A Socialist Searchlight. (1931)

From the May 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is British Capitalism played out? 

Since the War, politicians from Conservative to Communist have joined with business men and economic experts to harp on the theme that British capitalism was on the verge of collapse. They pointed to growing unemployment and the decline in the volume of exports and imports as proof that the industries of this country were being strangled. The Communists assured us that the end was only a matter of time. They repeatedly prophesied the early outbreak of the revolution at the “psychological moment.” Like Bottomley, who always promised that the War would be over by Christmas, the Communists pinned their faith each year to the cold weather which would drive the unemployed to desperation when winter came. In the meantime they went on sharpening up the knuckle-dusters with which they were going to attack the armed forces. We of the Socialist Party said all along that the “facts” on which they based their case were largely fiction, and that their theories were all nonsense. A consideration of the growth of the total income of the country year by year, side by side with declining exports, shows in unmistakable fashion that we were right.

The figures in Column (1) are taken from the Economist Budget Supplement of April. 18th, 1931. It may be remarked, however, that, according to a rough estimate by Professor Bowley, communicated in a letter to The Times written by Sir Herbert Samuel (Dec. 1st, 1930), the 1930 National Income might be as much, as £100,000,000 above the 1924 level; at the worst, it would not fall below 1921 by more than £200 millions.

The figures in Columns (2) and (3) are taken from the Statistical Abstract, 74th number, 1931, page 312. The figure for 1930 is taken from an official summary published in The Times, Feb. 26th, 1931.

It will be observed that although exports are now down to the pre-war level (after having been well above it owing to the increase in prices), the total national income is not far short of double the amount it was in 1914. During the last two or three years, especially in 1930, the volume of goods and services represented by the national income has grown larger without the money value growing proportionately, this being due to the heavy fall in prices. Sir Walter Layton, Editor of the Economist, says that the national production increased nearly 12 per cent. between 1924 and 1929 (Times, March 31st, 1931).

It is evident that technical changes and new tariff policies in the different countries have altered the conditions of world trade. The mistake the Communists made was in assuming that the British and other capitalists would not be able to adjust their industries accordingly. They have made the adjustments and, in this country at least, are richer than ever they have been, and still securely fixed in the saddle. Capitalism has its problems now, just as it had them before the War, but so long as the workers are content to put up with the capitalist system and go on voting the control of the political machinery into the hands of the parties which will use that control for the purpose of guarding capitalism, just so long will capitalism continue in being. Even had the Communists been right about the decline of the British capitalists, they overlooked the fact that the decline of Britain as a capitalist power would only mean the rise of other capitalist powers in its place. So lacking in a correct understanding were the Communists, that they helped to make that alternative more likely by lending their aid to the capitalist movements in India, China, Egypt, and elsewhere, under the mistaken impression that the native capitalists who control the “nationalist” movements desire to work or can be compelled to work for Socialism.

* * *

Mr. Hicks solves the unemployment problem.

In his election address (see Daily Herald, April 1st), Mr. George Hicks, the successful Labour candidate at the recent by-election in East Woolwich, claimed with pride that the Labour Government are employing more men at the Arsenal than had been employed there by the Tory Government ! But it is disclosed that this “increase” had been achieved simply by having more Government work done at the Arsenal, and less done at private yards. So that the employment of more men in one place will have been balanced by the dismissal of a similar number elsewhere. Mr. Hicks’s solution for unemployment is in line with the Cabinet’s attempt last year to boost the sale of cotton fabrics (at the expense of artificial silk), and the suggestion that the over-production of wheat can be met by persuading Orientals to eat more wheat (and less rice).

If the reports of his speeches in the Daily Herald are to be believed, Mr. Hicks talked more nonsense than one is accustomed to receive even from the most ill-informed or insincere of Labour candidates. In view of the fact that Mr. Hicks (once a member of the S.P.G.B.) claimed in public debate with a Communist, in 1921, that he still accepted the principles of this Party, it would be instructive if we could be told what events have sufficed since 1921 to cause Mr. Hicks to abandon the position he then held. There is a vast gulf between the belief that only Socialism can solve the workers’ problems, and Mr. Hicks’s present desire “to maintain the high traditions set by Will Crooks” (Daily Herald, April 1st). Perhaps Mr. Hicks was combining the serious personal business of getting into Parliament at all costs with a misplaced April fool joke at the expense of the electorate.

* * *

Getting with the masses.

The Communists have always talked a great deal about the necessity of getting with the masses, and have criticised the Socialist Party because, as they truly allege, we have attached more importance to the preaching of sound principles than to attracting the support of non-Socialists. It is instructive to learn from one of their prominent members, Mr. Arthur Horner, that the Communist tactics secure for them not the approval, but the hostility of the workers. Horner, in a letter to Moscow (see Daily Worker, March 10, 1931), states that the setting up of Communist strike committees during the recent mining dispute in South Wales resulted “only in our isolation,” the miners preferring their own elected officials and committees. He says that the Communist movement showed itself, both nationally and in South Wales, “effectively bankrupt from every angle.” Horner was called sharply to order, and it was at first reported that he and Mr. J. Tanner were to form a new Communist Party, less given to wrecking tactics. It now appears that they are to be received back into the Communist Party.

* * *

Comic relief at the I.L.P. Conference.

The National Council of the I.L.P. decided that their members must not belong to the Mosley Party, and the Conference passed a resolution rejecting “with disdain the quack remedies of the Labour Government and Messrs. Lloyd George and Oswald Mosley” (Manchester Guardian, April 7th). Yet Mr. John Paton, Secretary of the I.L.P., writing to the New Statesman about a fortnight earlier, said that the Mosley programme had been borrowed to a large extent from the living wage programme of the I.L.P. At least three of the M.P.’s who drafted the Mosley programme were members of the I.L.P. at the time. And although the I.L.P. Conference thus repudiates the quack remedies of the Labour Government and of Mr. Lloyd George, it is I.L.P. members in the House of Commons who form a majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party and permit these “quack remedies,” and permit the holding of office on terms satisfactory to Lloyd George.

One of the funniest incidents was a protest by a delegate (Mr. Southall) against Gandhi entering into negotiations “with the Imperialist leaders whilst still leaving so many of the Indian leaders in prison” (Manchester Guardian, April 8th). The joke of it is that the “Imperialist leaders” are all of them the nominees of the Labour Government, which is kept in office by I.L.P. members in Parliament. The Secretary for India, Mr. Wedgwood Benn, is one of the I.L.P.’s own M.P.’s. How was Mr. Gandhi to know that Mr. Southall did not want him to enter into negotiations with the people who are elected to Parliament with the assistance of Mr. Southall and his party?

* * *

Forward and the S.P.G.B.

Mr. Emrys Hughes, who edits the Scottish I.L.P. journal, Forward, has been warning the I.L.P. to avoid becoming “an anti everybody and everything organisation like the S.P.G.B.” Mr. Hughes has fallen into error through taking a superficial view of things. He notices that we oppose the Liberals and Tories, the Labour Party, the I.L.P., and the Communists, but he has not noticed that one reason applies to each of these parties. We do not pretend that they are alike in all respects, but we do claim that each of them is prepared to retain capitalism, either as it now is or reformed to a greater or less degree. Since each of the three so-called Labour organisations find themselves advocating similar reforms and voting at elections for the same candidates, our opposition to one naturally involves our opposition to the others also. We have only one object, which is the replacement of capitalism by Socialism.

