope that this is the “last war,’' and through it will come about the Brotherhood of Man.

Nature has made the world very beautiful, but, alas! Man has turned it into a veritable inferno. Whilst Spring has been decking the countryside in loveliness comes the news that 4r millions of the manhood of Europe have been killed and wounded ! Yet the war goes on!

Will the workers never learn the lesson of reason and wisdom except through untold suffering and unspeakable pain the lesson that they, as a class throughout the world, have but one enemy, the INTERNATIONAL CAPITALIST CLASS?

Under the present system, in time of peace or war, the workers are compelled to produce wealth prolifically ; they receive about one third of what they produce, the rest is legally stolen from them, and used to their injury. And so we get the most intensely ironical fact of millions of dispossessed wage-slaves, fighting each other in groups, in their masters’ interests alone, they themselves having previously produced all the wealth which the capitalists quarrel over. All their energies of mind and body have made the prodigious accumulation of wealth which the capitalists keep only to use against the workers, whose very lives are but pawns in the hands of the class that has exploited and continues to exploit them.

Apparently no sacrifice is too great for the working class to make when capitalist interests are at stake. When are the workers going to fight for their own interests ?

The most deplorable fact of our present social life is the lack of class-consciousness among the workers. They do not realise that they are wage-slaves. They do not grasp their own all-importance. They do not understand their own all-powerfulness. Chloroformed by superstition and custom; content to let the present regime continue, they drift into fatalistic folly, and political and intellectual thralldom. It is this attitude that has made the breeding bed for the war.

What a price is paid by the working class of the world for political ignorance! What a penalty is suffered for the proletarian misconception called “Patriotism”!

What, then, is the remedy? Reforms, palliatives of any kind, are useless. They are but anodynes to lull the ever-recurring pain that is produced by this system of production for profit. The cause of the evil must be eradicated. That cause is the capitalist system.

Workers, study SOCIALISM! Organise class-consciously for the conquest of the political machinery, and for your complete emancipation from your present slavery. Yours is an irresistible power: wield it, and win

The World for the Workers.

G.