If Mr. Hughes would study the question further from another angle, he would recall one or two respects in which our capacity for being anti-everything falls short of the I.L.P.’s capacities in the same direction. For example, the S.P.G.B. has not achieved the distinction of being opposed to itself, whereas Mr. Hughes is constantly pointing out to his own opponents inside his own party that it is absurd for them to go on denouncing the Labour Government (including the I.L.P. members of it) and yet remain affiliated. He has also ridiculed the absurdity of there being three I.L.P. Parliamentary parties—first the group of 140 I.L.P. members in Parliament, then the group of about 30 M.P.’s for whom the I.L.P. was responsible at the last election, and lastly the group of about a dozen who have consented to accept the rulings of the Maxtonites. Mr. Hughes would recall that the S.P.G.B. remained Socialist during the War, instead of following MacDonald, Keir Hardie, and other prominent members of the I.L.P. into the anti-German recruiting campaign. Mr. Hughes will remember, too, that readers of Forward during the War were treated to the entertaining spectacle week by week of fervid anti-German articles from one jingoistic regular contributor, while the Editor attacked him and apologised for him in other columns.

Lastly, we would remind Mr. Hughes that, however anti-everything we may be, Forward has taken care that its readers shall not learn in its columns our justification for attacks we make. On July 14th, 1928, Forward described as “nonsense” our assertion that Keir Hardie boasted in 1914 of the number of recruits he had enrolled for the capitalist war. We promptly asked Forward to allow us space to give our evidence for the assertion. We are still waiting for Forward’s reply.

* * *

The promise of Empire Free Trade.

It is worth recording that the destitution which now exists in Protectionist America is what the Empire Free Traders promise to copy.

Viscount Rothermere, writing in the Sunday Dispatch on February 23rd, 1930, gave an undertaking that five years after the achievement of Empire Free Trade, “Great Britain will be as prosperous as the Unites States.”

On December 17th, 1929, the Evening News, Rothermere’s paper, in an editorial said :—

“The world has never been without poverty . . . in the U.S.A., to-day, the richest nation in material wealth that the world has ever known, there is plenty of it—not relative poverty merely, but want and destitution.”

On February 2nd, 1931, the Telegraph’s special correspondent in New York, Mr. Percy S. Bullen, gave a review of unemployment in U.S.A. He said :—

“In all my experience I have never seen such want as exists here to-day. . . There is more misery to the square mile to-day in the great American Metropolis than in any city abroad.”

He thought 9,000,000 unemployed an exaggeration, but put it at between 4 million and 6 million.

He quoted Senator T. H. Caraway as saying that 1,000 persons die of starvation every day in the U.S.A.

* * *

The co-operators set an example.

We are often told that the Co-operative dividend hunters set an example to the other employers. This is true. The Co-operative Societies in the North-Western Area are asking for the following alterations in their agreements with their 20,000 employees : —

Ten percent. reduction for juniors.

Five per cent. reduction for adults.

A still heavier lowering of the minimum for branch managers.

Alteration of the period of payment for sickness from three weeks on full pay and three weeks on half pay to two weeks on full pay and two weeks on half pay in one full year.

Co-operative Societies in the North-Eastern Area, employing nearly another 10,000 workpeople, have also asked for the termination of the existing agreement.

The report is taken from the Daily Herald, April 10th. It will be recalled that Mr. Maxton wants the Co-operators to have a share in fixing a “living wage” for the workers.

* * *

Straws in the wind.

The Daily Herald, has lately begun the practice of describing Lloyd George and his Party as “Radicals,” instead of “Liberals.” Is it that an alliance with the Liberal Party is intolerable, while an alliance with the same party under another name is more likely to be accepted by the Labour rank and file?

Edgar Hardcastle

Blogger's Note:

The mention in the column that the ex-SPGBer, George Hicks, stated as late as 1921 " . . .  in public debate with a Communist . . .  that he still accepted the principles of this Party" is referred to — and expanded upon — in this passage from an article in the June 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard:

"George Hicks, after leaving the SPGB became an official of a building workers union and was President of the TUC in 1927. He also joined the Labour Party and remained in it for the rest of his life. In spite of this he continued to take an interest in the SPGB and on occasions declared that he still agreed with the SPGB case. Early in the 1920's he debated with Palme Dutt and not only put the SPGB case against the Communist Party but frankly stated that it was the SPGB case he was putting."

" . . . as late as 1921" because Hicks actually finally left the SPGB in 1910.

The ILPer Southall who is mentioned in the column could have been the famous painter, Joseph Southall. I can't be 100% certain. Just an educated guess at my end.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (2004)

Book Review from the November 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Penguin Books have published in their Modern Classics series a new edition of this working class classic by Robert Tressell. Price £8.99. Well worth reading if you’ve not got a copy already –  despite the odd choice, to write the introduction, of a one-time “ministerial adviser in the Labour government of 1997-2001”, odd because Tressell was a member of the SDF, whose members had some knowledge of Marxian ideas, enough anyway for them to see through Labourism.

A Socialist Searchlight. (1931)

From the October 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Maxton gives a date.

Mr. Maxton, M.P., under the false impression that it is a Marxian theory, has for years been prophesying the sudden and irretrievable collapse of capitalism. He has now given it a date. In a speech at Cowcaddens, reported in the Daily Record (August 22nd) and reprinted in Forward (September 12th), he said :—

“I am perfectly satisfied that the great capitalist system that has endured for 150 years in its modern form, declared Mr. James Maxton, M.P., in the Cowcaddens Ward, Glasgow, last night, is now at the stage of final collapse, and not all the devices of the statesmen, not all the three party conferences, not all the collaboration between the leaders, can prevent the system from coming down with one unholy crash. 

They may postpone the collapse for a month, two months, three months, six months,” he cried, forefinger pointing at his audience, and body crouched, “but collapse is sure and certain.”

Six months from August 22nd brings us to February, 1932. When that comes round, we will ask Mr. Maxton for his explanation.

* * *

Another exponent of the collapse theory, Mr. Walton Newbold, has suffered a strange transformation. In 1921, as a Communist, he. prophesied imminent collapse, and was doing his utmost, so he said, to hasten it. It did not come off, and Mr. Newbold, now in the Labour Party, is on this occasion rallying round MacDonald and Thomas to prop capitalism up again !

* * *

Letters to Mr. Hicks.

Mr. George Hicks, M.P., was asked for his comment on the letter of personal explanation which Mr. MacDonald sent to each of the Labour Party M.P.’s. Mr. Hicks sneeringly replied that it was just the sort of letter he would expect from a man like Mr. MacDonald.

Mr. Hicks was not always so minded about letters from that quarter. As recently as April of this year (see The Times, April 11th), when Mr. Hicks was Labour Party candidate at East Woolwich, he published a broadsheet called the George Hicks Herald, containing the letter sent by MacDonald, assuring the electors that Mr. Hicks is the sort of man MacDonald regarded as suitable to represent the workers of Woolwich.

* * *

The Communist-I.L.P. Alliance. 

The crisis has had the effect of throwing together the two reformist bodies, the I.L.P. and the Communist Party. On Sunday, September 6th, Communist and I.L.P. speakers addressed a joint demonstration in Hyde Park, speaking from the same platform. The Secretary of the Balham and Tooting I.L.P., in a letter to the New Leader (September 11th), described it as “a glorious sight to see a demonstration in Hyde Park in which both Parties were united.” This was just a week after the majority of the I.L.P. Labour M.P.’s had voted for the election of Mr. Henderson as leader of the Labour Party in place of Mr. MacDonald. Only five votes were cast against his election (Daily Express, August 29th). One of those who voted for Mr. Henderson was Mr. J. Beckett. M.P., and it was Mr. Beckett who was the star turn at the Hyde Park demonstration, although Mr. Beckett complained that Communists in his audience hurled abuse at the I.L.P. speakers. Mr. Beckett was so anxious not to have it thought that he voted against Henderson, that he had the Daily Express (August 31st) publish a correction of their statement including him among the five.

P. S.

Studies in Economic Fallacy (1930)

From the October 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Invest your savings—Don't "save” them.

Mr. Robert McLaurin has been writing in the Labour press, advocating that money should be turned into productive fields. The way to do it, he says, is to stop the banks paying interest on deposit accounts, and so compel the depositors to invest their “savings” in industry. The fact that we are suffering from over-production of goods is ignored by this finance reformer. If more goods were produced by more concerns being started, the situation would simply grow worse. Goods are produced for sale to-day, and as the market is already glutted in almost every trade, the suggested reform would not touch the situation. This writer savs “the system worked with comparative smoothness” until 1914 ! Poverty, insecurity, and unemployment of wage-slaves is apparently a post-war condition to this reformer !

Proudhon and his modern followers who advocate “Free Banking,” the currency cranks like Arthur Kitson, and the Labour crowd who want money reform, are all Utopians who seek a commercial competitive system without the laws of commerce or of competition. Most of them imagine that goods should be money and that banks should allow every owner of goods credit for the amount of his wealth. If the goods cannot find a market in exchange for the universal means of circulation—money—how can they find a market any easier by being put in pawn—if such a childish notion ever was adopted?

* * *

Will reduced wages mean more work?

Another “short cut to more jobs” is being advocated by some employers in the press. The simple scheme suggests that the money paid to “out of works” by the Government should be handed to employers instead, to enable them to capture orders from abroad. Every unemployed man engaged by the employers will get the difference between the so-called “dole” and his usual wage, made up by the employer. Present wages prevent contracts being obtained against foreign competition—so runs the cry! The profits, of course, are quite in order! Such a pass has capitalism come to, that the competition employers adore prevents them being able to pay a subsistence wage ! Does it? They don’t suggest that capitalism should be abolished, but that the ruling-class as a whole should subsidise those employers who cannot pay wages and profits out of their business.

Seeing that these same people complain that foreign countries subsidise industries and pay “low” wages, where will the process of cutting wages end ? The miners and many other workers in recent years have had such low wages that poor law relief has had lo make them up to subsistence level. Did that prevent unemployment growing amongst them? And when the rationalisation and electrification of foreign industries is copied here more and more, the unemployed will increase. The countries of “low wages” abroad have a growing unemployed army. “Low wages” hasn’t saved them.

The general adoption of the policy of supplementing part wages with so-called “doles” simply means that wages will be pushed down throughout the country. The employers who have not the capital to modernise their plants cry out for more wage reductions, and in the meantime the larger concern crushes or absorbs them.

* * *

The economic trend.

It is a plausible catch-cry to shout “wages determine prices,” but economic facts dispel that moonshine. Ford’s Motors in their last annual report showed that where they paid the highest wage in Europe (in Denmark) output was greatest, and where they paid the lowest (Belgium) the output was least. The real basis of world competitive prices is the amount of labour that it takes on the average to produce articles with modern methods. Where manufacturers, like Ford, have the capital to buy the latest and biggest quantity of machinery, they can reduce the time taken to produce goods, and so sell for less.

The manufacturers who cry out for subsidies to help them pay wages, won’t face the issue that production for the world market is wiping out many competitors and producing the combine or trust in every field. The successful firms have won by reducing costs, which means reducing the numbers of workers required to produce a given quantity of articles. Therefore, the chronic unemployment of to-day becomes a fixed feature of capitalism. Every country and every manufacturer is out for trade, and therefore profit, and in the wild scramble the workers do not count. They just produce the wealth and under the best conditions get just about enough of it back to keep them alive.

* * *

Shall we demand "lower prices”?

Labourites and “short-cut Socialists” are demanding cheaper goods. Consumers’ Bills and anti-profiteering campaigns are on the road to cut prices. These people are chasing a Will-of-the-wisp. “Reduce the cost of living” may be a good battle-cry for those who are consumers only, but the working class is a producing class. It does all the producing, but only a part of the consuming. How much the workers consume is determined by their wages. And what determines their wages? The basis of wages is the money needed on the average to keep a worker and his family. The number demanding work and the number of jobs available decides the daily fluctuations in wages, but the average level of wages is the cost of living of the worker. When the official index figures of the cost of living show a reduction, wages are reduced accordingly. In the daily Press of July 23rd we read that the Civil Servants have just been notified that their salaries are to be reduced, as the cost of living has fallen. Therefore, the campaign for cheaper goods will simply result, if successful, in reducing the worker’s wage. The money wages are only nominal—the buying power is the real wage. If the necessaries of life are “high,” wages may be raised to cover the increase, but the purchasing power of wages is always related to the cost of living of the workers. However cheap goods are, wages will always represent but a fraction of the wealth made by the workers.

The cry for cheapness to-day overlooks the economic tendencies of the system.

* * *

The march to monopoly. 

On the one side mass production serves to produce cheaply, but alongside of that is the rising power of monopoly, rings, and trusts to corner the supply and exact monopoly prices. Many manufacturers are against the prices of necessaries being raised and so driving them to pay higher wages. The general tendency of modern capitalism, however, is to concentrate the great sources of wealth and the products into fewer and fewer hands. If nature and man are very productive, and the supply grows quicker than the demand, the owners scheme to restrict production and actually to destroy products, in order to keep prices high enough to ensure their growing’ profits.

Centralised production on a large scale certainly works towards reducing costs, but the great combine owners are not interested in usefulness or cheapness as such—they are interested in profits. Once they have cut out the competitors, they plan “to get all the market will bear” by controlling the market. There is, of course, a limit which they cannot go beyond without reducing the amount they can sell.

The Consumers’ Leagues and similar bodies are powerless to effect their wishes, whatever Bills are passed to stem the economic tide. The concentration of wealth and the combine are the natural outgrowth of commercial competition, and can only be dealt with effectively by abolishing private and class ownership.

One other factor in “high” prices is the falling value of gold due to modern improvements in working gold-bearing ore. Thus economic development and economic laws of capitalism cannot be dodged by reform legislation. They must be understood—and then we’ll fight for Socialism.

* * *

The economics of "Labour.”

David Kirkwood, of the Clyde, Labour M.P. and I.L.P. chieftain, has a mental upsurge. He has discovered how to stop the downward march of workers’ conditions. He has brought in a Bill to make it illegal for employers to reduce wages. A Government in charge of the capitalist system of profit and exploitation is asked simply to decide “No more reductions in wages.” Employers must not cut the workers’ pay. Wages will then automatically stay put. Wages will fluctuate no longer downwards—but only upwards. Thus poverty will be grappled with.

A little economic knowledge would be dangerous to a Labour M.P. We will, however, try a small quantity.

Under this system an employer is not compelled to employ the workers seeking work. The number of men and women seeking work being greater than the number of jobs, wages tend downwards. The market—the labour market—is the place where competition for work causes men to accept the master’s terms. Having no wealth, the workers cannot hold out. Does Kirkwood’s Bill abolish that market and its competition? Does it wipe out unemployment? Does it abolish the lack of property—the force that drives men to work for others for a fodder wage? Does it alter the fodder basis of wrages ?

No. Kirkwood, playing with effects, would like to abolish the effects of capitalist system whilst leaving the system running. It is more sensational, vote-catching, and sounds drastic; it is easier than explaining capitalism and advocating Socialism.

* * *

Economic laws override statues.

A law to stop wages going down ! A war might do it for a time, whilst the demand exceeded the supply of workers, but a law under capitalism cannot stop the employer buying better and more effective machinery whenever wages tend to rise, and thus pushing numbers out. The rationalisation which Kirkwood criticises (New Leader, July 18th) would play havoc with his “law.” Centuries ago, laws were passed making it criminal to pay more or less than the wage fixed by statute. The plague had swept huge numbers of workers away, and wages rose rapidly. Conditions made the statute a dead letter. The cry of employers for labourers and the favourable situation for the men made reductions of wages impossible. Too many employers were willing to pay more than the legal wage.

When hunger drives hard, men and women go back to work even at terms (fixed with Labour Government’s assistance) involving ten per cent. reduction, as in the woollen trade. What has happened to the Minimum Wage Laws “won” by miners from Lloyd George? Where are the miners’ work and wages to-day? David Kirkwood, like his fellow Labour Members, should stick to “Pleasant Sunday Afternoon” meetings at the kirk.

* * *

Is shorter hours the remedy?

Mr. Geo. Hicks, of the General Council of the Trade Union Congress, has been telling his Building Trade Union of the effects of rationalisation on the building-trade. One hundred and fifty thousand are out of work in this industry, but more machinery and efficiency schemes are being used every week to get the work done “cheaper.” “A shorter working day,” he told them, would absorb some of the unemployed, and those pushed out by machinery should be given alternative employment or fully maintained.

Hours have been continually shortened in the builders’ craft, but has that absorbed the unemployed? The Union that can’t win a strike over some detail of their conditions is not in a position to win full maintenance. Mr. Hicks, like most Labour leaders, is busy supporting the Labour Government, which carries on capitalism and advocates the wholesale rationalisation which he complains about to his members.

Labour leaders do not tell their members the truth that the only way out is to abolish this system by winning political power for Socialism. It’s a much easier and more profitable way for leaders to keep the workers ignorant. Then they can be led.

* * *

A lesson for trade unionists.

Whilst the Trade Union leaders are busy as Labour M.P.’s supporting rationalisation, which will add to unemployment, the Unions beg the members not to add to the financial burden of the Unions by temporary stoppages, etc. The Boot and Shoe Union used to boast that by a “no strike” policy of conciliation they had won the best conditions. Now they complain that unemployment of their members in this machine industry is draining all their funds. The Cardroom Amalgamation of Lancashire has issued a circular to its members, warning them that the scales of contributions and benefits will not stand the chronic unemployment to-day.

The eight looms per weaver scheme, however, is being put through in Lancashire, where more than one-third of the operatives are already out of work. The Labour Government’s Committee of Enquiry, headed by J. R. Clynes, the Labour Minister, advised the greater rationalisation of the industry with the latest wages-saving automatic looms.

The workers in the Unions are still supporting the leaders who mislead them. Not by changing leaders, but by completely changing’ their ideas about society, is the only way the members can cure the situation.

Let the working class own the machines, etc., in common. Stop improving the machinery for the masters. Organise politically to end this system of profit-making.

* * *

Another "sheltered trade" gone.

The Railway Unions have benefited so much by brilliant leadership that since they got back their 2½ per cent. reduction in wages, short time or dismissal has been the rule in the railway shops. A greater speeding up of the work is the owners’ reply to the cancelled reduction of wages. Now we learn from the Daily Herald of June 17th that owing to the drop in the official cost of living figures, thousands of railwaymen have lost two shillings a week. Seventy-five per cent. of the railwaymen, according to the same authority, are down to the minimum rates of wages. They give the figures of £2 6s. for porters, and lamp-men and permanent way men £2 8s. In the meantime the railway companies have been buying up their ‘bus competitors, the money for which, I suppose, comes out of their losses. The Transport Unions and the Railway Union are now busy squabbling over which Union the members must join. Mr. Thomas, we expect, will add to the railway workers’ prestige by finding a place in the House of Lords. Such are the fruits of conciliation in industrv.

* * *

“The Iron Law of Wages." 

"The corner-stone of Marx’s theory, as expounded in ‘Das Kapital,’ is that labour is the creator of all wealth, but that under Capitalism labour is not paid by the value it produces, but by the price of labour power as a commodity on the market. This price, according to Karl Marx, is fixed by the economic laws under which we live at a point which just secures an adequate supply of labour for industry. This he called the ‘Iron Law of Wages’.”—(H. H. Tiltman in his Life of Ramsay MacDonald.)

The above is an example of the ignorance of Marx’s economics by the brainy bourgeoisie who write about him.

Marx did not call his law of wages the “Iron Law of Wages.” In fact he exposed the “Iron Law” theory, which was taught, not by Marx, but by Lassalle. In his criticism of the Gotha programme of the German Labour Party of 1875, Marx pointed out that the so-called Iron Law of Wages was a mixture of Malthus’ over-population theory with economic facts. The “iron law of wages” presupposes that wages cannot rise owing to an increase of population taking place if the subsistence level is increased. More workers born would crowd the labour market and bring wages down. Too few workers would raise wages, which, in turn, would induce larger families, and thus, through competition for work, wages would again fall to their former level.

Marx, on the other hand, showed that the cost of subsistence was the basis of wages. The level of wages, however, was not fixed and was not like iron. The union of workers and their struggle played a part in the raising of wages. The standard of living, too, was not fixed, but fluctuated, due to the changing social conditions; the efforts of workers to adapt their way of living to the period they lived in; and the need of employers to adapt the living standards of the workers to enable the speed and efficiency of industry to be maintained or increased.

The really vital factor in overcrowding the labour market was not the birth-rate, but the use of machinery by the employers. The critics of Marx seem to get their knowledge of him from his opponents.

Adolph Kohn

Some Black Sheep (2004)

From the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note: With regards to the passage about Con Lehane, you have to check out the afterword which corrects some bum information about Lehane that we got via Laurens Otter.

What have a Labour member of the House of Lords, a President of the TUC, a member of the Army Council of the IRA, a Communist Party journalist, a Syndicalist pamphleteer, and a Tory mayor and magistrate have in common?

    

Answer: this was the subsequent fate of six of the 140 or so present at the meeting on 12 June 1904 which set up the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Obviously, we are not proud of what these particular founding members became, but it does at least show that the meeting did have some significance even from a non-socialist point of view. And, since more is known about the lives of these six individuals than for most of the others who set up the SPGB, their political trajectory before and after 1904 can give some idea of the sort of people involved and of political developments in the first half of the last century

McEntee in ermine.

The Labour Lord

The future Labour Lord was Valentine McEntee. Born in Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) south of Dublin in 1871, the son of a doctor from the Protestant minority, he was orphaned at an early age and was apprenticed as a carpenter. He was an early member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party which had been founded, largely on the initiative of James Connolly, in 1896 as the Irish equivalent of the SDF. In 1899, like many Irish workers, he emigrated to America, to New York, but within a year returned to Europe, but to London not Dublin. He joined the SDF and was also the secretary and chairman of the Walthamstow branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners.

    

At the inaugural meeting of the SPGB he moved that the name of the new party be “The Socialist Party of Great Britain and Ireland” but his motion only obtained six votes, presumably because the others felt that workers in Ireland should organise their own socialist party. His membership was not to last long since in December 1904 he was nominated by his union as a potential parliamentary candidate, which would have meant him standing for the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party. Called to account for this, which would of course have been contrary to the SPGB’s principles, he was eventually asked to resign and did so in February 1905.

    

After that he rejoined the SDF and began his career as a budding Labour politician. In 1908 he was an (unsuccessful) candidate for Walthamstow council. In 1909 he self-published a short pamphlet entitled Socialism Explained. This was a general criticism of capitalism but went out of its way to claim that socialism “is neither pro nor anti-Christian” and was supposedly supported by “ministers of the Gospel of all denominations”.

    

In 1920 he was finally elected to Walthamstow Council and in 1922 as Labour MP for Walthamstow West. Defeated in 1924 he was re-elected in 1929 and remained an MP till he retired in 1950. In 1951 he was made Baron McEntee of Walthamstow. He died in 1953.

The leftwing Trade Union leader

George Hicks was also to become a Labour MP, for East Woolwich from 1931 to 1950, but it was as a leftwing trade union leader at the time of the 1926 General Strike that he has a place in working-class history.

    

He was born in 1879 in Venham Dean, near Andover, in Hampshire where his father was a builder. In 1904 he was working as a bricklayer and (like a number of other founder-members) an active member of the Operative Bricklayers Society. The records show that he resigned in March 1905 but rejoined in December 1908, resigning again a few years later as his trade union career took off. In 1912 he was appointed a national organiser of the OBS. By 1919 he was its General Secretary and President of the National Federation of Building Trades Operatives. In 1921, having successfully seen through the amalgamation of this federation into a single union, he became the first general secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers, a post he was to occupy for the next twenty years. As such he was elected a member of the General Council of the TUC.

    

In 1925 he was one of a group of leftwing trade union leaders who went to Moscow where they agreed to set up an Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee. Stalin and the Russian government had an interest in this as they wanted to build up mass support in countries like Britain against military action to invade Russia, but it is difficult to see what was the advantage for the trade union movement; no doubt the trade union leaders involved, including Hicks, mistakenly felt that what existed in Russia was some sort of workers’ regime. When the general strike occurred in Britain the following year, the leftwing trade union leaders on the Anglo-Russian Committee were unable to prevent the majority on the TUC General Council betraying the miners. Trotsky saw this as a heaven-sent stick with which to try to beat Stalin for relying on “left lackeys of imperialism” such as “Purcell, Hicks and other traitors”. But Trotsky, who by this time was on his way out, had clearly lost touch with reality, wanting to “orient the working class toward a general strike and an armed insurrection in the course of a war”. Hicks, whose turn it was to be to be TUC President in 1927-28, survived. Trotsky did not.

    

Hicks rejoined the reconstituted SDF, now affiliated to the Labour Party, and in 1931, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its founding, was invited to give the keynote address. This was later published as a pamphlet Poverty from Plenty. The Industrial Depression: Its Cause and Cure. He began: “its cause is capitalism: its cure is Socialism”. Although his analysis was rather too under-consumptionist, it did show some evidence of his passage through the SPGB.

    

In 1941 he became a junior minister – Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Works – in the war-time coalition government, with as his parliamentary private secretary none other than the future Lord McEntee. He died in 1954.

Jackson in 1905.

The Communist Party hack

When the Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in July 1920 among the founding members was Thomas (T. A.) Jackson. Born in Clerkenwell, North London, in 1879, he left school at 13 to be apprenticed as, like his father, a compositor. He joined the SDF in 1900. In his autobiography Solo Trumpet, published in 1953, he claimed to have been only marginally involved with the SPGB, which he doesn’t mention by name simply referring to some mysterious “impossibilist” (in his original manuscript he had written “leftist”) group. The records show, however, that he was a very active member for nearly five years, being on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Principles, speaking outdoors and indoors, writing articles, serving on the executive committee and even acting for a short while as General Secretary (and he married another founder member, “Miss K. Hawkins”).

    

These activities resulted in him having difficulty in finding a job in his trade and, in 1909, as he frankly told some Party members at the time, he decided to sell his speaking abilities to other propagandist groups in order to survive. He thus ended up joining the ILP but without really believing in what they stood for. When he moved to Leeds he got a job speaking for the Secularists. Later he was a freelance speaker, depending on his audience putting money in his hat.

    

During the war he was able to find employment as a storeman. By its end he had joined the SLP and it was as a member of its pro-Bolshevik wing, which was one of the constituent organisations that set up the CPGB, that he became a founder of that party. For the rest of his life he was a paid writer and journalist for the CP and its papers the Sunday Worker and then the Daily Worker. In the 1920s he was in fact one of the leading figures in the CP, editing its first weekly journal, The Communist, and a member of its central committee and executive committee. In 1929, when Stalin ordered the parties in the Comintern to “turn left”, he was one of the leaders who were removed as “rightists”. He remained a CP member, but only as a journalist and writer. As such he wrote numerous articles and a number of books, but none of them showed the slightest evidence of anything he had learned while in the SPGB, not surprising for someone who declared that he had come “to see Marx and Engels through the spectacles provided by Lenin and Leninism”. Quite the worst was a long turgid book on Dialectics (1936), pretentiously subtitled “The logic of Marxism, and its critics: an essay in exploration”, which regurgitated Lenin’s ideas on philosophy. He wrote a nationalist history of Ireland, Ireland Her Own, for which he dishonestly allowed himself to be billed as a “Protestant Nationalist” (when his connection with Ireland was very tenuous). He also wrote a book on Dickens and other literary subjects. He died in 1955.

The Tory Mayor

The strangest case is that of Jack Kent. Prior to joining the SPGB, he had been a prominent member of the SDF, serving on its national executive, writing in its journal Justice and organising its activities. As such he was probably the most high-profile SDF member to have gone over to the SPGB. Born in Lambeth, in South London, in 1870, in 1904 he was working as a clerk at the head office of Whitbreads, the brewers. In the elections for the Party’s 1905 Executive Committee he topped the poll; he was an outdoor speaker and indoor lecturer, wrote a regular column in the Socialist Standard, organised speakers’ classes, and in 1907 was the Party’s treasurer. He resigned in 1908. He had been promoted at work to departmental manager and was able to afford to move to the then up-market west London suburb of Acton. Here he turned his coat completely, helping to form an organisation called the “Constitutionalists” whose aims were “to uphold the Constitution, advocate a Consolidated Empire, to oppose Socialistic legislation, to propagate Tariff Reform, and to contest Municipal elections”. As this outfit ran street-corner meetings, no doubt the skills he had acquired in the SDF and the SPGB proved invaluable. In 1912, after sitting on the local Coronation Committee, he was elected a member of Acton Council. From then on it was downhill all the way. Joining the Acton Volunteers to serve British capitalism (if only on the streets of Acton rather than in the trenches of Northern France), he was chairman of the local Conservative and Unionist Association in 1918, a magistrate in 1920, Mayor of Acton in 1922-23, and a Middlesex County Councillor. At the time of his death in 1945 he was chairman of the local magistrates bench as well as of the local Tory Party. Why did he turn? Initially at least, probably for the same reason as Jackson: to earn a better living. Yet further proof of how unfree workers are under capitalism and its wages system, forced by economic circumstances to compromise their views.

Allen in 1905.

The Syndicalist pamphleteer

One of the youngest founder members of the SPGB was Ernest Allen, or E. J. B. Allen as he was known. Born near Oxford in 1884 the son of a butcher, he had joined the SDF there when only 16, later moving to London where he played an active role in the “impossibilist revolt” within the SDF. A speaker and writer, he was particularly interested in the trade union question. The early SPGB had not yet worked out a fixed policy on this and Allen was one of those who favoured the setting up of a socialist union in opposition to the existing trade unions based on the sectional interests of their members. At the party’s first annual conference in 1905 he moved that as soon as the party had attained 5000 members it should set up a socialist union. There was no seconder.

    

In 1906 a series of special party meetings were held at which the matter was thrashed out. Many members were hostile to the existing unions because of their non-socialist nature and their association with moves to set up a reformist Labour party. In the event no agreement could be reached and the position was left as it had been before: that SPGB members could be members of the existing ones (as many of the founder-members had been, McEntee and Hicks for instance), supporting any action of theirs on sound class lines and opposing all actions on unsound lines. Although the votes were close, and despite the subsequent myth put about by later opponents (starting with the Labour activist and historian G. D. H. Cole), the SPGB never took up an anti trade union position. Ironically, the SLP, which Allen was to join for a while, accused the SPGB of being pro-trade union! Before the debate within the SPGB on the trade union question was over, Allen had joined an organisation called the “Advocate of Industrial Unionism”, whose aim was to set up in Britain the equivalent of the IWW in North America. As the SPGB did not regard the IWW as a socialist organisation he resigned. In the years that followed Allen passed through all the variant positions associated with those who advocated “socialist industrial unionism” to overthrow capitalism: from holding that this should be complemented by political action at the ballot box (the SLP position), through arguing that industrial action alone to “take and hold” the means of production would be sufficient (the anarcho-syndicalist position, expressed in his 1909 pamphlet Revolutionary Unionism), and then ending up as a propagandist for Tom Mann’s Industrial Syndicalist Education League which advocated industrial action for reformist ends too.

    

In 1912 he emigrated to New Zealand where he continued his syndicalist activity. His pamphlet was reprinted, and for a while he was president of the General Labourers Union in Auckland. When the war came he supported it, including conscription. This destroyed for ever his reputation as any sort of revolutionary. After the war he ended up as a supporter of the NZ Labour Party and later of the leftwing breakaway party set up by ex-Labour MP John A. Lee for whose Weekly he wrote articles. He also wrote and spoke for the NZ Rationalist Association. He died in1945.

Lehane in 1905.

The IRA man [See correction below.]

Con (Cornelius) Lehane, who was the Party’s General Secretary for the first two years of its existence, was born in Cork and, like Valentine McEntee, had been a member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party before moving to England and transferring to the SDF. He worked as a clerk and later trained to be, and became, a solicitor. In school, as part of the Gaelic revival, he had learnt Irish which he spoke fluently, ending one of his contributions to the Socialist Standard, in the Irish spelling of the time, “Saoghal fada dho! – Conchubhar”. It was in fact through militant Irish nationalism that he came to socialism. However, it was not this that led to him leaving the SPGB. Yet again, it was an issue related to the trade union question.

    

Lehane was on the wing of the Party which (unlike another former ISRP member, James Connolly, who was a founder member of the SLP in Britain) didn’t think much of the so-called “economic power” of the working class and insisted that socialists should concentrate on getting the working class to first win control of political power, i.e. to expropriate the capitalist class politically so as to be in a position to then expropriate them economically. He fell out with the Party because he felt that the Executive Committee was not taking a tough enough attitude towards industrial unionists who had joined the Party. To protest against this, in 1906, the Islington branch, of which he was a member, suspended all propaganda activities and got itself expelled for dereliction of duty. After his expulsion Lehane published a couple of pamphlets attacking the SPGB for having gone off the rails.

    

Ironically, he was next heard of as a supporter of Jim Larkin, the leader of the ITGWU who favoured syndicalist tactics. It is not clear when he reverted to his original Irish republicanism, perhaps when he was in America during the First World War. In any event, during the 1930s he was a member of the Army Council of the IRA, which earned him an 18-month jail sentence in 1935 for sedition after the Council issued a statement promising “maximum support” for a strike of Dublin transport workers. After his release he left the IRA and, together with former IRA Chief of Staff, Sean MacBride, and others was of a founder-member in 1940 of the leftwing republican party, Clann na Poblachta. In 1948 he was elected a Clann member of the Dail for Dublin. Following this election, in which it had won 10 seats, the CnP joined in an anti-Fianna Fail coalition government. So, ironically for a one-time “impossiblist” who had advocated political power for the sole purpose of achieving socialism, he ended up as a supporter of an openly capitalist government. He lost his seat in the 1951 general election.

Adam Buick

Con Lehane: A Correction

In the September Socialist Standard we stated that Con Lehane, who was a founder member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, went on to become in the 1930s and 40s a member of the IRA and a Republican member of the Irish parliament. This was not the case and was due to a confusion with someone else with the same name.

The Con Lehane who was a founder member was born in Cork in 1878 was indeed an Irish Republican but he died in New York in 1919, shortly after being released from prison where he had been detained for his political activities. In 1916 he had published a pamphlet entitled The Irish Republic arguing that the so-called Easter Rising in Dublin that year had been a workers’ revolution.

The other Con Lehane, who was on the Army Council of the IRA in the 1930s and a Clann na Poblachta deputy from 1948 to 1951, was born in Belfast in 1912 and died in 1983 (see Irish Times, 27 September 1983).

The original source of the error was an article which appeared in the anarchist paper Freedom on 8 February 1992. Our apologies for not having first checked this thoroughly enough –Editors.

In revolt (2023)

Book Review from the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14. By Ralph Darlington, Pluto Press, 2023

The period of strikes between 1910 and 1914 was known at the time as the ‘Labour Unrest’. Darlington says that it should rather be described as the ‘Labour Revolt’. Miners, railway workers, dock workers, and many others were involved in bitter strikes, some accompanied by rioting when the police protected ‘blacklegs’ that the employers brought in to try to keep production going. The army was called in too. Workers were killed, either shot by soldiers or beaten by the police, in Belfast (2), Liverpool (2), Tonypandy (1), Llanelli (2) and Dublin (2).

Darlington discusses possible reasons for the revolt. Wanting to be treated with more respect will have been an element as he suggests but the rise in the cost of living which eroded real living standards will have been the most important.

The bogey for the capitalist press was ‘syndicalism’. Darlington brings out that what was called this was a practice rather than a doctrine and was a revolt against trade union officialdom as much as against employers. He notes that the number of paid union officials had increased faster than the number of union members. These officials prioritised union recognition by employers to negotiate agreements but these involved commitments not to strike without first going through conciliation procedures. An element of ‘syndicalism’ was workers insisting that their union’s officials be their servants and not do deals over their heads; they wanted employers to be treated as the class enemy rather than mere bargaining partners. It was essentially militant trade unionism.

There were doctrinaire syndicalists who advocated more than this and saw the objective as the workers eventually, through ‘direct action’ and a general strike, taking over and running the industries in which they worked. But there can’t have been many activists and strikers who took this seriously or who thought it realistic to expect the government to stand by and let this happen when it even intervened to hinder the ordinary trade union struggle. Most activist workers knew that political action was also necessary; indeed the demand for worker representation in Parliament was another feature of the wider period.

Darlington criticises the SDP (as the SDF became in 1908 and then in 1911 the BSP) for insisting on the need to gain control of political power before taking over the means of production and so regarding the trade union struggle as ‘secondary’. But, in a footnote towards the end of the book, he criticises syndicalism because ‘it did not explicitly address the problem of how a revolutionary general strike to establish workers’ control would overcome the state monopoly of armed force in defence of the capitalist economic and social order’, adding ‘it did not consider the question of the conquest of political power’.

He also discusses the position of the De Leonist SLP and criticises its ‘doctrinaire and sectarian’ view that workers should form revolutionary unions to oppose the existing unions. This doctrine, known as ‘dual unionism’, was also embraced by the IWW and some syndicalists. Other syndicalists favoured staying in the existing unions and trying to make them more democratic and militant.

One contemporary group whose views he does not discuss is the SPGB. There is a single mention, to say that George Hicks, the national organiser of the Operative Bricklayers’ Society, was a founder member. E. J. B. Allen, one of the doctrinaire syndicalists he cites on a number of occasions, was also a founder member, though Darlington has him as a founder member of the SLP. There can be no justification for discussing the views only of the SLP but not the SPGB which was probably slightly larger and was active in more places.

The Socialist Standard of the time covered all of the big strikes discussed by Darlington (and one he doesn’t — the 1911 London printers’ strike). The September 1911 issue carried a detailed 4,600 word editorial on the failed 1911 railway workers strike under the title “Strikers Struck. How the Railway Servants were betrayed’ which argued that the strikers should have given priority to demanding the release of all imprisoned strikers and improved hours and wages rather than to the ‘recognition’ of union officials as negotiators, and concluded:

‘The most they may snatch from the ashes of their ruined hopes is the lesson that, whether on the industrial or the political field, their struggles must be grounded upon democracy. Their position must be democratic, their methods must be democratic, their weapons must be democratic. Even under capitalism democracy is no empty word, and its first interpretation is that the representative is the servant, not the leader. Had the railwaymen given this reply to their so-called leaders when the latter sent the fatal message: “All men must return to work immediately,” they would not now be chewing the cud of their disappointment, marvelling at the difference between recognition of the unions and recognition of their officials, and wondering if they had not better set about making the unions (which appear to consist of the officials) recognise the men.’

As to the syndicalists and other anti-parliamentarians:

‘The final lesson, and the greatest of all, is to be found in the crushed hopes of the Industrialists, the Syndicalists, the Anarchists. These claim that the means of production must be seized in the teeth of the armed forces; the Socialists hold that the preliminary must be to get control of the armed forces by capturing the machinery of government.’

The 1912 strike in the London docks was dealt with in the August issue under the title “Dockers Betrayed” which made the same point regarding union officials. The failure of the rail union leaders to support sympathetic strike action to help the locked-out (by an Irish Nationalist employer) Dublin transport workers was covered in the January 1914 issue under the title “Sold Again”. The August 1911 issue included an eye-witness account, and experience, of police brutality in Manchester (all these articles can be found here: www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/standard-index-1910s/).

What the articles show is that the SPGB didn’t conform to the left-wing calumny that it is ‘anti-trade union’. What it was against was not to workers forming unions or even appointing officials but to the control of unions and of struggles over wages and working conditions by officials who regarded themselves as the leaders rather than the servants of their members. It was for democratic organisation of workers to wage the struggle against employers, even if this was indeed ‘secondary’ to the need to gain control of political power. And it opposed ‘dual unionism’, working within the existing unions.

It is only on the last but one page that Darlington reveals that he supports ‘the Bolshevik doctrine of a revolutionary vanguard party’, though this could have been guessed from his earlier analysis that what was lacking in the period was the right leadership.

Nevertheless, the book does usefully describe in detail and analyse the national and local strikes of the period, including those by women workers. It will obviously be on the reading list for anyone studying or interested in the period.

Adam Buick

Rationalisation or Socialism. (1928)

From the October 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalist system of society is based upon the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution, by a minority of the population. The majority of the population, being property-less, are compelled to offer their services for sale to the capitalists, and receive in return sufficient to enable them to live and keep on working. Only the working class engage in the work necessary to production, but the wealth that results from the workers’ labour-power belongs to the capitalists, and therefore the system is an excellent one—for the capitalists.

This being so, any proposals which have for their object the smoother working of the present system should be welcomed— by the capitalists.

The system is essentially a competitive one, and though the capitalists’ interests are identical as against working-class interests, they are not identical in the struggle to secure the greater proportion of the profit accruing from the workers’ labour-power. This results in a tremendous waste. In most industries there is more plant and machinery in being than is necessary to produce sufficient to supply the markets; consequently many works are on short time, not working to their full capacity, or are actually closed down.

Thoroughly up-to-date and efficient methods of production exist side by side with inefficient, almost obsolete, methods.

These facts are fairly obvious, and attempts are being made to meet the problem, but we are concerned about it being clearly understood whose problem it is.

To increase the difference between the total wealth the workers produce and the amount they receive in the form of wages has always been the object of the capitalists, and what is referred to as rationalisation is only a phase of that estimable object.

In an article in the Daily Herald (August 24th), Mr. Citrine attempts to justify the action of the T.U.C. in acting in conjunction with a group of employers to secure “the maximum efficiency of labour with the minimum of effort,” to avoid “waste of raw materials and power” and “unnecessary transport, burdensome financial charges, and the useless interposition of middlemen.” As the General Council of the T.U.C. is supposed to represent the interests of the wage workers, it was up to Mr. Citrine to demonstrate that the object of these proposals is not to increase the difference between total wages and total profits.

Instead of doing this he proceeds to ignore the class division in society and indulge in vague talk about the “community,” and increasing the standard of living of the “people.”

As the article was a reply to a previous one by Mr. Hicks, he brings forward evidence to show that his attitude is quite in accordance with Trade Union policy both here and abroad, instancing a report published by the T.U.C. and the Labour Party in 1924 on the Waste of Capitalism, which, as he says, “was, in effect, a demand for the rational organisation of industry.” He also points out that the German Trade Union movement took the initiative in demanding the institution of Rationalisation in 1926.

To be able to give evidence of other suicidal policies is regarded as sufficient justification of the present one. We have some indication of how Rationalisation works in Germany in an article in the Manchester Guardian Industrial Relations Supplement (30/11/27), by C. W. Guillebaud. One of the “concessions” to the workers is the institution of Works Councils, on which both workers and employers sit; and the writer points out that

“One most significant feature of the development of the Works Councils has been the great decline in the number of those willing to submit themselves for election or re-election. . . . The chief causes of this tendency are, first, the power of employers to get rid of Works Councillors, . . . despite the protective provisions of the Act.”

It should be obvious that a worker with orthodox views will be a useful man for the employers, but one who realises the direct cleavage of interests between the two sides, and says so, will be given his cards and shown the gate.

Although the Trade Unions arose from the antagonism of interests between the property-owning employers and the property-less wage workers, they frequently function in the interests of the capitalists. The railway workers’ unions have recently successfully negotiated a 2½ per cent. reduction in their members’ wages, without the trouble and expense of a lock-out. While having a clear idea of the purpose of “rationalisation,” it is necessary to point out to the self-styled “left-wingers” that it is not something to be fought separately. At the annual conference of the National Minority Movement, Mr. Harry Pollitt moved a resolution which declared that “the chief issue before the working class was to fight Rationalisation” (Daily Herald, August 27).

Certain phrases seem to knock these shallow pates off their balance; “Mondism” and “Imperialism” are manifestations of capitalism. One is reminded of 1914, when the counterparts of the present left-wingers considered it “progressive” to fight against Prussianism.

The opening paragraph of this article being correct, the only problem the workers need concern themselves about is their non-possession of the means of wealth production, the solution of which is in their own hands, by organising as a class, politically, to take possession of them. The Socialist Party is the only organisation which concentrates the workers’ attention on that problem. Labour right-wingers, who urge the workers to take an interest in their masters’ problems, and left-wingers, who urge them to attack separate features of capitalism, are equally side-tracking them from the thing that matters.

J. L.

Local Authority Housing (1967)

From the June 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Working class housing, and by that we mean houses for those who depend upon wages and salaries for a living, has for a very long time been provided in three ways: by private enterprise builders, by employers and by Local Authorities. Of these, Local Authorities came last on the capitalist scene in an attempt to carry out a rescue operation after others had failed dismally to provide for even the minimum requirements of an efficient labour force.

Like any other capitalist venture, private enterprise building must promise a profit to those who engage in it, or lend money for it, before such “enterprise" is even contemplated. Moreover the rate of profit must compare favourably with that from other kinds of capitalist investment. The fluctuations in the rate of building have, since the beginning of capitalism, been attributable in the main to the movement of investment caused by the search for the greatest profit. Particularly has this been the case in respect of housing for the lower-paid workers, able to pay only small rents, and where profit margins are consequently small. The situation has been aggravated by “boomerang reform measures" — Public Health, Building and Housing Regulations — which have raised the minimum standards of working class housing from the dismal levels of 19th. century slums. The result of such legislation has been to still further reduce the prospect of profit in private enterprise building with a consequent drying up of supply.

Of the second category of house building, that undertaken by employers, little need be said, except that it suffers from similar limitations to those found in “spec" building. In the early part of this century a few idealistic employers such as Cadburys and Lever Brothers built model housing estates for their workers (Bournville and Port Sunlight) which provided the shining example for those reformers of capitalism who saw in these ventures a means of solving the housing problem without disturbing the edifice of a capitalist economy. The movement however did not spread to the extent envisaged. Industrialists in a competitive world can seldom afford to provide better housing for their employees any more than they are generally willing to raise their wages.

Whether houses are built by speculative builders or enlightened employers, standards are still limited, directly or indirectly, by the purchasing power of the worker.

Against this background of failure the housing shortage developed, slums proliferated, the decayed housing of the middle income groups was split up into “flats" to provide cheap accommodation for their less fortunate brethren. Wars and slumps brought building to a virtual standstill, until at the end of the last World War politicians were estimating the housing shortage in this country at figures ranging from one to four millions, according to their political outlook.

It was early realised that slums threaten the health of the community and reduce the efficiency of the workers. Herbert Morrison, later leader of the LCC, writing in 1923, pointed out that

In addition to the public money spent on slum clearance, it has to be realised that, consequent on evil housing conditions, much expenditure on Public Health Services is involved. A not inconsiderable proportion of the £1,880,884 spent by the London ratepayer in the financial year 1916-17 on Public Health Services . . . was the consequence of bad housing, and the same is true of the £500,000 estimated expenditure in connection with tuberculosis in the year 1921-22.” (A Housing Policy for London).

and George Hicks in a pamphlet published by the TUC and the Labour Party in 1922 has this to say about slums:

Bad housing creates illness and encourages crime. Illness and crime mean public expense. The effect of overcrowding upon industrial efficiency, unemployment in building and allied trades, loss of public revenue as a result of arresting the normal increase of rateable property — these are included in the price we pay for housing neglect.” (How to Get Houses).

Industrialists appreciate all this but, as has been seen, can do little about it on their own account. Political parties cannot ignore acute housing shortages when they appeal for votes at elections. If private enterprise cannot provide the housing required, then the State must step into the breach. Which brings us to our third category of housebuilding: Local Authority Housing financed by Government grants and contributions from the rates.

Since 1890 a succession of Housing Acts have provided subsidies for the building of houses by Local Authorities together with powers to charge part of the cost of building to the rates. (Some of these Housing Acts have offered subsidies to private builders but their interest in such offers has steadily declined since they were first made in 1919).

It might be thought that here was the answer to the housing question and it seems strange that after 77 years, some ten Housing Acts and a succession of Conservative and Labour Governments, there should still be an acute housing shortage. The reasons are however not hard to find. One has only to look to see where the money comes from.

Government grants for housing derive from taxation. In the last analysis income tax is paid by the capitalist class since employers have to pay their workers not only enough to enable them to live but also enough for them to pay their taxes. And they have their own taxes to pay as well. It is no wonder therefore that capitalists become as alarmed as anyone when the Chancellor of the Exchequer proposes an increase in Income Tax. They, in the end, carry the burden of it. Taxation eats into their profits in more ways than one. Money flows to where profits are greatest — even right out of the country when things are bad — and no Government, Labour or Conservative, can allow this to happen.

If we examine the history of the Housing Acts we see this situation reflected in repeated economy measures, restrictions, limitations and sometimes complete abolition of subsidies. The same situation exists in respect of rates, the other source of housing subsidies. Rates are only another form of taxation, property-based instead of income-based. Faced with such restrictions in expenditure, with an increasing population, the deterioration of old property, the destruction due to war and the cessation of building during wars and slumps, the fact that Local Authorities cannot solve the housing problem, even for the lower-paid section of the working class, is not difficult to understand.

Before the 1914-18 War the almost universal type of working class urban house was what came to be known as the “tunnel-back” — mostly two-storey terrace houses containing living room, parlour, kitchen and scullery on the ground floor and three bedrooms on the upper floor. With the rapid improvement in means of transport which took place at the beginning of the century, it became practical to spread new housing over the cheaper agricultural land surrounding the towns and considerably reduce the density of building. Apart from this, and the addition of a bathroom, the accommodation provided was generally the same and room sizes no larger. In fact, in many houses the parlour was surrendered in exchange, for the bathroom. These were the “Council houses” brought into being by the Housing Acts.

The first of the Government “housing manuals”, published in 1918 as a guide to Local Authorities, indicated space standards for various types of houses and sizes of families. This manual set the pattern for many subsequent manuals by suggesting minimum sizes for individual rooms and by providing typical plans showing room sizes and over-all areas for various types of dwelling. If we trace through these manuals the recommendations for three-bedroomed houses for a family of five, we find that between 1918 and 1961 (the date of the last manual) there is remarkably little increase in space standards. The following table illustrates this.

To sum up the present position it is therefore fair to say that the provision of State-subsidised Local Authority housing has, in spite of repeated Government promises, neither met the demand for working class housing in terms of numbers of dwellings, nor shown a material advance in space standards over a period of nearly fifty years. The housing standards of the working class remain a reflection of the wages they receive. The housing problem is essentially a poverty problem and cannot be solved until the workers exchange capitalist poverty for socialist plenty.

John Moore

Editorial: Party or Mass. (1926)

Editorial from the March 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

The continual claim of Communists and others is that we must be with the great masses of the working class. If the masses want “immediate demands” and reform agitations then we must go with them in this policy. Shout 44 hours and 4 pounds per week or nationalisation of coal mines or any other plank the masses take up. Sometimes this leads to quarrels about which reform should be supported. MacDonald, Mitchell & Co. shout Weir houses whilst the other section wants a different kind of steel house or brick one. Mitchell accuses Geo. Hicks, of the Builders, of signing a report in favour of the weird houses and Hicks tells Forward readers he is sorry he ever did such a thing. So the reformers, with their crowds of supporters, unite the workers by fighting about the kind of plaster to apply to capitalism. Yet, those who think we must join the large numbers, are always talking of Glorious Russia, the very country where Lenin and other Bolsheviks refused coalition with the much more numerous Menshevik and Social Revolutionary elements, though these parties had behind them the bulk of the workers and peasants. Lenin himself says in his pamphlet, “Towards Soviets” :—

“Is it not more honourable for the internationalists at such a moment to be able to resist the fumes that stupefy the ‘masses,’ than to ‘desire to remain’ with the masses, i.e., to give way to the general intoxication? Have we not witnessed, in all the belligerent European countries, how the jingoes defended themselves on the plea of desiring ‘to remain with the masses’ ? Is it not essential to be able for a certain time to be in a minority against the ‘mass’ intoxication? Is not just the work of propagandists essential precisely at the present moment, in order to set free the proletarian line of policy from the ‘mass’ effect of the chauvinist and lower middle class intoxication? It is just the fused state of the masses, proletarian and non-proletarian, without any class distinction within them, that constitutes one of the conditions of the rise of chauvinist epidemic. To speak contemptuously of ‘a group of propagandists’ of the proletarian tendency, seems to be a little out of place.”

Our work is not to pander to the prejudices of the ignorant but to win the workers’ minds for Socialism. Not by agreeing with their unsound ideas but by replacing these wrong notions with sound knowledge.